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Violenceand Time:Traumatic Survivals

In recent yearspsychiatry has shown an ininsistence on the direct effects of creasing externalviolence in psychicdisorder.This trend has culminated in the study of stressdisorder," which de"post-traumatic scribesan overwhelmingexperienceof sudden, or catastrophicevents, in which the responseto the event occursin the often delayed,and uncontrolledrepetitive occurrenceof hallucinations,flashbacks and other intrusivephenomena.As it is generallyunderstoodtoday, traumaticdisordersreflect the direct imposition on the mind of the unavoidablerealityof horrific events, the taking-over-psychicallyand neurobiologically-of the mind by an event that it cannot control.As such it is understoodas the most real,and also most destructivepsychicexperience.I will suggest brieflythat the problemof traumais not simplya problemof destructionbut also, fundamentally,an enigma of survival. It is only in recognizingtraumaticexperience as a paradoxical relationbetween destructivenessand survivalthat we can also recognizethe legacyof incomprehensibility at the heart of catastrophicexperience. The problemof traumais raisedmost directlyin one of the firstmajorworkson traumain this century,Freud'sBeyond the Pleasure This piece, writtenin the Principle. aftermathof WorldWar I, has been called upon as showinga directrelationbetween Freud'stheoryof traumaand historicalvioreflectedin a lence, a directnesspresumably theoryof traumahe produces.I wouldproFreud'sforpose that this workrepresents mulationof traumaas a theoryof the of human surpeculiarincomprehensibility vival.It is only by readingthe theoryof individualtraumain Beyond the Pleasure in termsof its inherentlytemporal Principle structure-the structureof delayedexperience that will ultimatelylink individual traumato the problemof historicaltrauma in Freud'slaterwork-that we can understandthe full complexityof the problemof at the heartof human experience. survival Beyondthe PleasurePrincipleindeed opens with Freud'sperplexedobservationof a psychicdisorderthat appearsto reflect the unavoidableand overwhelmingimposition of violent events on the psyche. Faced with the strikingoccurence of what were called the warneurosesin the wake of World War I, Freud is startledby the Cathy

emergence of a pathologicalconditionthe repetitiveexperienceof nightmares and relivingsof battlefield events-that is experiencedlike a neurotic pathologyand yet whose symptoms reflect, in startling directnessand simplicity,nothing but the unmediated occurrenceof violent events. Freud thus comparesit to the symptoms of anotherlong-problematicphenomenon, the accident neurosis.The relivingof the battle can be compared,he says,to the nightmareof an accident: Dreams in traumatic neuroses occurring havethe characteristic of repeatedly bringof ingthe patientbackinto the situation his accident, a situation fromwhichhe wakes This up in another fright. astonisheds peoplefartoo little ... Anyone whoacceptsit as something self-evident thatdreams shouldput thembackat night into the situation thatcausedthemto fall ill hasmisunderstood the nature of dreams. Edition18, p.13) (Standard The returning traumaticdream perplexes Freudbecauseit cannotbe understoodin termsof any wish or unconsciousmeaning, but is, purelyand inexplicably, the literalreturn of the event againstthe will of the one it inhabits.Unlikethe symptomsof a normal neurosis,whose painfulmanifestations can be understoodultimatelyin termsof the attemptedavoidanceof unpleasurable conflict,the painfulrepetitionof the flashbackcan only be understoodas the absolute event inabilityto avoidan unpleasurable that has not been given psychicmeaningin anyway.In trauma,that is, the outsidehas gone insidewithout any mediation.Taking this literalreturnof the past as a model for repetitivebehaviorin general,Freudultithe Pleasure Prinmatelyargues,in Beyond ciple,that it is traumaticrepetition,rather than the meaningfuldistortionsof neurosis, that definesthe shapeof individual lives. Startingfromthe accidentneurosisto exhistories,Beplain the natureof individual can thus be said yondthe Pleasure Principle to askwhat it wouldmean forhistoryto be understoodas the historyof trauma. Freud'scomparisonof the warexperience to that of the accidentintroducesanother element as well, however,which adds to the significanceof this question. For it is not just any event that createsa traumaticneu"serosis,Freudindicates,but specifically vere mechanicalconcussions,railway disastersand other accidentsinvolvinga 24

