We’re going to start with a naive question – what is the ‘stuff’ of the unconscious?

This short article is about the unconscious of ‘things’, and if we think about what these ‘things’ might be, psychoanalysis already gives us several possible answers. We could think of:

• Freud’s ‘thing-presentations’ (Sachvorstellungen)
• Das Ding – the second sense of ‘thing’ in Freud
• The internal “foreign body” described by Freud and Breuer in the Studies on Hysteria
• The ‘part-objects’ of Kleinian and object relations theory
• Objects a of Lacanian and post-Lacanian theory

‘Things’ vs metapsychological abstractions

All of the ‘things’ on this list, despite being drawn from different traditions, at least share the advantage of being considerably less abstract than many of the ways the unconscious is usually described in psychoanalytic theory (and in psychology more widely). This doesn’t mean they are more correct, but it allows us to avoid the ‘dangers’ of metapsychological abstraction. Here are three such dangers.

1. The danger of ‘mental state-ism’

The easiest way to describe the unconscious is as a mental state. This sounds relatively uncontroversial but also somewhat wishy-washy when we probe it philosophically. One of the most interesting philosophers of recent years to have tried to refine a definition of the unconscious as a mental state is David Finkelstein.

For Finkelstein, we can say something is unconscious if we lack to ability not just to recognise it but to self-ascribe it in an expression:

“Someone’s mental state is conscious if she has an ability to express it simply by self-ascribing it. If she lacks such an ability with respect to one of her mental states, it is unconscious” (Finkelstein, ‘On the Distinction Between Conscious and Unconscious States of Mind’, p.93).

You could object that pretty much anything could be self-ascribed, but Finkelstein’s argument in response would be that “the self-ascription will not be an expression of that mental state” (ibid, p.95). Something is unconscious when someone “lacks the ability to express some of his mental states in self-ascriptions of them” (ibid). This means that, for Finkelstein, psychoanalysis is not really about granting someone a knowledge of their unconscious but of granting “a certain sort of expressive ability” (ibid, p.97).

Finkelstein’s argument succeeds in two ways but falls short in one. On the one hand, his proposal is helpful in that he doesn’t rely on an epistemic criteria to pronounce something conscious or unconscious. It’s not about whether something is known or not known, it’s about “being unable to do something – of being unable to express one’s state of mind in a particular way” (ibid, p.97).

Finkelstein also gives us a way to distinguish what is ‘unconscious’ from Sartean ‘bad faith’. It’s not that you fail to acknowledge something about yourself (after all, symptoms and other unconscious effects do not simply vanish just because we recognise them). Instead, a thought is unconscious when we lack the ability to occupy the expressive position from which we could self-ascribe it.

But the problem with Finkelstein’s view is that it’s not quite the kind of unconscious we’re dealing with in psychoanalysis. When Freud defined the unconscious in 1915 he was careful to distinguish the descriptive unconscious from the unconscious as a system – one distinguished topographically from a conscious or pre-conscious system, whereby the difference was the result of a dynamic interplay of psychical forces which had – at their basis – ‘things’ (SE XIV, 159-215).

But what kind of ‘things’? Freud’s idea was that the ‘stuff’ of the unconscious are not ‘mental states’ at all – they are ‘thing-like’ presentations. If we leave aside for a moment the criteria of self-ascription, whether or not this is a reflection of particular mental state is not – at least for Freud – the criteria by which we should judge whether something is conscious or unconscious.

The psychoanalytic unconscious is not defined on the basis of things you can’t express or self-ascribe, nor ‘mental states’, it’s defined on the basis of things – thing-like presentations. It doesn’t matter whether they are words, impressions, visual or auditory stimuli – the important thing about them, as we will see, is their ‘thing-ness’. As Freud emphasised in 1915, we should think of the unconscious less like another person and more like another thing (SE XIV, 169-170).

2. The danger of personification

We have discussed the critique of psychoanalysis proposed by Georges Politzer before on this site, and it’s a good one. In short, Politzer was opposed to the abstraction of Freud’s metapsychology and thought that the presentation of an ‘internal world’ – populated by a cast of internal characters like the ‘agency’ of censorship, the ego, super-ego, and id – were over-personifications that only led us further and further away from a ‘realist’ view of the unconscious.

By ‘realist’ he meant an unconscious that is revealed in the uniquely individual, highly idiosyncratic modes of expression of each person: a truly phenomenological unconscious. We do not need any abstract personification to describe the unconscious in this way, Politzer thought. To take just one of his examples, in Freud’s dream of Irma’s injection from Interpretation of Dreams Irma’s sore throat is an idiosyncratic expression of Freud’s wish for a mistaken diagnosis, in just the same way that the French term pere means the English word father. They are just two ways of saying the same thing, two modes of expression, so we don’t need a metapsychological division of the psyche into conflicting personified agencies to show this (Politzer, Critique of the Foundations of Psychology, p.107).

3. The danger of reification

Politzer’s critique also helps us avoid a tendency to reification in talking about the unconscious. We find this when we slip into the assumption that there are such things as ‘unconscious desires’ within us that are pushing to be realised, or waiting to be discovered by the psychoanalyst. Things that we’re referring to when we say ‘I unconsciously desire x’.

But what we find in Freud – and what Lacan is especially good at pointing out – is that desire never shows itself as such. All the way through the 600 pages of Interpretation of Dreams there is not a single dream that allows us to put our finger on some kind of purified, unalloyed unconscious desire of the dreamer. Instead, unconscious desire is detectable in a series of complex, combinatorial and sometimes contradictory expressions, never in one form that can be stated with the first person pronoun (as if it ‘existed’ in a more reified sense). We should think of unconscious desire as more like a Trojan horse or hitchhiker that attempts to smuggle itself in, through the otherwise innocuous details of our manifest dreams, and latent thoughts connected with them.

This in itself sounds rather abstract, but it shouldn’t. Because in order to avoid the fallacy of reification we should think about ‘unconscious desire’ in the same way we think about the ‘redness’ of a sunset or the ‘blueness’ of the sky. These qualities are perceptible and describable, but even so descriptive qualities or abstract nouns are not things as such – they can’t be laid down on a table next to pens, paper and your phone.

