History Beyond Trauma, by Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, has been well-received for over ten years. I could hardly find a negative review. But, in my view the book provides no evidence at all for its most fundamental claim: that historical and social trauma is the origin of madness (pp xxii-xxiii).
To be sure, intergenerational trauma exists. Parents inflict it on their children. Davoine and Gaudillière recognize this, but the message the book sends, and certainly this message has been widely received, is that historical traumas such as war are passed down the generations in ways that can’t be readily explained by the familiar experiences of children in troubled families.
Take the case of the chronically mute woman in an asylum whom one of the analysts took the trouble to talk to. Finally the woman responded, and as the analysis progressed, a traumatic event was uncovered.
It was wartime. One day, she followed her mother toward the fortifications of the little town where they lived. She caught her mother quickly leaving a German soldier. Back home, her mother had lifted her skirt over her nakedness and screamed at her astonished daughter, “You want to know what I’m doing? OK, take a look!” From then on, the little girl had canceled herself out as a subject until she reached her forties, ageless. (p. 211)
First, most people do not become mad (their term) from a single traumatic incident. Second, even if this were the case, the woman’s mutism is easily explained in terms of relationships within this single family. It does not mean or imply that the mute forty-something French woman was traumatized by the Second World War. In a sense she was, but it is in the way that many who are driven mad by their families are: by an encounter with a troubled mother and absent father. No need to claim that the mute woman embodied the trauma of the second world war in some more mysterious or profound way.
“Madness has to do with the radical dislocation of human beings from their social context by way of generational trauma.” (p. xiii)
It is with these words that M. Gerard Fromm introduces the book. It’s true, but it suggests a level of abstraction that is misleading. Families make people crazy, but without intimacy people would go even crazier. I think my statement says the same thing as Fromm’s.
An insight misinterpreted
Davoine and Gaudillière make an important discovery: that psychosis can be treated as extreme trauma is treated. Their approach to madness is based on the Salmon principles, developed by Dr. Thomas Salmon for treating shell shock, or war neuroses in 1917. “Who would have imagined that a psychoanalysis of madness had begun in the barracks of field hospitals?” (p. 106) Where they go wrong, and where their readers have gone wrong, is imagining that because an approach to the treatment of wartime trauma has proven successful in addressing psychosis that therefore psychosis must be in some way linked to wartime trauma. Generally it’s not.
Furthermore, if madness is a result of trauma, then in almost every case the trauma will have the quality of C-PTSD, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder. Not yet recognized by DSM 5, chronic post-traumatic stress disorder stems from long term abuse of children. Not every, or most, cases of adult madness are due to child abuse, though the number is likely far greater than is regularly recognized. Madness generally develops through deep failures in family life, though genetic causes cannot be ruled out in some cases. These failures play out over years, not in single traumatic incidents such as the cases selected by Davoine and Gaudillière.
These family failures seem to work through projective identification. The parent communicates his or her unbearable experiences to the child so that the child feels but hardly knows the message, for it is communicated by attitude and silence. Attitude can be a tone of voice, a tenseness in the body; silence occurs what powerful emotions and experiences are never spoken about.
“Daddy has affairs, and mommy knows it, but she will never acknowledge it, and you must keep the wordless secret hidden from everyone, including yourself.” Secrets and lies like these can make kids crazy. It is certainly the intergenerational transmission of trauma, but its path of transmission is familiar to those who do therapeutic work with families. One might argue that a secret like this may be emotionally harmful, but not traumatic. But, there is no reason to define trauma in terms of PTSD. If trauma has to do with unbearable experiences that can find no means of expression, then secrets like this are traumatic. And possibly crazy-making.
Only the Phantom knows
In The Shell and the Kernel, another well regarded book that deals with intergenerational trauma, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok write about what seems to be a similar process, referring to
the existence within an individual of a collective psychology comprised of several generations, so that the analyst must listen for the voices of one generation in the unconscious of another. (p. 166)
They call this presence the Phantom. However, it turns out that the Phantom is but another word for projective identification. The Phantom exists “on account of a direct empathy with the unconscious or the rejected psychic matter of a parental object.” (p. 182) Projective identification does not operate in an attachment vacuum. The haunting of the Phantom “exhibits a measure of loyalty toward the parents.”
