Trauma and Temporality

On the Origins of Post-Traumatic Stress

Ronald Mather and Jill Marsden

Bolton Institute

Abstract. The authors argue that attention to the Freudian and Derridean
concepts of Nachträglichkeit and différance might challenge the implicit
assumption of the linear development of traumatic stress from originary
event to presenting symptoms. These concepts raise fundamental questions
as to the origin of trauma and its ontological status. It is suggested that the
psychical reality of retro-causality necessitates a reorientation of current
thought about traumatic stress to reflect the paradoxical temporal dynamics
of postmodernity.
Key Words: différance, Nachträglichkeit, postmodernism, Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder, psychoanalysis

It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our
childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess.
(Freud, 1899/1955b, p. 322)
Jean-François Lyotard (1984) memorably defined the postmodern in terms
of the ‘paradox of the future anterior’ (p. 81). For Lyotard, recognition of the
principles according to which postmodernist works are produced ‘always
comes too late for their author’, or, in what amounts to the same thing, their
decisive effects ‘always begin too soon’ (p. 81). No longer bound by ‘grand
narratives’, the postmodern artist or writer produces work which is not
‘governed by pre-established rules’ and cannot be judged by applying
‘familiar categories’. With no little irony, Lyotard suggests that those rules
and categories are what the postmodern work seeks to establish: ‘The artist
and the writer . . . are working without rules in order to formulate the rules
of what will have been done’ (p. 81). With these tantalizing reflections,
Lyotard signals two salient thoughts about the temporality of postmodernity.
First, the ‘event character’ of postmodern productions is such that they
occupy an ambiguous position between past and future, for it is only after
the fact that one can establish what was in place prior to their achievement.
Second, the postmodern emerges as that which ‘puts forward the unpresent-
able in presentation itself’, inasmuch as its cultural expressions—like the

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206 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 14(2)

Kantian sublime—allude to the withholding of the present. In both these

respects, postmodern art and literature evade what might be termed the
‘metaphysics of presence’ as such (Lyotard, 1984).
The peculiar temporal logic that Lyotard designates postmodern might
serve to illuminate some perplexing features of a contemporary psycho-
logical condition that similarly problematizes our conception of presence—
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (hereafter referred to as PTSD). PTSD is an
anxiety disorder thought to occur after exposure to a terrifying or deeply
disturbing event. In its initial formulation in the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Health Disorders (3rd revised edition), PTSD is defined
in relation to an event ‘outside the range of usual human experience’
(American Psychiatric Association, 1987, p. 247). PTSD sufferers often re-
experience a traumatic event in the form of a ‘flashback’, nightmare or
recurrent memory. Indeed, depression, stress and debilitating anxiety tend to
set in at some temporal distance from the ‘triggering incident’. However, it
is not uncommon for crucial aspects of the traumatic event to be subject to
severe repression. In these cases, instead of flashbacks, the past remains
‘inaccessible’ to present consciousness. Here its failure to present itself is
signalled unconsciously in a series of ‘symbolic’ symptoms that defy
explanation at the level of rational consciousness. In this respect, PTSD, like
postmodern temporality, challenges the Kantian assumption that coherent
self-consciousness is the necessary condition of human experience.
Those psychologists who place more emphasis on the cultural milieu of
PTSD than its symptoms per se regard it as the fragmentation of personal
self, a severe disruption of lived time, the inevitability of re-experience in an
era of saturating media simulation (Hacking, 1995). Whilst theorists may
have been over-zealous in their citation of schizophrenic paradigms in
naming the subjectivity of the Zeitgeist, perhaps the less analysed yet no less
significant phenomenon of traumatic stress may yield richer insights into the
political pathology of the postmodern condition. Arguably, the social and
cultural dynamics of postmodern life exacerbate the psychic fragmentation
associated with PTSD. The traditional points of social and personal fixity—
church, state, family, linear time—have become increasingly unstable. This
may be a contributory factor to the increased reporting of symptoms given
that in this dizzying postmodern epoch a stable site of self-presence may
never be found. In short, PTSD, or at least the symptomatology of experi-
ential fragmentation, seems to occupy the far end of the continuum that is
‘normal’ experience.
However, it is important to stress that PTSD is not simply a cultural
condition. The transformations of the 20th century may have exacerbated the
syndrome but they cannot claim sole causal efficacy (after all, the symptoms
of PTSD appear to have been reported from many wars). To acknowledge
that this debilitating experience shares certain features with the spirit of the
times is not to deny its reality as a ‘clinical’ phenomenon. Whilst the

