Archives for : Delbo

The imitation of trauma by those who study it

abstract-art-516337_1920The transference is always active between the scholar and what he or she studies.  This is especially so when the subject is trauma.  So Dominick LaCapra argues, and I think he’s right. What does the transference mean in the case of trauma?  For LaCapra it means that “at some level you always have a tendency to repeat the problems you are studying.” (p. 142)         

More generally,

by transference I mean primarily . . . the tendency to repeat in one’s own discourse or practice tendencies active in, or projected into, the other or object [of study]. (P. xv)

In the case of trauma, those writing about it often write as though they have been traumatized.  The writing of Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman is frequently in “unmodulated, orphic, cryptic, indirect allusive form” that is designed to transmit the disorientation of trauma.  (LaCapra, p. 106)  This may be suitable for trauma fiction, as it is sometimes called (though I have questioned that in another post), but it is unnecessary and counterproductive when trying to explain trauma. 

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What I learned about trauma from Holocaust survivors: not to idealize integration

Between 2007 and 2014, I viewed over 250 Holocaust testimonies at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale University (Alford, 2009, 2013). Many date from the late 1970’s, and were given before Holocaust testimony became its own genre, with its own norms. Many were talking about their experiences for the first time. Many had not spoken about their lives in the ghettos and concentration camps even with their families. It wasn’t until at least a decade later that talking about the Holocaust became widely accepted, even within the Jewish community.

One of the founders of the Archive was a psychoanalyst and child survivor, Dori Laub. He established an unstructured interviewing format that is still followed. Survivors would frequently talk for a half-hour without interruption. Most interviews lasted about two hours. A number lasted four. There was no time limit. In all this they are quite different from the interviews undertaken for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation (sfi.usc.edu).

What I learned

Extreme trauma lasts forever. People don’t get over it. They learn to live with it, alongside of it. Those who testified were, for the most part, “successful survivors.” They married or remarried (a number lost their entire families to the Holocaust), built businesses, raised families, had children and grandchildren. They survived surviving by living alongside their trauma, beside their Auschwitz self as one called it.

There are no constants among survivor testimonies, no universal themes. The two that come closest, are “no one can understand who wasn’t there,” and “even today I live a double existence.” Kraft (p. 2) argues that doubling is the near universal theme.

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