riskto life" (18, 12). What Freudencounters in the traumaticneurosisis not the reaction to any horribleevent but, rather,the peculiar,and perplexing experienceof survival.If the dreamsand flashbacks of the traumatizedthus engageFreud'sinterestit is becausethey bearwitnessto a survival that exceeds the veryclaimsand consciousness of the one who enduresit. At the heart of Freud'srethinkingof history,in Beyond the Pleasure I would thus proPrinciple, is the and pose, urgent unsettlingquestion: What doesit meanto survive? The intricaterelationbetween traumaand survivalindeed arisesin this text not, as one might expect, because of a seemingly direct and unmediated relationbetween consciousnessand life-threateningevents, but ratherthroughthe veryparadoxical structureof indirectness in psychical trauma.Indeed, Freudbegins his discussion of traumaby noting the "bewildering" fact that psychologicaltraumaoccurs not in strict correspondenceto the body's experienceof a life-threat-through the woundingof the body;a bodily injury, Freud notes, "works as a rule against the development of a neurosis"(18, 12, emphasisadded). Indeed, survivalfor consciousnessdoes not seem to be a matter of knownexperienceat all. For if the return of the traumatizingevent appearsin many respectslike a wakingmemory,it can nonetheless only occur in the mode of a symptom or a dream.Thus if a life-threat to the body is experiencedas the direct infliction and the healing of a wound, traumais sufferedin the psyche precisely, it would seem, because it is not directly availableto experience.The problemof survival,in trauma,thus emerges specifiallyas the question:what does it mean for consciousness to survive? Freud'sspeculationson the causesof repetition compulsionin relationto the origins of consciousnesscan indeed be understood as attemptingto graspthe paradoxical relation between survival and consciousness. Freudsuggeststhat the developmentof the mind seems, at first,to be verymuch like the developmentof the body:consciousness arisesout of the need to protect"thelittle fragmentof substancesuspendedin the middle of an externalworld," which "would be killedby the stimulationemanatingfrom these if it werenot providedwith a protec-

tive shield againststimuli"(18, 27) Unlike the body,however,which protectsthe orbeganismby means of a spatialboundary tween inside and outside,the barrier of consciousnessis a barrier of sensationand knowledgethat protectsby placingstimulation within an orderedexperienceof time. What causestrauma,then, is a shockthat appearsto workverymuch like a threatto the body'sspatialintegrity,but is in fact a breakin the mind'sexperienceof time: We may,I think,tentatively venture to reneurosis as an gardthe commontraumatic extensive breach beingmadein the protective shieldagainst stimuli.Thiswould seemto reinstate the old naivetheoryof shock... [It] regards the essenceof the shockas beingthe directdamage to the molecular structure ... of the nervous syswhatweseekto understand tem, whereas arethe effectsproduced on the organ of the mind.It is causedby lackof anypreforanxiety.(18, 31) paredness The breach in the mind-the awarenessof the threat to life-is not caused by a pure quantitive amount of stimulus breaking through the body, Freud suggests,but prethe lack of preparedness cisely by "fright," to take in a stimulus that comes too quickly.It is not, simply,that is, the literal threateningof bodily life, but the fact that the threat is recognizedas such by the mind one momenttoo late. The shock of the mind's relationto the threat of death is thus not the direct experienceof the threat, but preciselythe missingof this experience, the fact that, not being experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known.And it is this lack or direct experience that, paradoxically, becomes the basis of the repetition of the nightmare: Thesedreams areendeavouring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whoseomission wasthe cause of the traumatic neurosis. (18, 32) The returnof the traumaticexperiencein the dream is not the signalof the direct experiencebut, precisely,of the attempt to overcome the fact that it was not direct, to attempt to masterwhat was never fully graspedin the first place. Not having truly known the threat of death in the past, the survivor is forced,continually,to confront it over and over again. For consciousness then, the act of survival,as the experience of trauma,is the repeatedconfrontation with the necessity and impossibilityof graspingthe threat to one's own life. It is