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following has no decisive contribution to make in ‘explaining’ PTSD, it tries

to demonstrate why such a total explanation may, necessarily, prove elusive.
We seek to show that thinking of PTSD as a postmodern condition might
avoid begging the question of its aetiology in terms of either ’culture’ or
‘nature’. Our intention is to raise difficulties with the assumptions of linear
development that underlie much of the literature in this area; specifically, the
idea that traumatic response follows a discernible path of development (in
principle) from the originary event(s) to presenting symptoms. To challenge
the model of uni-directional causality implicit in the medical literature we
utilize the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit. We also endeavour to show
that Derrida’s notion of différance is indebted to Freud and can be employed
(with certain caveats) to elaborate a conception of time and causality that is
inextricably linked to postmodernity. Since seeking therapeutic aid or legal
redress for traumatic exposure, whether in the context of personal assault,
natural disaster or military combat, is complicated by the temporal delay in
experiencing emotional response, the ontological status of traumatic symp-
toms and their causal power requires careful examination. We propose that
rethinking PTSD in light of these philosophical themes facilitates an
understanding of the paradoxes inherent in constructing a coherent narrative
of traumatic stress.

Truths and Illusions

The exact nature of the linkage between traumatic event and symptom-
atology (exposure–effect) is unclear from the literature. The causal relation-
ship between traumatic events and the criterial features of PTSD may be
complicated by the existence of other psychiatric diagnoses/classifications
(McFarlane & Papay, 1992). It has been calculated that between 40 and 70%
of the population may have had experience of a traumatic event(s) (Breslau,
Davis, Andreski, & Peterson, 1991; Norris, 1992). The attempts to quantify
the seriousness of traumatic events and their attendant capacity to produce
symptoms (Rachman, 1980) have hardly been a resounding success, even if
the increasing emphasis on death or risk of death as the cardinal feature is
accepted. It is easy to understand the motivation behind these efforts. The
sense in which traumata can be said to be ‘present’ creates almost as many
difficulties as their point of origination. It is this doublet of causality and
presence that perhaps necessitates a reorientation of the analyses of PTSD.
One of the most challenging discussions of the causality of PTSD has
been advanced by Allan Young in The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder (1995). Writing from an avowedly Foucauldian
perspective, Young explores the discursive practices that have contributed to
the ‘invention’ of PTSD as a diagnostic category. He repudiates the notion
that PTSD is an illness that has always existed in some form but has only

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208 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 14(2)

