Trauma is knowledge of the unbearably real. Trauma is a breaking of faith with all that one held sacred. Trauma is too much too soon. Trauma is “knowledge as disaster,” as Maurice Blanchot put it. The survivor of an environmental disaster captures the meaning of unbearable knowledge when she says
While it could be argued that it’s not a bad thing to become more knowledgeable, it is, I think, certainly a bad thing to become knowledgeable in the way that we’ve become knowledgeable. It’s like a person who’s an agoraphobic. If you’re terrified to go out of the house, you don’t live a very good life. (Erikson 1995, 197)
If trauma is knowledge, then what exactly is it knowledge of? That everyday life is a conspiracy to make the world seem safe enough to live in. Trauma is the result of an experience that makes it impossible for the traumatized to use social conventions the way most of us do in order to relieve anxiety, even dread. An example of such as convention is the statement “just you wait, everything is going to turn out ok.” Well, sometimes it doesn’t. Robinson Crusoe put the lie this way.
How infinitely good . . . providence is, which has provided in its government of mankind such narrow bounds to his sight and knowledge of things; and though he walks in the midst of so many thousand dangers, the sight of which, if discovered to him, would distract his mind and sink his spirits, he is kept serene and calm, by having the events of things hid from his eyes, and knowing nothing of the dangers which surround him. (Defoe, p. 163)
An intriguing thought suggests itself. Successful therapy can be defined as enabling the traumatized person to once again use the socially sanctioned lies the rest of us rely on to get by in everyday life. Successful therapy isn’t about bringing the traumatized one into closer contact with reality. The traumatized person has already come too close to reality; that is his or her affliction. The task is to reestablish within the traumatized person the ability to use the beliefs, sayings, clichés, and so forth that the rest of us use to get by. Of course, these new defenses will never fit quite as well as before, but perhaps they will fit well enough for the traumatized one to get through the day . . . and night.
I don’t know that this is how therapy works, whether it works this way for many, or a few. Trouble is, I don’t believe that clinicians are in a position to know this either. Increased function, the increased ability to retell rather than relive, the diminution of symptoms, all of these may well be achieved by the socially sanctioned lie. For if that is the way that most of us get through life, if the experience of trauma is the experience of having been forced outside of the penumbra of the lie, then the ability to reestablish the lie would be a genuine therapeutic achievement. It would also account for the continued suffering and suicide (as well as their attraction for the rest of us) of those truth tellers, such as Primo Levi and Jean Améry, who could not take up the lie. The devastation that is trauma should lead us to think about how much we really want to know about reality, how close we want to get, and how therapy cures, when it does.
This is one reason Holocaust survivors are interesting. Almost all are unable to utilize the socially sanctioned lie. They have been through too much. Muncie K. (T-503) says “I see the bodies, the trucks, all my life . . . that I am normal, that I have children, that I can live . . . I don’t know how. It is just amazing that I can have a normal life after all I went through.”
One might imagine that Muncie suffers from what are called flashbacks and intrusive thoughts, markers of PTSD. She does, but her point is more abstract or philosophical. What astonishes Muncie is how unbelievable it all was, and by unbelievable Muncie means the moral and human unbelievability. “Absolutely unbelievable that they did this to us. Why? This is the question I always ask.” She repeats a version of this statement at least a half dozen times during her testimony. By the end of her testimony she is practically screaming it.
One does not ordinarily think of trauma as a philosophical problem, but in the end that is what it is. Judith Herman made this point in her classic Trauma and Recovery, a book that is clinically oriented.
Traumatic events destroy the victim’s fundamental assumptions about the . . . meaningful order of creation. . . .The traumatic event challenges an ordinary person to become a theologian, a philosopher, and a jurist. . . . [The survivor] stands mute before the emptiness of evil, feeling the insufficiency of any known system of explanation (pp. 51, 178)
What I learned about trauma from Holocaust survivors is not just to study the survivor, but to take seriously the questions they raise. They know more than we do, not only about the fragility of the world, but also its potential for evil. We might imagine that our emotional lives are more integrated than theirs. Sometimes this may be true. However, we should consider the possibility that repression and denial are the way most of us get through even ordinary tough times, a luxury unavailable to those whose times were not merely tough, but humanly impossible.
Perhaps it is our socially sanctioned lies that bind us: as nations, communities, families. Often benign, perhaps even therapeutic, our lies must look like a fortress to those who cannot, or in some cases simply will not, let themselves inside its sheltering walls.
References
Daniel Defoe (1953). Robinson Crusoe and the Further Adventures. London: Collins.
Kai Erikson (1995). “Notes on Trauma and Community.” In C. Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 183-199.
Judith Herman (1997). Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.