Children are caught between a rock and a hard place: they must maintain their ignorance of a loved one’s secret. At the same time they must eliminate the state of secrecy: hence the reconstruction of the secret as unconscious knowledge. The result is that the subject harbors another person’s secret in his unconscious. Reducing the phantom, as they call it, means reducing the sin attached to someone else’s secret by stating it in terms acceptable to the adult child. The result, says Abraham, is “a higher degree of `truth.'” (p. 189) By this last phrase Abraham seems to mean that the child is able to know what he or she already knows, and thus become less split, more whole.
The process is a little complicated, but it is the stuff of ordinary object relations psychoanalysis. One reason Abraham and Torok come up with such tortured formulations is they are trying to work from within a Freudian framework.
Conclusion
Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière are Lacanians, and I would like to blame their frustrating elusiveness on the influence of Jacques Lacan. Trouble is, it turns out that Lacan’s basic account of madness as the inability to put words to an experience that defies symbolization, what he calls the Real, is actually a pretty good account of trauma. Trauma, in turn, helps make sense of madness. If Lacan deserves part of the blame, it stems from the overreaching style, with its puns, portentous literary references and sense that what is being written about is more profound than what can be demonstrated in a mere book. Therefore allusion must substitute for argument. And case studies need not be true to the facts, but are somehow truer than true. The “harsh reality of fiction,” Davoine and Gaudillière call it. (p. 250)
As for Abraham and Torok, I need only repeat my previous comment. Had they been familiar with post-Kleinian object relations theory, their path might not have been as tortuous, and the Phantom might have lost something of its supernatural status. (Abraham died in 1975. Torok died in 1998. She wrote about Klein. Nicholas Rand, editor and translator of The Shell and the Kernel, was Abraham’s nephew.)
Both books contribute to our understanding of the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and both mystify the matter more than need be.
References
Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma. Other Press, 2004.
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel. University of Chicago Press, 1994.
This is such a loose free association on your incisive and helpful post, I fear it is not worthy of your blog, but your discussion got me thinking again about the trope of “the kernel and the shell” and its origins in Marx, and really Hegel: you know, the ‘rational kernel within the mystical shell,’ etc., etc., and I thought you might have an interesting thought or two about it.
Of course, for Hegel (and actually Kant uses it in an interesting way at the very end of ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’), the shell is false and mystifying, and the kernel is the pure idea, or, for Marx, material reality or something like that. From what I know of Abraham’s (and several others’) use of the trope, the shell metaphor is inverted, becoming more of a contact barrier where the ego translates some of the unconscious, unknowable kernel into symbols and forms that are in some way thinkable and recognizable in the world.
Anyway, I was just thinking how much of trauma theorizing depends upon something of this formulation, such that trauma comes to mean getting something stuck within our interior unknowable kernels that can’t find its way to the surface of the shell, or — speaking intergenerationally — when something passes from parent’s kernel to child’s kernel, without ever having been translated at the level of shell.
(Or, of course, the idea of trauma as “shell shock”: which obviously referred first and foremost to artillary shells, but has come to carry the additional meaning of the shell of the personality being shocked, rocked, cracked, so that it can’t perform its mediating and protective functions any more.)
Instead, when I put all this together, I find myself wanting to go back to the Hegelian and Marxist vision of kernels and shells and to imagine something like a shell within a kernel within a shell, such that, for instance, the ‘Real’ would exist both in an interior and exterior shell, or, to put it slightly less mysteriously, the impenetrable core of the unconscious would resonate with, shape, and be shaped by an outer ‘mystical shell,’ which could be the mystifying shell that determines roles in a family or the ideological shell of the socio-political order or whatever. And the kernel that is the thinking self has to find some way to exist in between them. That is, of course, if we believe in ‘the self,’ which I do, but I know not everyone does. I suppose if you don’t, then you just have two nesting shells with nothing (or ‘une manque’ etc.) in between them.