recently been ‘discovered’. According to Young, the inclusion of PTSD in

the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III in 1980 was
the result of political lobbying for recognition of the post-war suffering of
Vietnam veterans. Anti-war campaigners, social workers and psychiatrists
fought to achieve institutional recognition for the lasting psychological
damage said to be caused by the horrors of the Vietnam War. This victory
paved the way for others seeking recognition for suffering stemming from
past trauma, particularly abuse. By the publication of DSM-IV in 1994, a
distinctive pathology for PTSD had developed, culminating in the normal-
ization of traumatic response and the reclassification of sufferers as both
victims and heroes.
The expansion of the category of ‘trauma victim’ has prompted renewed
interest in the medical status of a psychological disorder that is said to
originate outside the individual. In the context of the contemporary culture
of litigation, every ‘clinical’ diagnosis of PTSD is simultaneously political
insofar as every case is implicated in the moral, social and legal discourses
which contribute to its definition. Young’s meta-diagnostic claim that PTSD
is invented is also political, although it is not necessarily to be viewed as
part of a conservative backlash against the condition. To say that PTSD is
invented is not to say that it is merely fabricated. It is in this respect that
Young’s work connects with postmodernist debates about the status of
‘truth’ in the age of simulacra. Baudrillard points out that the dissimulation
or feigning of an illness ‘leaves the reality principle intact’ whereas
simulation threatens the distinction between truth and falsity: ‘Since the
simulator produces “true” symptoms, is he ill or not?’ (Baudrillard, 1983,
p. 5). Young does not deny the ‘reality’ of PTSD as a painful and disturbing
syndrome. His point is that notions of psychological health and illness
cannot be understood in isolation from their social and political conditions
of emergence. In this respect his argument that PTSD is historically
contingent is a transcendental one: the aim is to establish what gives the
‘given’—or, to express it more simply, to establish which factors serve to
constitute a particular phenomenon as real.
The demand that the suffering of trauma be validated as real raises
ontological questions which cannot easily be resolved by consideration of
empirical ‘fact’. In psychic injury litigation, much hinges on whether one is
able to prove a causal link between present suffering and past trauma.
However, as Young argues, these causal relations may be rather more
complex than the DSM theory allows.
The DSM theory of PTSD is simple . . . it is simply taken for granted that
time and causality move from the traumatic event to the other criterial
features and the event inscribes itself on the symptoms. Because the
traumatic event is the cause of the syndromal feelings and behaviors, it is
logical to say that it precedes them. If this were not true, then the term
‘reexperience’ would lose its accepted meaning. PTSD would be a distinct-

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MATHER & MARSDEN: TRAUMA AND TEMPORALITY 209

ive classification but also an incoherent one, since effects (symptoms)

would precede their own cause (traumatic event). (Young, 1995, pp. 115–
116)
Young notes that one of the peculiarities of PTSD is the difficulty in locating
the origin of the syndrome in terms of linear temporality. For example, it
may be the case that ‘the patient’s symptoms precede his (or his clinician’s)
discovery of a particular event/memory, and are, in some appreciable sense,
the cause of this memory’ (Young, 1995, p. 116). The preceding claim
clearly draws attention to the author’s reservations about the causal direction
of symptoms and traumatic event. The consequences of thinking through the
relation of symptom to memory leads to the crucial conclusion: ‘it is only
one more step to another idea, namely, that in certain cases, time may be
flowing mainly from current psychological states back to the events’
(Young, 1995, p. 136).
If it is the case that the relationship between traumatic events and stressful
symptoms is inverted, PTSD intimates a quite different trajectory of under-
standing and conceptualizing the way certain historical events affect
individuals. In most other forms of social explanation, be they
developmental-psychological or sociological, time moves inexorably for-
ward, and, crucially, discrete events retain their integral character as discrete
events. Knowledge or recollection of them may be partial, but the facticity
of historical events and their linear sequence remains unaltered, however
sensitive the attention to the ironies and the possible interpretations of the
said events. The analysis (and psychoanalysis) of PTSD implies a quite
different temporal register. Life must be lived forward but can be understood
only retroactively. It would seem that in the context of PTSD, the exact
nature of the connection between ‘traumatic event’ and supposedly sub-
sequent presenting symptoms can only be presented or re-presented in terms
of absence—the failure to assimilate environmental stimuli into a coherent
life-narrative. It has traditionally been the case that traumatology has been
linked with absence, specifically the absence of a physiological lesion, or,
later some physico-chemical imbalance (the search for such physiological
grounding, of course, continues—see Yule, 1999). It is perhaps the crucial
(negative) defining characteristic of trauma itself. It is the ontological and
epistemological implications of such an absence that has so exercised the
academic and political imaginations. The difficulty lies in comprehending
how an experience that has failed to present itself as a memory can be
activated by symptoms that are in some sense its by-product.