A certain strand of continental philosophy falls victim to this fallacy of reification with talk of ‘essences’. An egg is an egg – we can put one on the table – but there is no ‘essence’ of an egg that persists when one is scrambled, another is fried, and another used to make a cake. In the same way, we can’t be content with simply talking about ‘unconscious desires’, ‘unconscious fantasies’, ‘unconscious drives’ as things – we have to explain what ‘stuff’ they’re made from and where they come from, and how they become unconscious in the first place.

The truth of reification

But there is a truth to reification:

“We have to find room in the unconscious – and for now let us say, in psychoanalytic psychology, in metapsychology – not only for internal characters, but for internal things. In psychoanalysis, there is a truth of reification… I am referring to the part-object” (Laplanche, The Unconscious and The Id, p.36, his emphasis).

The ‘Unconscious of Things’ should be understood in the same way as we hear people talking about an ‘Internet of Things’ – that is, an assortment of various objects, perhaps unrelated in themselves, but connected as part of a system or network.

‘Part objects’ are examples of such ‘things’. Thinking in these terms helps us avoid the three dangers of metapsychological abstraction. It roots us in an unconscious of introjected objects – ‘things’ – rather than an unconscious of indefinite mental states (which raises more questions than it answers because we have to define the unconscious in opposition to consciousness); internal agencies or characters (personification); or ‘unconscious desires’ (reification).

The “truth of reification” Laplanche proposes might come in different forms. ‘Things’ may be part-objects, objects a, all of the above or none of the above. Here is another way to think about them, from the opening pages of Freud and Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria:

“We must presume rather that the psychical trauma – or more precisely the memory of the trauma – acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work” (SE II, 6, emphasis mine).

What about ‘the unconscious structured like a language’?

So what about ‘the unconscious structured like a language’? This commonplace Lacanian mantra is oft-repeated but its meaning still disputed. Is Lacan saying that the unconscious is structured in the same way as a language (a network of differential elements, ‘things’ that are structurally separable) or with the same material as a language (specifically, linguistic signifiers – phonemes, acoustic images, and so on)? Is there even a meaningful difference? Decide for yourself on the basis of the following passages from Lacan’s work:

“The unconscious is structured like a language. I say like so as not to say – and I come back to this all the time – that the unconscious is structured by a language. The unconscious is structured like the assemblages in question in set theory, which are like letters” (Seminar XX, p.48, Lacan’s italics, emphasis in bold mine).

[Talking about how there’s no such thing as a ‘meta-language’, no ‘Other’ of the Other] “This is precisely why the unconscious, which tells the truth about truth, is structured like a language, and why I, in so teaching, tell the truth about Freud” (Ecrits, 868, emphasis in bold mine).

“Starting with Freud, the unconscious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and insists somewhere (on another stage or in a different scene, as he wrote)” (Ecrits, 799, emphasis in bold mine).

These descriptions may seem very far away from the internal “foreign body” or part-object that might constitute the unconscious of ‘things’. So how do we square the two?

What is a signifier a signifier of?

Firstly, we have to separate unconscious processes and mechanisms from unconscious things, the material or ‘stuff’ of the unconscious. The idea of an unconscious ‘structured like a language’ might tell us a lot about the workings of the unconscious, but less about how something gets unconscious in the first place. In the 1960s many psychoanalysts were exercised by the debate about whether the unconscious was the condition of language, or language the condition of the unconscious. We will see a bit later on why this question became ultimately irrelevant.

Secondly, we can only treat signifiers as ‘things’ if we think of them as ‘thing-like presentations’, or “de-signified signifiers”, to use Jean Laplanche’s term (Laplanche, ‘A Short Treatise on the Unconscious’, in Essays on Otherness, p.92). That is, if they refer only to themselves. Because – ultimately – we have to ask: ‘what is a signifier a signifier of?’

As we will see, some – like Laplanche – argue that the signifiers of the unconscious are not the signifiers of language. The most we can say about them, Laplanche thinks, is that they are “borrowed from visual sense-perception” (Laplanche, The Unconscious and the Id, p.99), a bricolage of different elements that can’t all be bucketed together as ‘signifiers’ in the linguistic sense.  For Laplanche, the signifier will always remain stuck to the thing, even if only a fragment of the thing. If there are ‘signifiers’ in the unconscious they are not ‘representations of things’ but thing-presentations. That is, they refer only to themselves.

‘De-signified signifiers’: signs?

But aren’t Laplanche’s ‘de-signified signifiers’ simply what Lacan refers to as ‘signs’? Here we need to define what we’re talking about, and in Seminar XX Lacan gives us some working definitions that we can use to separate ‘signs’, ‘signifiers’ and ‘signification’.  

“The signifier”, he says, “is characterised by the fact that it represents a subject to another signifier” (Seminar XX, p.49). That is, the subject does not represent him- or herself to another subject directly, but via the signifier, in the same way that a lawyer represents a client to another lawyer, or an ambassador represents their country to another ambassador. This is why Lacan talks about a primacy of the signifier. The mediation of the signifier is a structural necessity and it is only through the signifier that the subject is arrived at:

“The subject is nothing other than what slides in a chain of signifiers, whether he knows which signifier he is the effect of or not. That effect – the subject – is the intermediary effect between what characterises a signifier and another signifier, namely, the fact that each of them, each of them is an element” (Seminar XX, p.50).

Signification is the process by which the effect of meaning is produced. Signification produces a phenomenon of meaning, but that effect results from the movement of the signified under a chain of signifiers. Signification is the passage of the signifier into the signified, as Lacan neatly demonstrates in the ‘bathroom doors’ analogy from ‘The Instance of the Letter’ (Ecrits, 499).

This is why signification is always momentary and contingent – signification can change because the signifier is separable from what Lacan calls here in Seminar XX “its meaning effects” (Seminar XX p.50).  

“A sign”, however, “is not the sign of some thing, but of an effect that is what is presumed as such by a functioning of the signifier”. He goes on, “That effect is what Freud teaches us about, and it is the starting point of analytic discourse, namely, the subject” (Seminar XX, p.49-50). Laplanche’s ‘de-signified signifiers’ are therefore not equivalent to what Lacan calls signs because, as we see here, for Lacan the signifier retains its primacy, and the sign is an effect of it. Laplanche, on the other hand, is talking about a point at which the signifier-signified distinction becomes meaningless – ‘de-signified signifiers’ are things in the sense that they refer only to themselves.