because the mind cannot confront the possibilityof its death directlythat survival becomes for the human being, paradoxically,an endless testimony to the impossibility of living. Fromthis perspective, the survival of traumais more than the fortunatepassage past a violent event, a passagethat is acciof it, but dentallyinterrupted by reminders the endless inherent of repetition necessity which ultimatelymaylead to destruction. The postulationof a driveto death, which Freudultimatelyintroducesin Beyond the Pleasure would seem only to realPrinciple, ize the realityof the destructiveforcethat the violenceof historyimposeson the human psyche,the formationof historyas the endlessrepetitionof previousviolence. If we attend closely,however,to Freud'sdeof the scriptionof the traumatic nightmare accident,we find a somewhatmorecomplex notion of what is missed,and repeated,in the trauma.In the description of the accident dream,indeed,Freuddoes not simply attributethe traumaticfrightto the dream itself,but to whathappensupon wakingup: Dreams in traumatic neuroses occurring havethe characteristic of repeatedly bringof ingthe patientbackinto the situation his accident, a situation which he from
wakesup in anotherfright.

vival. If historyis to be understoodas the historyof trauma,it is a historythat is experiencedas the endless attempt to assume one's survivalas one's own. It is this incomprehensibility of survival,I would suggest, that is at the heart of Freud'sformulationof the death drive. Freud comparesthe beginning of the history of the organismin the driveas the response to an awakeningnot unlike that of the nightmare: The attributes of life wereat sometime awoken in inanimate matter by the action arosein whathadhitherto beenan inanimatesubstance endeavored to cancelitself out. In thiswaythe firstdrivecameinto to the inanimate being;the driveto return
state. (18, 38) of a force of whose nature we can form no conception ... The tension which then

If "fright" is the term by which Freud defines the traumaticeffect of not having been preparedin time, then the traumaof the nightmaredoes not simplyconsist in the experiencewithin the dream,but in the experience of wakingfromit. It is the experienceof wakinginto consciousness that, peculiarly,is identifed with the reliving of the trauma.And as such it is not only the dream that surprisesconsciousness but, indeed, the verywakingitself that constitutes the surprise: the fact not only of the dreambut of having passedbeyond it. What is enigmaticallysuggested, that is, is that the traumaconsists not only in havingconfronteddeath, but in having withoutknowingit. survived, precisely, What one returnsto, in the flashback,is not the incomprehensibility of the event of one's neardeath, but the veryincomprehensibilityof one's own survival.Repetition, in other words,is not the attempt to graspthat one has almost died, but more fundamentallyand enigmatically, the veryattempt to claim one'sown sur25

At the beginning of the drive,Freud suggests, is not the traumaticimposition of death, but the ratherthe traumatic"awakening"to life. Life itself, Freud suggests, is an awakeningout of death for which there was no preparation. The originof the drive is thus preciselythe experienceof having passedbeyond death without knowingit. And it is in the attempt to masterthis awakeningto life that the driveultimately defines its historicalstructure:failing to returnto the moment of its own act of living, the drivepreciselydepartsinto the future of a human history. This historywill be developedmore fullyin Freud'slaterwork,Mosesand Monotheism, which examinesthe delayedexperienceof traumain the historyof an entire people. What I would preliminarily suggesthere is that such a history-individual or collective-bears with it the weight of a paradox: that externalviolence is felt most, not in its directexperience,but in the missingof this experience;that traumais constitutednot only by the destructiveforceof a violent event but by the veryact of its survival. If we are to registerthe impact of violencewe cannot, therefore,locate it only in the destructivemoment of the past, but in an onthat belongs to the future.It going survival is becauseviolence inhabits,incomprehenof those who have sibly,the verysurvival lived beyond it that it may be witnessed best in the futuregenerationsto whom this survival is passedon.

Caruth