The Concept of Nachträglichkeit

Freud (following J.M. Charcot) initially postulated the existence of, to use
the parlance of DSM-IV, ‘delayed onset’ trauma. This ‘did not occur

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210 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 14(2)

immediately after the trauma but after an interval of incubation. Charcot

liked to describe this interval as the “period of psychical working out”
(élaboration)’ (Freud, 1895/1955a, p. 134). These initial formulations follow
a conventional understanding of both chronology and a discernible delay in
causal effect. Neuroses were the result of traumatic events during childhood,
a protection from extraneous stimuli that threatened to over-run the psy-
chical apparatus (an argument revisited by Van der Kolk and Van der Hart
[1995] with specific regard to PTSD). This situation becomes slightly more
complex in Freud’s account in the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’.
Here he tries to demonstrate how the experience of traumatic events, and the
defence reaction thereto, is inextricably bounded by memory—memories
can ‘cause’ trauma in a way that actual experiences may not. The case of
Emma is striking in many ways, not least that it is the only clinical material
to which Freud makes reference. The story has three main elements: a fear
of going into shops alone (a ‘compulsion’ from which Emma is said to
suffer at ‘the present time’); a memory of an encounter with two shop-
assistants at age 12; and a memory at age 8 of a sexual assault (the exact
nature of its derivation being rather unclear) (Freud, 1895/1966, p. 353). The
memory of age 12 is of going into a shop, seeing two shop-assistants
laughing together, and then running from the shop in some distress. Emma
recollected that they were laughing at her clothes and one of them had
‘pleased her sexually’ (Emma experienced a ‘sexual release’). On its own
this memory fails to elucidate the nature of the present fear. However,
further investigation reveals a second memory. At the age of 8, Emma had
gone to a shop alone and had been the victim of a sexual assault on the part
of the shopkeeper; however, she had later gone back alone and had then felt
guilty ‘as though she had wanted in that way to provoke the assault’ (Freud,
1895/1966, p. 354). Freud believed that the laughing of the assistants had
occasioned the memory of the shopkeeper and the sexual assault. As Emma
had now reached puberty, the memory was able to achieve what the actual
experience had not, sexual release, which, in turn, is experienced as
displeasure. Such a scenario transforms the relation between traumatic event
and memory—the memory of the sexual assault becomes a trauma only via
the physiological change of puberty. It is important to note that sexual
release was not linked to the assault when it was experienced. The traumatic
event is traumatic vis-à-vis a re-transcription of memorial content: ‘Here we
have a case of a memory arousing an affect which it did not arouse as an
experience because in the meantime the change [brought about] in puberty
had made possible a different understanding of what was remembered’
(Freud, 1895/1966, p. 356). This text raises many interesting questions
around the relation between event and memory. It is clearly the case that the
Emma material cannot simply be approached as a further example of
Charcot’s theory of delayed action trauma. A cause (in this case, the sexual
assault at age 8) is only the cause of a traumatic symptom in conjunction

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with other events (those at age 12)—the sexual assault is generative of

Emma’s symptom only in association with later (contingent) happenings
which supply the affective charge.
There has been considerable debate on the nature of this retroactive
causality (Laplanche & Pontalis,1973; Modell,1990; Wetzler,1985; for a
diametrically opposed view, that no such causality is present, see Thoma &
Cheshire, 1991). Whatever the exact nature of causality operative in the
Freudian texts, the notion of origination (of traumatic disorder) is extremely
problematic, a point further reinforced by attention to the famous ‘wolf-man’
study of 1918. The so-called ‘primal event’ (the wolf-man, when aged 18
months, saw his parents copulating) is an event only in conjunction with
another; indeed, it seems to become an ‘event’ only vis-à-vis its connection
with other events (in this case, seduction at 31⁄4 by his sister, dissatisfaction
with Christmas/birthday presents at age 4, and the famous dream of wolves
sitting in a tree).
[I]t was at that point that the dream brought into deferred operation
[Nachträglichkeit] his observation of intercourse at the age of one and a
half. It is not possible for us completely to grasp or adequately to describe
what now ensued. The activation of this picture, which, thanks to the
advance in his intellectual development, he was now able to understand,
operated not only like a fresh event, but like a new trauma, like an
interference from outside analogous to the seduction. (Freud, 1918/1955c,
p. 109)