We’ll come back to this point in depth later on.

For now, we can ask: what’s the basis for all this in Freud? We find three possible answers in his work to what the ‘things’ of the unconscious might be.

Are ‘things’ memory traces?

The first thing to know is that, for Freud, a memory-trace is never simply an engram or a ‘stamp’ of the event, object, or ‘thing’ itself. The beauty of Freud’s model is that he instead breaks a memory up into different pieces, and those pieces exist separately in a stratified system – the mnemic system – where they sit until they become ‘cathected’, invested, or charged:

“As you know, I am working on the assumption that our psychical mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory-traces being subjected from time to time to a re-arrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a re-transcription. Thus what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that it is laid down in various species of indications.” (Freud, Letter 52, SE I, 233, emphasis in italics Freud’s, emphasis in bold mine).

Freud’s unique theory of memory stratification solved a problem that was bugging him even in the 1890s: are memories inscribed in the conscious or unconscious system? Here’s the dilemma: memories can’t simply be registered in the conscious (or pre-conscious) system because we would be constantly overflowing with the excitation attached to them. But a the same time they surely can’t be registered in the unconscious system because we are capable of remembering most things that happen to us so easily. This is what Breuer recognised in the Studies on Hysteria when he wrote that the mirror of a reflecting telescope cannot at the same time be the photographic plate (SE II,189, footnote). It can’t do two different things for the same object.

So in Freud’s stratification model the breaking-up of a memory trace is done on several different levels (chronologically, associatively, and so forth) all of which Freud elaborates in Letter 52 to Fleiss. A memory trace comes to have prominence or importance as a result of being ‘cathected’ or invested, which in turn allows a split between the idea and the affect, accounting for why we remember certain memories which seem so ordinary but not those of supposedly great magnitude in our lives.

So rather than a single memory of a single object or event (for example, a traumatic event) there are instead multiple memory traces split up and stratified over different layers depending on simultaneity, causality, and so on. This means that one part of the memory can be conscious and another unconscious. Freud had solved his problem (ta-da!)

The stratification model also allowed Freud to sever any link between the event or object and the memory trace. When you remember something, Freud’s model implies that you are in fact simply following a path through those stratified levels, a particular combination of which he calls ‘facilitations’ (Bahnung). When in the 1950s Lacan comes to study repetition automatism and argue for the autonomy of the signifier with reference to cybernetics, exchange circuits (see Seminar II), and heads-or-tails algorithmic combinations (see the postface to the Seminar on the Purloined Letter in the Ecrits) he is using exactly this model of combinations and facilitations that Freud had employed for his theory of memory stratification. It also allowed Freud to go on to argue, in 1899, that memory is never simply an inscription or trace but a distortion or screen (see the ‘Screen Memories’ paper, SE II, 301).

Are ‘things’ ideas?

Freud uses the German term vorstellung to express what we generally refer to as ‘ideas’. Sometimes it is translated into English as ‘presentation’, and representation is often offered as its French equivalent. Clearly they are not all the same, so it is easier to say that an ‘idea’ or ‘presentation’ for Freud is a registration – and specifically, a registration of the object in the mnemic system we described just now.

But ‘idea’ only makes sense in Freud’s lexicon when it is contrasted to ‘affect’ because – as we saw – the two are distinct and separable. The different destinies each pursues can be seen clearly in the psychoneuroses. In obsession, affect is displaced from the idea – so that a particular ritual or compulsion seems to revolve around some seemingly innocuous and trivial detail. In hysteria, it is converted – most classically, the “strangulated affect” is converted on to the body, where the repressed idea can then find expression (SE II, 17).

Thing-presentations or Word-presentations?

This distinction only makes sense if you think about it in terms of Freud’s metapsychological model of 1915. That is, as solution to the problem he is trying to solve at that time – whether there are separate conscious and unconscious presentations of an idea (the topographical hypothesis); or whether there is only a single presentation, which is either conscious or unconscious, depending on from which system the level of libidinal investment it receives originates (the functional hypothesis).

For Freud, a ‘thing’-presentation is much closer to the ‘thing’ (as in ‘object’) than the word-presentation. ‘Thing’-presentations are what the unconscious system deals in – you only get thing-presentations in the unconscious. And Freud’s ongoing therapeutic aspiration is to trace an unconscious idea back to this thing-presentation. We could say: to the point where it is a signified rather than a signifier of anything – to where the signifier and signified coincide to the extent that the distinction becomes meaningless. As the philosopher Raymond Tallis joked in his book attacking structural linguistics, Not Saussure, the distinction between signifier and signified exists only in the minds of linguists. What matters to Freud is exactly this point of coincidence – the pathogenic nucleus – and the whole point of following associative pathways through stratified layers as we saw earlier is to get to it.

The difference between the idea (or presentation) and the memory-trace is that the idea has to be cathected to be revived. It is not simply an inert registration. And in order for the thing-presentation to gain access to consciousness it has to be connected to a word-presentation. As Freud puts it:

“The conscious presentation comprises the presentation of the thing plus the presentation of the word belonging to it, while the unconscious presentation is the presentation of the thing alone” (SE XIV, 201).

Witnessing the slippage from ‘signifier’ to ‘thing’

Given all of this, can we really say that the unconscious has a linguistic character – whether structured like a language, or composed of signifiers? Is Lacan’s famous formulation, and the pronouncements he makes about it we quoted earlier, justified? And how can we square it with the notion of an ‘unconscious of things’?

There are three ways this can be done, but in each we can detect a certain slippage from the primacy of the ‘signifier’ to the privileging of the ‘thing’.

1. The Lacan way

If Lacan talks about the primacy of the signifier and says that the unconscious is structured like a language, how can we square this with Freud’s focus on thing-presentations rather than word-presentations being the ‘stuff’ of the unconscious?

