Testimony can create the trauma it discovers.
Trauma theory and testimony grew up together, beginning in about 1980. By this I mean that trauma theory and Holocaust testimony emerged as socially and historically significant at about the same time. It’s worthwhile thinking about their relationship. If we take the limits of testimony seriously, then much of current trauma theory, especially Cathy Caruth’s account of the “missing moment,” is mistaken.
It is, of course, not literally true that trauma theory emerged in 1980. Freud built much of psychoanalysis on his reinterpretation of his patients’ trauma almost a hundred years earlier. Shell shock, as PTSD was then known, emerged with the First World War. What happened beginning in the early 1980’s was the inclusion of PTSD in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III) for the first time. The introduction of PTSD coincided with the “narrative turn” in the humanities and social sciences. At about the same time, the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimony was established at Yale University.
I have come to believe that Holocaust testimony leads to a misunderstanding of trauma, especially if one does not understand testimony’s limits. I have published three books on trauma that draw on Holocaust testimonies in the Fortunoff Archive. I think I understand the limits of testimony better now. My instructor, so to speak, is Henry Greenspan, author of On Listening to Holocaust Survivors. I also draw on some more recent papers of his. In place of testimony, Greenspan has engaged in extended conversations with survivors. Some of these conversations have lasted decades. Out of these conversations comes a different way of thinking about testimony and trauma.