Nachträglichkeit (or ‘deferred action’) describes a temporal relation

between two events of a distinctive kind. The first has the character of shock
or surprise and is often of such traumatic intensity that the subject is unable
to assimilate it or properly ‘experience’ it. At a later time, a relatively trivial
event, only tangentially related to the first, catalyses a response of dispropor-
tionate affective charge, only explicable, it would seem, by reference to the
first event. The paradox of Nachträglichkeit is that the first event is only
experienced after the second event even though the latter is not chrono-
logically prior. The claim here is that the ‘originary event’ is never present
to consciousness for it is never psychically cathected and never emerges as a
temporal moment. Oddly, it appears to be engendered by the subsequent
event, a scrambling of the temporal order in which the father is begotten by
the son. The trauma is a silent gap in the unconscious, an inexplicable
absence incapable of being made conscious. In the case of the wolf-man, the
primal scene is the first act of a narrative sequence which will be ‘primed’
(charged) at a later stage. The primal scene is the first in a sequence, but
since it is not preceded by another item it both is and is not part of that
sequence. Following our reflections on Nachträglichkeit, we are inclined to
say that the ‘second’ event (in this case the ‘seduction’) generates the primal
scene as a primary event. It would follow from this that the second event is

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212 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 14(2)

primary and indeed that the third event (the dream) precedes the second in
that it generates a sequence rather than a pair.
Such a concept of causality seems to commit Freud to the claim that ‘the
primal scene’ is causal of these later events after, and only after, these later
events actually occur. Furthermore, the reality of the primal scene itself is
non liquet, and Freud is far from unsympathetic to the (Jungian) claim that
the primal scene itself is a constructed ‘retrospective phantasy’. Indeed, as
he sagely notes in respect of the wolf-man case, the relationship between
actual historical event and retrospective phantasy is ‘the most delicate
question in the whole domain of psychoanalysis’ (Freud, 1918/1955c,
p. 103). In short, the whole notion of the primal scene as an actual, prior
event is most definitely unclear. But even if its ‘reality’ is conceded, it is a
discernible event only after the occurrence of another event—the trauma of
the wolf-man witnessing his parents copulating. It is perhaps a significant
feature of this case that the wolf-man is unable to remember the primal scene
for it might be claimed that it is the ‘condition of possibility’ for all future
events and hence that it is constitutively necessary that it does not appear.
Freud postulated that for traumatic events stemming from childhood, what is
repeated is something which never took place as such because it lacked the
sense that an adult perspective would supply. What took place did not
happen then (it was lived through but not ‘experienced’). It is only as
memory that it becomes affective, but this does not mean that the trauma has
happened now. This would be to impute to trauma the status of both origin
and outcome. The peculiarity of this type of trauma is that it is placeless.
This emphasis on the placelessness of the past sits rather uneasily with the
notion of phylogenetic inheritance and ‘stages’ of psycho-sexual develop-
ment but it does raise very interesting questions about memory, narrative
and origination (by virtue of the very concept of a self-censoring or ‘screen
memory’ itself). In a sense, we are all prisoners of a past that is yet to come
or at least a past subject to continual re-organization. It is in the repetition
(symptomatic acting out) of what did not take place that the enigma of
PTSD resides.

The Logic of Différance

Whilst Freudian theory in general might be regarded as a modernist grand

narrative, we would like to contend that the notion of Nachträglichkeit
is most profitably regarded as postmodernist temporal dynamic. This is
most easily demonstrated by marking out the resemblance between Nach-
träglichkeit and the celebrated poststructuralist conception of ‘deferred
operation’, that of Derrida’s différance. Derrida coins the term différance to
express the thought that differing and deferring are mutually reinforcing
terms (différer means both ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’). Just as Freud had