His simplest argument is that it is the nature of the unconscious to use signifiers as things – that is, in their pure materiality (see for instance Seminar VII, p.44-45 and p.62-63). When Lacan nonetheless makes heavy use of Freud’s das Ding (‘the Thing’) in Seminar VII, his idea is that das Ding is the ‘beyond’ of the signified, outside of language, much more like a Kantian thing-in-itself (Kant in fact uses the same German term). Freud’s das Ding, in Lacan’s hands, can thus be the object-as-such, the horrific, incestuous object of desire against which the pleasure principle protects us and towards which the beyond of the pleasure principle – jouissance – tends. By contrast die Sache – the term Freud uses for ‘things’ in 1915 when discussing ‘thing-presentations’ (Sachvorstellungen) in the unconscious – are for Lacan linguistic in nature insofar as they are the signifiers as things in their pure materiality.

Lacan’s argument is only partially convincing. There is still nothing to justify why these Sachvorstellungen – thing-presentations – should be linguistic. The mode of their processing in the overall psychical economy might sometimes be, but not their status as such. Freud is clear that the ‘stuff’ of the unconscious is Sachvorstellungen, but Laplanche’s contention is that the most we can say about them is that they are “borrowed for visual sense-perception”, perhaps ‘fragments’ of language, cobbled together in a kind of bricolage or configuration (The Unconscious and the Id, p.99-100). This doesn’t allow us to simply bucket them all together as ‘signifiers’ in the linguistic sense, if such elements do not always behave the way signifiers do in linguistic structures.

We still have to ask the same question we raised earlier: if they are signifiers, what they are signifiers of?

Perhaps Lacan himself wondered about this question, because as his work develops through the 1960s and 1970s we can trace an increasing prominence given to the object as such over-and-above the signifier.

• This starts around Seminar VII in 1959-1960, as we saw, with a re-examination of Freud’s ‘Thing’ (das Ding).
• From das Ding grows the concept of object a in the 1960s, an element which – even without a specular form – allows the subject to separate from the signifying order. In one of its first iterations in Seminar X from 1962-1963, the object a is differentiated from das Ding because of its use in mediating the experience of anxiety.
• Object a is then used to refine a new theory of fantasy in the later 1960s (Seminar XIV from 1966-1967 in particular) during which time Lacan argues that in fantasy we create a relation to an object – usually borrowed from the pre-genital register – as a way of defending against the desire of the Other. The fantasy is the response to that desire, built up around the object.
• By the late 1970s, it is the object a – not the signifier – which will sit at the centre of the Borromean knot, at the inmost juncture of the subject’s sense of life. 

2. The Leclaire way

Lacan’s one-time student and analysand Serge Leclaire had an alternative way to square this problem through the concept of the Letter, which he defined in a 1968 article as:

“The materiality of the trait in its abstraction from the body, abstraction being understood both in the ordinary sense and as an operation of detachment from the corporeal surface.” (‘The Unconscious, or the Order of the Letter’, in Leclaire’s Psychoanalyzing, p.88, his emphasis).

He uses this concept to answer the question of how it is that something gets unconscious in the first place. A single element in an extremely pleasurable or painful experience remains to mark that experience, and it is this mark that he calls the Letter. Although the examples Leclaire gives may seem a little wacky, he’s showing that it’s not just the inscription or mark of the signifier that is important – after all, why one signifier rather than another? – but the link to the registration of an experience of intense pleasure or pain in or on the body. This is how the Letter is different from the signifier, but it is also distinct from the object too:

“It is the trait that fixes in a foreign register what seems incapable of being inscribed, namely, jouissance as annulment, which is accomplished in an evanescent fashion by the moment of pleasure” (ibid, p.96).

3. The Miller way

In his 2006 article ‘The Real Unconscious’ (recently published in Lacanian Ink, 50) Miller distinguishes two kinds of unconscious: the ‘transferential’ unconscious and the ‘real’ unconscious.

The idea of a ‘real’ unconscious may seem an oxymoron if we make the loose alignment between the linguistic nature of the unconscious and the symbolic register. But for Miller the ‘real unconscious’ simply means the unconscious that is without meaning (ibid, p.34). Basing himself in Lacan’s later work, Miller starts from the idea that the signifier, as such, signifies nothing – that S1 isn’t a representing signifier (ibid, p.27). This is exactly what we find in the canonical example of Joyce, he argues. So when we’re looking for the unconscious – for what is truly unconscious about the unconscious – we should look for both a lack of meaning and a lack of the transferential bond (ibid, p.29). We can catch a glimpse of this if we isolate – in a slip of the tongue, for instance – the moment before “the machine of attention” starts to operate (ibid, p.30).

Has Laplanche won out?

This new concept of the ‘real’ unconscious might seem surprising to Laplancheans – if the ‘real unconscious’ is without meaning, isn’t Miller just saying the same thing as Laplanche when the latter referred to ‘de-signified signifiers’? Does the term ‘real’ unconscious add anything to the description of the nature of the unconscious Freud was trying to elaborate with the distinction between word- and thing-presentations?

As Laplanche’s ‘de-signified’ signifiers are thing-like presentations, he can claim “the opposition presentation of the thing/presentation of the word loses its pertinence for the psychoanalytic unconscious” because “the presentation of the word (verbal representation) becomes in the unconscious, like the (visual) representation of the thing, a thing-like presentation” (Laplanche, ‘A Short Treatise on the Unconscious’, in Essays on Otherness, p.92).

Indeed, with the notion of the ‘real unconscious’, Laplancheans might wonder if Miller is subject to the very same criticism Lacan made of Laplanche in 1969 – that a ‘de-signified signifier’ implies a signifier could signify itself? (see Lacan’s preface to Anika Lemaire’s Jacques Lacan, p.xiii). Laplanche’s point in reply to Lacan is very simple:

“I think that at a certain point signifiers have no other signifieds than themselves. That is a point I make also in a personal way, by saying that the primacy of the signifier is a secondary one. When the signifier becomes the signified it acquires some kind of primacy, but that is a secondary primacy.” (Laplanche, responses to questions at the ICA Seminar, 5th May, 1990, published in Seduction, Translation, Drive, p.79)

Does the recent introduction of the ‘real’ unconscious into Lacanian jargon therefore signal that Laplanche has won this argument? Is the ‘real’ unconscious a concession to this point, albeit disguised as a new Lacanian concept?

Either way, it is clear from these three attempts to square the issue – Lacan’s, Leclaire’s, and Miller’s – that there is a gradual moving away from an unconscious of ‘signifiers’ (a linguistic conception of the unconscious, in which the signifier is primary), and towards an unconscious of ‘things’ (whether they be objects a, hybrid concepts like the Letter, or the notion of a ‘real’ unconscious without a link to meaning).