Makes me imagine trauma as looking less like intrusion or unspeakability and more about that which squeezes the life out of the self from both inside and out, because the self sits so precariously between its interior and exterior shells, or, as you say in the post, “between a rock and a hard place.” 🙂
Anyway, my apologies that this is so scattered, half-baked, or, depending on how you look at, either not enough kernel or too much… 🙂
Thanks as always for the thought-provoking post!
p.s. Do you know of Peter Baehr’s paper contending that Weber’s ‘Stahlhaltes Gehause’ should have been translated by Talcott Parsons as “steel shell” instead of “iron cage”? I find it interesting and persuasive, since, for me, it changes something important about the metaphor, as a shell is moveable, and part of the individual, while a cage is immovable and exterior to the person, and therefore doesn’t seem to fit as well with Weber’s overall psychology.
Dear Matt, a thoughtful and challenging post.
I’m not sure I find the kernel and the shell a useful way of thinking about trauma, or anything, to tell you the truth. And I think your riff on their relationship reveals why.
If we think back to the original way of talking about trauma in physical medicine, the trauma is the intrusion itself, as in blunt force trauma.
To be psychologically traumatized is in some ways the exact opposite. Intrusion is not the trauma, though it may be its instigator. The trauma is the inability of the mind to live in and be in the present, to enjoy everyday experiences, and to grow from them. Instead, mind and body are somehow unable to escape the past, caught in an endless loop of time that folds back on itself. The symptoms of psychic trauma, from intrusive flashbacks to numbing and dissociation are signs of being trapped in the past. Otherwise expressed, they prevent living in the present.
From this perspective, the shell and the kernel are misleading images. To live everyday life is to live very much on the surface. Not that one’s experiences aren’t “deep,” but the surface goes all the way down, and the depths invigorate the surface with material from our deepest hopes, fantasies and desires. Trauma blocks this communication, and with it the richness of psychic life.
I think you are getting at something like this with a “shell within a kernel within a shell,” but I’m inclined to say the simile is so misleading we are better off without it.
Dear Fred,
Thanks for the comments and I am agreed: too simplistic and not so helpful. Also agreed about distinguishing between trauma (its psychic manifestation) and trauma’s “instigator[s],” as you put it. Although both of these ideas obviously cut against some lingering theories that define the experience of trauma by way of its imagined instigation: i.e., the unknowable foreign substance that penetrates the self leads to an experience of ‘foreignness to oneself,’ self-alienation, etc., which probably gets both the experience and the instigator[s] of trauma wrong.
I guess it does strike me as moderately interesting, in a tedious, academic way, how the basic imagination of the self as kernel/shell or core/surface has hung around for so long, not just in trauma theorizing but going back as far as the Stoics, maybe farther, especially considering how difficult it is to fit this image with the complexity of experience. I suppose one could argue that the imagination of the self as a kernel within a shell may be, itself, a sort of ideological defense against certain realities of self-experience — vulnerability, dependency, attachment, etc. — which, in some cases, might be experienced as traumatic. Certainly this seems to be the case in Epictetus and others.
Dear Matt, your comment convinces me that all of Western philosophy and religion is, or was, but a variant of the shell and the kernel. In religion, the body is the shell, the soul the kernel. In philosophy since Socrates, the body is the shell, the psyche (which we translate as soul and self) the soul, which has an independent, immortal existence.
And so we go from Plato through the Middle-Ages, until we reach Nietzsche, Foucault, et al. Yet, there is a counter-trend even in Greek thought, and one finds it in Greek tragedy, where the distinction is not present, for humans don’t participate in the Godlike and numinous, except perhaps as sacrifices to it, such as Antigone, or Oedipus. I think the tragedians had it right, and that the whole point of the kernel and shell is to shelter something precious within from contingency (this certainly fits Winnicott’s true self, false self).
The value of trauma theory, from this perspective, is to remind us that there is no shell, not really: just a soul-body that may be all too easily pierced. We are infinitely exposed to fate. It is the task of a decent and humane civilization to provide us with a temporary home, a human-made shell, from houses to culture. Trauma theory is a philosophy.