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intimated that the primal scene is the condition of possibility for the
occurrence of psychic events and hence cannot be encountered as such,
Derrida suggests that the process of differing is also one of deferring the
primal moment and hence can never be present in itself. Derrida’s pro-
nouncements on the repudiation of inquiry into origins and grounds has clear
affinities with a concept that continually renders a moment of originary
trauma so problematic. The influence of the Freudian notion of Nach-
träglichkeit on Derrida’s formulation of différance is explicitly marked in
both the seminal ‘Différance’ essay and ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’
(Derrida, 1978). In the former text, Derrida characterizes the Freudian
unconscious as a certain alterity ‘definitively exempt from every process
of presentation’ (p. 20). The unconscious is said to differ and defer itself,
its radical alterity residing in the ‘irreducibility of the aftereffect, the
delay’ (p. 21).
The structure of delay (Nachträglichkeit) in effect forbids that one make of
temporalization (temporization) a simple dialectical complication of the
living present as an originary and unceasing synthesis—a synthesis con-
stantly directed back on itself, gathered in on itself and gathering—of
retentional traces and protentional openings. The alterity of the ‘uncon-
scious’ makes us concerned not with horizons of modified—past or
future—presents, but with a ‘past’ that has never been present, and which
never will be, whose future to come will never be a production or a
reproduction in the form of presence. (Derrida, 1967/1982, p. 21)
Temporalization is liberated from its traditional domination by the present
because the present is always transcended towards a horizon which recedes
and must recede in order to make possible the presentation of being-present.
Nachträglichkeit is not one of the ‘determinations of being as presence’ and
hence does not shore up the ‘logic of identity’ and the very concept of origin
upon which its laws are predicated. Derrida’s claim is that Western thought
since the Greeks has been marked by a preoccupation with presence or, in
more Heideggerian terms, ‘determinations of being’. These have taken
various guises, ranging from the Platonic Idea to the concepts of God, soul,
consciousness and psyche, to name but a few. These grounding concepts
have traditionally been conceived as self-identical essences present in and of
themselves. The notion that there is a simple, self-identical and non-
ambiguous reality to which propositions refer was designated a century
earlier by Nietzsche as the concept ‘God’. As eternally self-present, immuta-
ble and causa sui, God symbolizes the metaphysical concept of truth and the
concomitant notion that truth is to be located at the ‘origin’ of things. In a
series of ‘deconstructive’ procedures, Derrida sets out to show that the
concept of originary, foundational truth is illusory and that it is only through
patterns of differing and deferring that positive and seemingly stable
concepts can be adduced. Stylistic play of a deconstructive stamp exploits
the fact that a signified concept is never present in itself but is inscribed

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214 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 14(2)

within a systemic play of differences from which it derives its meaning.

Whilst this entails the conclusion that meaning is determined negatively, this
negativity never becomes determinate by virtue of the fact that all signifiers
are fluid, divided from themselves as well as from each other in the ceaseless
iteration and referral of signifier to signifier: ‘The presence of an element is
always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of
differences and the movement of a chain’ (Derrida, 1978, p. 292).
It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible
only if each so-called ‘present’ element, each element appearing on the
scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping
within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be
vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being
related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past,
and constituting what is called the present by means of this very relation to
what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a
modified present. (Derrida, 1967/1982, p. 13)
In effect, Derrida transposes Freudian and Nietzschean insights into a
semiotic theory which underscores the point that the ‘originary’ moment of
presence can never occur. Deconstruction then consists in exposing the ways
in which thinkers attempt to establish pure self-presence in the face of the
absences induced by textuality or writing, rationality and reality being just
two such moments. It only remains to link such a reading with the
Saussurean view that language consists not in the identity of self-identical
linguistic items, but rather in a process of internal differentiation to gain the
recognizable features of différance. Language can only re-present by the
repression of its own conditions of possibility: presence can only be
maintained, paradoxically, under conditions of endless difference and de-
ferral. The representation of the timeless transcendental, God or the uncon-
scious or some other version of pure self-presence, can be represented only
in the temporality of writing (deferral). There never was an original moment
of presence, but equally such a process must be reckoned interminable. The
moment of full presence never arrives.
For Derrida (1978), the repression of writing is the ‘repression of that
which threatens presence and the mastering of absence’ (p. 197). In ‘Freud
and the Scene of Writing’ (Derrida, 1978), he draws attention to Freud’s use
of metaphors of inscription to describe the psychic economy of drives and
desires. Derrida identifies Freud’s use of these grammatological allusions as
fundamental to his attempt to argue for a primary inscription at the level of
the unconscious, and in doing so Freud is compelled to elaborate the
distinctively differential character of ‘generalized writing’ that exceeds
the speech/writing dyad. In this sense, psychoanalysis fails to explore the
repression of writing in Western philosophy.
It might be thought that this subtle reading exemplifies the extent to which
Freud remains a modernist thinker, caught up in the conceptual armoury of