Crucially however, what all these alternative models have in common is that there is always some link to the body, the corporeal dimension. This is why we have to distinguish the processes of the unconscious from the stuff of the unconscious – the operation from the material on which it works. As people like Laplanche have pointed out, ‘part-objects’, residues of ‘visual sense-perceptions’, and ‘internal foreign bodies’ can’t all be reduced to signifiers in the linguistic sense. And likewise, the unconscious can’t be reduced to the ‘primacy of the signifier’ because we always have to ask: what would they be signifiers of? It is things as such, things in their thing-ness, not things-as-signifiers, that are fundamental to the nature of the unconscious.

‘De-signified’ signifiers are the ‘stuff’ of the unconscious

So, to answer our question, this is what the ‘stuff’ of the unconscious is: the unconscious of ‘things’ is an unconscious of de-signified signifiers – that is, signifiers that refer only to themselves.

Not, we should note, drive. This is the very instructive lesson that comes from Laplanche – that there is no independent force of the drive that somehow sits behind the representative:

“For me the drive is a force of the representatives themselves and not “behind” them, which would go back to some abstract force which doesn’t exist for me.” (Laplanche, ibid, p.73).

Laplanche is countering another version of the reification fallacy we saw earlier – to believe that the drive exists as an independent force. But the ‘stuff’ of the unconscious – these ‘de-signified’ signifiers which refer only to themselves – are nonetheless not inert. They are sources of stimulation themselves, Laplanche believes (ibid).

But how do ‘things’ get unconscious in the first place? The easy answer is ‘primal repression’. But this only pushes the question one step back – how does something become primarily repressed?

Here Laplanche’s major contribution to psychoanalytic research – the ‘General Theory of Seduction’ – becomes very interesting. Summarising very broadly, it is an implantation model which involves the transmission of an ‘enigmatic message’ from the parent to the child. These enigmatic messages are examples of ‘de-signified’ signifiers. They are always linked to the body, always around an ‘exchange zone’ – that is, some kind opening on the body, or privileged point of interface in the parent-child relationship which can be described as ‘sexual-pre-sexual’ (SE II, 133) – and are always directed to the child by the parental other.

Primal repression is a failure of translation

Primal repression is the result of a failure of translation of these enigmatic messages. This is where Laplanche’s theory harks directly back to Freud’s famous Letter 52 that we looked at earlier in terms of the retranscription and re-arrangement of memory traces. It is worth quoting the relevant passage in full:

“I should like to emphasise the fact that the successive registrations [of memory traces] represent the psychical achievement of successive epochs of life. At the frontier between two such epochs a translation of the psychical material must take place. I explain the peculiarities of the psychoneuroses by supposing that this translation has not taken place in the case of some of the material, which has certain consequences…. A failure of translation – this is what is known clinically as ‘repression’. The motive for it is always a release of unpleasure which would be generated by a translation; it is as though this unpleasure provokes a disturbance of thought which does not permit the work of translation” (Freud, Letter 52, SE I, 235, emphasis in bold mine).

Even with its basis in – and condition on – the body, what we see as the drive in psychoanalysis is a product of this translation process. The important differentiator between Freud’s abandoned theory of seduction from the late 1890s and Laplanche’s ‘General Theory of Seduction’ is that the latter doesn’t rely on any meaning or intentionality on the part of the adult towards the child. Indeed, Laplanche’s theory may also give us a model for unconscious intergenerational transmission – paving a way for showing how something could be transmitted without intentionality, across generations, and end up constituting the unconscious of another person.

“I am an encoded of the anti-past”

To bring this to life, here is a clinical example of how this failure of translation may work.

One of the fundamental lessons of psychoanalysis is that if something cannot be given a meaning (via signification) or representation (via the signifier) it appears in another register. In Lacanian terms, if something cannot be adequately represented through the symbolic or imaginary – that is, through words or images – it appears in a much more discreet way, perhaps on the body (localised at the ‘exchange zones’ we saw earlier) or through the kinds of ‘practices of inscription’ we find in minimalist or abstract art. The way these impossibilities are used may themselves differ – either as ‘idioms of distress’ when they appear in the clinic, or therapeutic ‘knottings’ that help organise someone’s life and restitute against suffering.

Drs Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere are psychoanalysts practicing in Paris and professors at L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Their research interest centres around madness and trauma. Interviewed a few years ago by Cathy Caruth, Gaudilliere told the story of how he first introduced himself to one of his psychotic patients – a man confined to an asylum for more than 10 years, feverish, and almost starving:

“‘I am Jean-Max Gaudilliere’, I said, ‘I am a psychoanalyst of the ward’. And he looked at me with his eyes completely wide open from fever, and he said to me, ‘I am an encoded of the anti-past’” (interview with Davoine & Gaudilliere, quoted in Caruth, Listening to Trauma, p.82).

If we break down this enigmatic but beautifully poetic expression, we can see how it illustrates what an unconscious of ‘things’ might look like:

“I am” – As Gaudilliere notes, “He was the encoded. He said: ‘I am an encoded of the anti-past’” (ibid). Here we see the ‘internal foreign body’ that Freud and Breuer described at the very start of the Studies on Hysteria (SE II, 6). Being itself becomes the ‘thing’.

“Encoded” – Here we see the ‘de-signified signifier’, devoid of meaning or communicative intentionality, ‘thing-like’ as Laplanche describes it. This is the sense of ‘thing’ in Freud’s 1915 distinction, and we can align it to the pathogenic nucleus he searches for.

“Anti-past” –  Here we see the failure of translation Freud noted in his early theory of memory registration and repression. The way Gaudilliere’s patient describes himself, at the core of his psychosis, is mark of an alternative past that has been (primarily) repressed due to a failure of ‘translation’, but not a failure of transmission. The ‘anti-past’ is still expressed, but in this form rather than in the form of memory as we usually understand it.

To conclude, the lesson here is that if you want to understand the nature of the unconscious, you have to be able to say how something gets unconscious in the first place. For that, you need a theory of transmission or implantation to explain primary repression and provide a link to the other (whether the parental other, other generations, or others more broadly).