The quotation from Muncie K. comes from the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University. The testimonies are not anonymous, but the Archive prefers this method of citation.
Trauma exposes one to the brute fact that the universe is. A Realist like Aristotle or Aquinas may say that existence is good, that it is among the four Transcendentals: Goodness, Truth, Beauty and Existence. In fact, perhaps only this kind of Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy comes the closest to a genuinely realist grounding of goodness.
However, it too rests on an ungroundable assumption, that Existence is good. One has to accept that existence is good to agree that life is the highest form of good humans can pursue. Trauma questions even this assumption. What is so good about a life that lasts only the few years we are given, a life of pain and misery and meaninglessness such as that of a patient with a “depressive psychosis”, who has never experienced the rush of endorphins or serotonin, but must depend on their synthetic form in an anti-depressant pill? The only thing that makes sense to such a person is Soren Kierkegaard’s “infinite resignation” in “fear and trembling”, and while Kierkegaard says this is the doorway to enduring eternity, who is to say? What proof does he have that there is anything beyond the ultimate sacrifice of one’s son to God? Is it not more honest to commit suicide, as Albert Camus proposes?
Camus proposes suicide as the one serious philosophical question in the opening of The Myth of Sisyphus. He raises the question because he believes that life is fundamentally absurd, in the sense that it has no given meaning. We cry out for the world to respond, and the world is silent, uncaring, because it cannot care. Therefore it is up to us to give life meaning. For me, for Camus (I think), and for D. W. Winnicott, life is meaningful when our life experiences resonate with our innermost sense of being. That is, when we feel aliveness.
The great danger of trauma is that it kills that sense of aliveness, and the world becomes absurd. I think several of the key symptoms of trauma (PTSD) according to the DSM-5, such as avoidance, numbing, constricted affect, alienation, diminished interest in pre-traumatic activities, are best explained in terms of the death of aliveness. How to restore the feeling of aliveness is a philosophical problem, but it does not have a philosophical solution. The solution is practical, everyday, trying to find even small experiences that bring pleasure, and working to be aware of them. Sometimes that’s easier said than done.
Yes, indeed! I think Camus gives a practical answer too. Instead of his hero Sisyphus giving up on his absurd task, he enjoys it so as to defy the gods that have consigned him to such a meaningless task as rolling the boulder up the hill only to have it roll back down. This enjoyment of life, I think, can be equated to Nietzsche’s yea-saying to life as in the following passage:
What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Though both Camus and Nietzsche did not consider themselves existentialists, I believe this embracing of the here and now as the only life we have, accepting it as it is and doing our best to make it as good as we can, is even more profoundly existentialist than Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy.
I like this:
An intriguing thought suggests itself. Successful therapy can be defined as enabling the traumatized person to once again use the socially sanctioned lies the rest of us rely on to get by in everyday life. Successful therapy isn’t about bringing the traumatized one into closer contact with reality. The traumatized person has already come too close to reality; that is his or her affliction. The task is to reestablish within the traumatized person the ability to use the beliefs, sayings, clichés, and so forth that the rest of us use to get by.
Yes, Kathryn, I like this idea too: that successful trauma treatment means enabling the traumatized person to once again use the lies the rest of us use to get through the day. And I actually think it’s true. In any case, successful trauma treatment isn’t about “getting in touch with reality,” or at least that’s not the main part of the story. Fred
Thank you so much for all your writing and scholarship.I never imagined you would have a blog and I could communicate with you.I put a link to your other blog on my blog and a friend who is a physicist has said he was very pleased to read such thoughtful writing about God.
Thank you so much for all your writing and scholarship.I never imagined you would have a blog and I could communicate with you.I put a link to your other blog on my blog and a friend who is a physicist has said he was very pleased to read such thoughtful writing about God.
I will disagree to compare holocaust survivor of adult and a child. A developing child who experiences trauma in the hands of a loved parent is so different than a imprisoned adult in a war.
That is beyond comparing apples to bread.
Now I do not know how therapy heals yet but I am in the process. And I think unless you heal from trauma, you will not know.
I think the best knowledge is with those who actually heal from trauma. You are right, they went so far to see reality and learned the lie as an adult, they have the knowledge. They may be even called prophets. Maybe!
So far for me, I went there and came back and I feel I am on the right track to see the lie too. It is fun learning the lie after what I went through as a child. and I hope I can teach others how to bridge over.
Therapy may heal. But childhood trauma, only love can heal.
Dear integrationinprogress, I think a developing child is very different from a Holocaust survivor. But, both may suffer from dissociation. Still, the comparison troubles me too a little bit.
About your comment at the end, “Therapy may heal. But childhood trauma, only love can heal.” About the deepest wounds perhaps only love can cure, but therapy can be an enormous help. I know this from experience, not just theory. Fred