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the metaphysics of presence. However, it must be acknowledged that

Freud’s account of Nachträglichkeit does invite us to consider how ‘texts’
are produced somatically. As his account of memory and repression reveals,
not all psychic traces are inscriptional. The inaccessible past exists as a trace
that remains in the process of erasing traces. Such traces are ‘affective’—
feelings that one cannot assimilate in terms of any present narrative. They
are not ‘signs’ in any lexical sense. Freud explains that in the case of Emma,
sexual feeling is associated with a second event although produced by the
memory of an earlier episode.
Attention is [normally] adjusted towards perceptions, which are what
ordinarily gives occasion for a release of unpleasure. Here, [however, what
has appeared] is no perception but a memory, which unexpectedly releases
unpleasure, and the ego only discovers this too late. (Freud, 1895/1966,
p. 358)
Like the postmodern author whom Lyotard describes, the ego discovers ‘too
late’ what it needed to know at the outset. Since the ego is unable to draw on
its usual defences against an unpleasurable sexual affect, it triggers a
pathological defence—repression. For Freud, it is this ‘somatic absence’ that
problematizes the notion of presence. It is not the case that a traumatic
experience is ‘buried’ for, as in the case of Emma, the experience has never
been present to consciousness. It is in this sense that the Freudian account
offers an account of the presentation of the unpresentable which fuses
temporality with affectivity. It is in the process of recollection that the scene
is ‘primed’ with explosive charge. The traumatic response testifies to an
illegible experience—one which cannot be articulated because it cannot be
called to presence, whether in the clinician’s office or the courtroom.
Unlike Freud, for Derrida the somatic is produced textually and as such is
thought in relation to the semantic rather than vice versa. Claiming that there
is neither a Being nor a truth of the play of writing such as it engages in
différance, Derrida claims that that which differs does so from a concept or
term which is equally ‘non-present’ or traced through with absence and as
such defines itself contrastively with what it is not. Such an account appears
to commute differences to a common measure, a flat terrain upon which
signifier relates to signifier in a relation of putative equality. Whilst it is
unquestionably Derrida’s point to assert that oppositions presuppose the
common concept that they affirm or negate, his notion that ‘each of the
terms must appear as the différance of the other, as the other different and
deferred in the economy of the same’, reinscribes the form of opposition
found in the signifiers in the form of their conditions (Derrida, 1967/1982,
p. 17). Defining ‘presence’ negatively in terms of its not being other
elements in a signifying chain is to remain at the level of representation,
even if determination is endlessly deferred. It is not that logical syntax is
pre-given, simply that reference of all things to the concept yields a theory

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216 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 14(2)

of limitation of one term by another, which is to confuse a relation between

conditioned elements with a relation between their real conditions. We
would like to contend that Freud’s thinking of affectivity can be thought in
the non-metaphysical sense of ‘real conditions’ as outlined above in relation
to Nachträglichkeit. Indeed, it is the reality of ‘trauma’ inherent to this
concept which proves most fruitful in considering PTSD as postmodern.