It is this that Laplanche’s ‘General Theory of Seduction’ provides. 

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Trauma often appears to be a very broadly-spread notion in psychotherapy. Its urgency in clinical settings seems to outpace the theoretical rigour we can give it, leading the label ‘trauma’ to have been been ascribed to all kinds of experience, from birth, to sex, war, and even to love.

Moreover, it sometimes seems that the only access we can get to an account of personal trauma is through its link with a collective trauma. The experiences of slavery, colonisation, and persecution all leave behind both victims and survivors, with the implication that the effects of these collective traumata are in some way ‘transmitted’ to later generations. Even if descendents lack a personal experience of the traumatic event themselves, its collective memory binds the group – constituting it as a group – whose distinctive identity is rooted in that shared historical trauma. This in turn bleeds into personal narratives of trauma among the group’s individuals, perhaps echoed in later symptomatology to which they might be connected but bear no obvious resemblance.

Indeed, almost all the theories of intergenerational transmission are based on models of trauma; and almost all the examples of intergenerational transmission involve an experience of trauma. Is trauma therefore a precondition for transmission? Conversely, does something need to be transmitted in order for a trauma to be felt as ‘traumatic’?

This interplay between collective and individual experiences of trauma generates some confusing repercussions. ‘Trauma’ as a label can come at the expense of a proper investigation into the complexities of an individual’s life. It becomes far too easy to simply declare ‘it’s trauma: case closed’ and avoid the inconvenience of having to probe into the specificity of an individual case. Psychoanalysis, by contrast, is a one-by-one practice. Its approach is to scrutinise, challenge, and perhaps de-stabalise such labels. In practice, this takes a long time and is painful psychotherapeutic work. When the alternative on offer is to comfort, empathise, and seek immediate relief from suffering, psychoanalysis can seem deeply unattractive as a treatment option.

But we have to stop and think about what ‘trauma’ actually is. To label an experience as ‘traumatic’ only begs the question. Worse, it can function as a way not to have to think about the particularities of each case. What made an experience traumatic for this individual but not that one? Why does the trauma manifest in this precise form rather than another, and at this time in a person’s life, perhaps years after a precipitating event? The paradox is that the label of ‘trauma’ can function to mask a subjective narrative – the very thing that many psychotherapies aim to bring to realisation.

To start with therefore, we can point to two problems that any theory of trauma has to have good answers for.

Problem 1: The Event

Often we find ourselves trying to locate a single event, and one of a specific magnitude, at the aetiology of a trauma. And yet we sense that this choice is always somewhat arbitrary if we cannot account for how that event was inscribed, metabolised, or worked-through by the individual. Why this event? Why is the same event not traumatic for everyone? Why does an event only take on a traumatic colouring years after it happened – and what might have triggered or re-activated it? The danger is that our in search for ‘The Event’ we end up with what Ruth Leys calls a ‘literalist’ reading of trauma: the event is presumed to have had a ‘direct’ impact that is in no way subjectively mediated. Even though we know it always is.

Likewise, an appeal to a single catastrophic event usually relies in turn on an appeal to external reality. For psychoanalysts however there is no such thing as ‘shared’ reality. So we have to ask what kind of reality is being proposed here? Furthermore, if an external event is presumed to have a certain magnitude we might be led to wonder: why can’t the absence of an event be traumatic?

Problem 2: Affective Weight

What gives a particular experience its measure of affective ‘weight’? That is, the level of psychical investment or emotional charge that is felt – in the end – as suffering? The ‘experience’ in this instance need not be an event. Even if we acknowledge the importance of a psychical reality over a material one, why should this particular experience carry or engender an affective investment over that one for a particular subject? When all is said and done the affect – even if displaced – has an origin, and is ‘felt’ by the subject in a certain way. Therefore we have to account for it.

The easy recourse would be to link inextricably the event to the affect it produced. The death of a loved one or a terrorist atrocity are deemed to carry sufficient explanatory force to draw a straight link between the event and the experience of the event. But this only moves the question back one step – we could easily ask what it was in particular about a certain event that granted it affective weight, and in any case it is not always so easy to identify an event which would qualify. Indeed, as modern criteria for PTSD deem exposure to a trauma-producing situation to be sufficient in producing the trauma itself, it might make us question whether we can be sufferers or victims of a trauma without knowing it. The alternative recourse, especially where the link between the event and its affective impact is less clear, is to neuroscience. Imbalances of brain chemistry or faulty neuronal wiring are ventured as explanations, exploiting the opacity generated when we are unable to justifiably locate the cause of trauma in the event. Cum hoc, ergo propter hoc.

The History of Trauma Theory

Now that we know the problem, let’s look back through history to see what different theories of trauma have been proposed. This won’t be a purely psychoanalytic history – and especially not a solely Lacanian one – because the field is much wider. Neither will it be an exhaustive history of that wider field. But it will allow us to pause at certain points here and there to comment on the parts that are of interest to psychoanalysis, and how it has – or should – engage with them.

1860s-1890s

At its inception, theories of psychical trauma were modelled on what was known about physical trauma. When John Erichsen proposed the term ‘railway spine’ in 1860 he was attempting to account for patients who had been involved in accidents on the newly-invented (and almost comically dangerous) railroads. Many complained of nervous injury, but presented no obvious physical signs. Erichsen hypothecated that the collision caused a physiological shock to the spine, resulting in tiny lesions affecting the nervous system. This proposal of an organic lesion at the origin of a psychical trauma was taken up by Hermann Oppenheim in 1889 under the label ‘traumatic neurosis’. Around the same time, on the opposite side of the Atlantic Jacob Mendes Da Costa had noticed that American Civil War soldiers showed signs of a post-combat anxiety disorder appearing in the form of breathing difficulties and palpitations, which he labelled ‘soldier’s heart’.

1893-1897

By the 1890s many illustrious names at the cutting edge of neuroscience were interested in this problem. Charcot, Janet, Binet, Morton Prince, Freud, and Breuer all made contributions to the problem of what was now seen as a psychical wound, beginning its conceptual divergence from the physical disturbances to which it had been held in parallel.

