Using Psychoanalysis to Understand #MeToo Memories
This is not an original post. It is from The New York Review, but it seems so important and relevant I decided to reprint it here because it helps explain how events that were not experienced as traumatic in the past can become traumatic many years later. This is the reason some women have waited decades to report their experiences. Elapsed time does not invalidate trauma; it helps make it. Subheads and emphases are my own.
Using Psychoanalysis to Understand #MeToo Memories, Avgi Saketopoulou
New York Review of Books, New York Review Daily, Oct 11, 2018
As the #MeToo movement has gathered momentum, we’ve seen a proliferation of allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault. In some instances, one or two accusations are followed by a series of others, as happened during the course of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Although Kavanaugh’s supporters, including Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee, professed respect for the demeanor of his main accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, even as they dismissed the allegations of others, they also called into question the integrity of her testimony. One of the main objections was the length of time, thirty-six years, that had passed before Ford had gone public with her report of his alleged sexual assault. Why would someone who has been hurt, they wanted to know, not speak at the time the injury was inflicted? Isn’t this very delay, as President Trump recently said, itself evidence that the claims are suspect? These questions are not new or specific to Kavanaugh, but they became especially urgent when a Supreme Court nomination is at stake.
Much trauma doesn’t fit PTSD
Part of the disconnect in appreciating how and why allegations arise as and when they do has to do with our culture’s understanding of trauma. We are accustomed to thinking about only one of the ways that trauma works. Here is the clinical definition most generally familiar: something is traumatic when it overcomes the subject’s capacity to cope, and it interrupts the self’s ability to absorb and process distressing or painful events. Such trauma can bring about feelings of helplessness and produce long-lasting disturbances in the subject’s life. This type of trauma is understood to happen in real time; the harm itself occurs at the time of the scarring event. This is the most widely held understanding of how trauma works, but psychoanalysis offers an alternate conception of trauma: specifically about how a traumatic experience can mean quite different things for the same individual over time.