Narrative and Paradox

As we have noted in the foregoing discussion, it is difficult to comprehend

how an experience that has never been present to consciousness could have
a belated effect. The claim is that an event that was never lived through is
dissociated from consciousness and precisely through its dissociation is
‘forgotten’. Without wishing to reopen the recent debates on ‘false memory
syndrome’, one must ask how a diagnosis of PTSD can be secured when a
traumatic event is not ‘available’ as a guarantor of the presence of the
condition. It is here that one might be inclined to favour aspects of the
Derridean notion of différance over the Freudian theory outlined. Whereas
Freud locates Nachträglichkeit in terms of psychic mechanisms, Derrida’s
notion of a general text enables one to reflect on how the ‘psyche’ as a
construct is constituted. As Young (1995) has shown, the diagnosis of PTSD
does not reveal something specific to the psyche but something political
about the way in which ‘traumatic stress’ has become increasingly psycho-
logized over time. As the following very typical passage from the literature
indicates, PTSD is a condition that one is obliged to ‘invent’:
All these subjects, regardless of the age at which the trauma occurred,
claimed that they initially ‘remembered’ the trauma in the form of
somatosensory flashback experiences. . . . This study suggests that there is
a dramatic difference between the ways people experience traumatic
memories and the ways they experience other significant personal events. It
supports the idea that the very nature of a traumatic memory is to be
dissociated, and to be stored initially as sensory fragments that have no
linguistic components. All of the subjects claimed that they only came to
develop a narrative of their trauma over time. Indeed, five of the subjects
who claimed to have been abused as children were, even as adults, unable
to tell a complete story of what had happened to them. They merely had
fragmentary memories to support other people’s accounts and their own
intuitive feelings they had been abused. Thus the subject’s traumatic
experiences were not initially organized in a narrative form, and they
seemed to serve no communicative function. It appears that as people
become aware of more and more elements of the traumatic experience,
they construct a narrative that ‘explains’ what happened to them. This
process of weaving a narrative out of disparate sensory elements of an
experience is probably not all that dissimilar from how people automat-
ically construct a narrative under ordinary conditions. . . . Even after

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MATHER & MARSDEN: TRAUMA AND TEMPORALITY 217

considerable periods of time, and even after acquiring a personal narrative

for the traumatic experience, most of our subjects reported that these
experiences continued to come back as sensory perceptions and as affective
states. (Van der Kolk, 1996, pp. 288–289)
It seems significant that PTSD is to be thought in terms of ‘signs’ that do
not ‘communicate’. What the sufferer of PTSD is obliged to do is to develop
a narrative that will enable him or her to conceptualize trauma as a ‘play of
difference’. The metaphor of weaving, where an absence (the sensory
fragments, which are not yet present) becomes presence (narrative), but
presence still inflected with absence (an incomplete construction that ‘ex-
plains’ a story), which becomes a personal narrative (fully present self-
identity) but remains still ultimately threatened by the negative power of
continuing sensory fragmentation (dissociative memory), is testimony to the
salience of Derridean motifs in this area. However, the value of différance
may be itself nachträglich—a deferred memory of a repressed Freudian
inheritance. The reporting of symptoms might require the operation of
language, but the duplicitous power of language itself threatens the pure
self-presence of the ‘somatosensory flashback experiences’. Van der Kolk
(who is still sympathetic to the positivist framework in broad outline)
concludes that ‘all narratives that weave sensory imprints into socially
communicable stories are subject to condensation, embellishment and con-
tamination’ (p. 296).
It seems evident that the criteria which would enable us to settle the
matter of whether PTSD is real or ‘invented’ cannot be considered in
isolation from the syndrome itself. To insist on the dyad of truth and falsity
is to perpetuate the metaphysics of presence. Recalling Lyotard’s definition
of the postmodern, we might say that traumatic stress exemplifies the
‘unpresentable in presentation itself’ (Lyotard, 1984, p. 81). Lyotard likens
the experience of the unpresentable to the Kantian account of sublime
feeling—an affect that is aroused when the sensory faculties encounter
something that the intellect is unable to conceptualize. This feeling—which
is figured as traumatic itself—is not empirical but transcendental and
potentially universalizable. The language for trauma has to be invented
because it is not ‘language’ which gives the experience. This is where a
Foucauldian notion of discourse shares a surprising affinity with the
Freudian understanding of affect. This kind of affectivity leaves the recipient
unable to assimilate the experience in relation to his/her own ‘identity’. In
the case of PTSD it will always be the case of the future anterior—inventing
the narrative frame for what will have been the truth.

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ter: Wiley

Ronald Mather is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Bolton Institute of

Higher Education. His current research interests include the philosophical
and theoretical foundations of the human sciences. Address: Department
of Health and Social Studies, Bolton Institute, Deane Road, Bolton BL3
5AB, UK. [email: rm4@bolton.ac.uk]

Jill Marsden is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Bolton Institute of

Higher Education. Her book After Nietzsche: Notes Towards a Philosophy
of Ecstasy was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2002. Address:
Department of Health and Social Studies, Bolton Institute, Chadwick
Street, Bolton BL2 1JW, UK. [email: jm2@bolton.ac.uk]

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