Freud and Breuer based their view of trauma on their research into hysteria. The common currency between the two was the idea of a psychical economy, and in trauma this was marked by “the incapacity of the psychical apparatus to eliminate excitation in accordance with the principle of constancy” (The Language of Psychoanalysis, Laplanche & Pontalis, p.467). The ‘cathartic method’, via hypnosis, was proposed as therapy on the assumption that the traumatic experience could be worked-out, worked-through, and physically abreacted in line with the economic model of the mind the pair had suggested.

Theories of trauma moved very quickly around this time. It was an exciting field, led by Freud and Breuer’s work on hysteria. By the late 1890s there were three possible models of trauma.

• 1. Trauma is the result of a single external event. For example, an experience of sexual abuse. Therapeutically we have to find this event because with it we will find the point of aetiology and work it through. For Freud at this time, there was always a sexual aetiology to trauma; for Janet, not so much.

• 2. Trauma is not the result of a single external event. Or at least, the traumatic event is not the sole aetiological agent. There could be a multitude of events at the same time that contribute to the effect of trauma, but there has to be a predisposition of some kind. Even if the magnitude of a certain event (for example, the death of a loved one) meant that it could never be fully psychically abreacted, the different ways it can be processed psychically pointed to some other determinative factor. Hysteria presented three options for how this could happen:

• a) Hypnoid hysteria – Breuer’s idea, presented in the Preliminary Communication to the Studies on Hysteria, was that what makes a trauma traumatic depends on there being a split in consciousness, a particular altered state of consciousness at the time of the event. He called this a ‘hypnoid state’ (SE II, 12).

• b) Retention hysteria – a short-lived idea of Freud’s from 1894 that trauma embeds itself when there is no opportunity in the moment to react in the proper way – perhaps due to social niceties or other circumstances at the time not permitting it – and so the affect it is ‘dammed up’. The job of therapy is thus to help abreact it (SE III, 94).

• c) Defence hysteria – by the time the Studies on Hysteria was published in full in May 1895, the dominant idea shared by both Freud and Breuer is that a traumatic experience is one which cannot be assimilated in the same way that an unpleasant idea is usually dealt with (most usually, through repression). A defensive mechanism is triggered, often taking the form of a conversion of the trauma onto the body. This becomes hysteria proper and the two earlier ideas are dropped.  

• 3. The traumatic event is actually two events, or more precisely two moments (as we will see in Part II). This means that you can never identify a single traumatic event – it needs a later one to set it off. Initially (pre-Sept 1897) Freud had looked for a scene of ‘seduction’ (child sexual abuse) as the single event. Then (post-Sept 1897) he accepts that the search for this scene would be fruitless, and pens his famous “I no longer believe in my neurotica” letter to Fleiss (Letter 69, SE I, 259-60). But Freud never fully gave up his quest for the original scene. As we will, throughout his career he was always trying to look back, further and further, to find the original scene or event in the past which could account for the trauma he saw in the present.

1914-1918

When ‘shell shock’ emerged in World War I it was clear psychoanalysis had to have a view on this phenomenon. It was also a time of intense development in Freud’s own views. The economic model of the mind was revised, amended, but never abandoned. In 1916, Freud used it to explain trauma in these terms:

“Indeed, the term ‘traumatic’ has no other sense than an economic one. We apply it to an experience which within a short period of time presents the mind with an increase of stimulus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way, and this must result in permanent disturbances of the manner in which the energy operates” (SE XVI, 275).

This idea seems very neat and all-encompassing. So much so, does it mean we can align trauma with neurosis, and claim that everyone who is neurotic must have experienced some kind of trauma? Freud isn’t so sure. Firstly, he thinks, it’s too broad – we would have to believe that everything and anything could be classed as traumatic, even the most mundane of early-life experiences. Secondly, where is the evidence that there was anything traumatic about most neurotic’s early-life experiences? Most of his patients were reporting fairly unremarkable childhoods growing up in middle-class homes, it was only later they sought his help (SE XVI, 275-6). If trauma was an accidental contingent experience, it had to be coupled with a certain disposition, Freud thought. It was a fixation of the libido (either from an infantile experience, or from some kind of hereditary of even prehistoric experience) that would lead to a sexual constitution capable of producing neurosis.

Just before the end of the First World War, all the leading voices in psychoanalysis were brought together at the Fifth Psycho-Analytical Congress in Budapest, in September 1918. As the ‘war neuroses’ were the hot topic of the day, they were joined by representatives from the Central Powers – the military coalition of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire – who sat and listened as papers were delivered and proposals put forth that psychoanalysts should be able to set up new clinics to study shell-shock and test out psychoanalytic treatments for it (SE XVII, 207). Of course, that idea came crashing down when Germany and her allies lost the war just a couple of months later, but it remains one of the only points in history where governments have given a shit about psychoanalysis. This was, of course, not motivated by the claims of psychoanalysis to scientific interest. Military officials were more interested in the possibility that psychoanalysis could challenge the notion that it was the war per se that had traumatised their soldiers.

Were governments and their militaries wholly bought in to the idea that shell shock was the result of a disturbance in libidinal economy? Of course not. And here Freud notes that the opponents of psychoanalysis think they have him on the run. Where is the evidence of a psycho-sexual aetiology in cases of shell shock, they would demand? Freud’s reply initially appears a little evasive:

“If the investigation of the war neuroses (and a very superficial one at that) has not shown that the sexual theory of the neuroses is correct, that is something very different from its showing that that theory is incorrect” (SE XVII, 208, Freud’s emphasis).

Instead, Freud thinks that the war has caused another conflict in the soldier, between a warlike ego and a peaceful one. But then he comes to a remarkable conclusion: it’s not the war itself that has brought this about, it’s conscription:

“Thus the precondition of the war neuroses, the soil that nourishes them, would seem to be a national [conscript] army; there would be no possibility of their arising in an army of professional soldiers or mercenaries” (SE XVII, 209, my emphasis).

Conscription is the active ingredient in what makes a war trauma traumatic. In other respects, Freud thought, they do not differ from the traumatic neuroses we see during peacetime and which are not due to the conflict in the ego that conscription brings about. From a Lacanian perspective Freud’s conclusion is very interesting because it introduces the idea that an invocation or desire from the other is the precondition for trauma – exactly the kind of hypothesis Lacan would later develop in his theory of anxiety as the sensation of the desire of the other.

But Freud has a better answer to the challenge that the war neuroses disprove the sexual theory of trauma: the theory of narcissism. With this elegant solution, he was able to circumvent the simplistic ego-libido duality and argue for “an amount of sexual energy attached to the ego itself and finding satisfaction in the ego just as satisfaction is usually found only in objects” (SE XVII, 209-210). This gives us another very neat cut between the transference neuroses of peacetime (in which the ego defends itself from the claims of the libido) and the war neuroses (in which the ego defends itself from the threat of external violence).

Freud’s followers had quite a time with the theory of narcissism.

In 1916, Victor Tausk was one of the first to deploy it in arguing – against the military establishment of the time – that these men were not malingerers or deserters, but had fallen ill due to unconscious conflicts, resulting in a ‘flight into illness’ in order to avoid combat.

Abraham then proposed the theory that it was an over-developed narcissism which had led to trauma in some men rather than others. They were already unfit to fight by the time they reached the battlefield. In a now rather dated-sounding passage he writes:

“It is found with great regularity that war neurotics were even before the trauma – to call it for the time being by the common name – emotionally unstable, especially with regard to their sexuality…. Many war neurotics had, already before the war, shown poor or limited potency. Their relationship to the female sex was disturbed, by partial fixation of the libido in the developmental phase of narcissism to a greater or lesser extent. Their social and sexual functioning was dependent on certain concessions to their narcissism” (Abraham, ‘Psycho-analysis and the War Neuroses’, 1923, in Clinical Papers and Essays on Psycho-analysis, p.61).

Ferenczi however asked the obvious question – why shouldn’t an over-developed narcissism actually make you a better soldier? Wouldn’t it give you a greater lust for glory, honour, and blood? What was in fact happening, Ferenczi thought, was that when they reached the battlefield these men realised the horror that confronted them and were dealt an immediate blow to their honour. The problem therefore was an over-estimation rather than an over-development of their narcissism.

But importantly, neither Tausk, Abraham, Ferenczi, nor Freud were blaming these men or characterising them as malingerers. They were the victims of unconscious psychological conflict rather than a pathology of the will. We can notice as well that in all their theories it is not the event itself that is the determining factor – otherwise why wouldn’t all soldiers suffer the same fate? But neither are they taken as ‘witnesses’ to horrific events beyond their control. As Fassin and Rechtman point out in their excellent, careful study Empire of Trauma, “Their illness was not the product of historical circumstance but of their own tendencies” (p.63). Sufferers, yes; witnesses, no.

To some extent then, those government representatives and military psychiatrists who attended the 1918 Congress got what they came for. Yes, Freud would put the finger of blame on conscription as the precondition for the traumas of war. But on the other hand, it was no longer the event (the war) alone which was responsible. Moreover, it was still possible to for the military to see psychoanalysis as a method of extracting a ‘confession’ of weakness – if psychoanalysis had succeeded in humanising the treatment of shell-shocked patients by removing the need for electrotherapy, so much the better. Already, an important shift was underway. As Fassin and Rechtman note,

“Self-confession came to represent the central motif of the trauma narrative. The event features in this narrative only as the pretext for intimate revelation, for the trauma is already present, within the individual history of each patient, and it is this preexisting – structural – trauma that will ultimately explain the impact of the event” (Empire of Trauma, p.64).

1920-1945

With Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920 Freud had reasserted the fundamental economic model of trauma, but now with the addition of ‘repetition compulsion’ – the attempt by the psyche to bind a quota of excitation by mastering the original experience through repetition (SE XVIII).

A further and more radical twist came in 1926 with the publication of Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. Anxiety as a signal (of what to be afraid of) protects us against automatic anxiety (in which we are completely helpless). The consequence however is that the psyche comes under attack not just from the outside but from the inside (SE XX).

It is exactly this problematisation of inside versus outside, internal worlds versus external worlds, that topological models like the torus and Mobius strip beloved by Lacanians show so well. Put your finger on top of the Mobius strip and try to trace it along, from the topside to the underside, and you will soon realise that this is impossible. The torus as a category always precludes this inside-outside distinction. We will look at this more in Part II.

So by the 1930s, psychoanalytic views were the primary reference point for psychiatrists and any other medical professional working in the field of trauma. There was a recognition that trauma had to be detached from the event, and the question of what counted as ‘traumatic’ subsumed under a general theory of psychopathology. In short, it was widely-accepted that there was a lot more going on.

1945-1980

That all changed in 1945. With the extent of the Holocaust becoming clear it soon became apparent that this was the defining trauma of the age. Whilst no new classification of ‘trauma’ followed as a direct result, the debate about its nature continued but with a very different experience of tragedy to confront. Unlike the shell-shocked soldiers emerging from the battlefields of the First World War these victims were ordinary civilians with stories to tell. Stories, indeed, of what was meant to be kept secret.

Some of these stories were not told until many years later. It was as if the collective trauma exhibited the same latency that characterised personal trauma. As we have seen previously on this site, by 1979 the effort to collect and record these narratives – such as through the Holocaust Survivors Film Project at Yale – had led to a greater dialogue with psychoanalysis that continues to this day through the work of trauma theorists like Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth.

Yet over the intervening period, the large number of Holocaust survivors spread across both sides of the Atlantic allowed trauma as a category to get greater public attention, in turn bringin psychoanalytic ideas on trauma to a broader audience. Many of the survivors were themselves first-generation psychoanalysts – unsurprising given the large number of Jewish analysts and the perception fostered by the Nazis that psychoanalysis was a Jewish pseudo-science. One such refugee from the diaspora was Bruno Bettelheim.

Bettelheim had been in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps from 1938-1939 before escaping to the US, where he wrote about his experiences in the collection Surviving, first published in 1952. It’s a telling title, as Fassin and Rechtman note, because it marks the start of a gradual move from ‘traumatic neuroses’ (or ‘war neuroses’) to ‘survivor syndrome’. They pick up on two important changes that Bettelheim’s collection heralded:

1. Trauma is reframed as the experience of the ‘unspeakable’ and ‘communalised’ through an imperative. Survivors become guardians of this communal trauma, and it becomes their responsibility to testify on behalf of those who did not survive.
2. The event comes back to the fore. For Bettelheim, what made a trauma traumatic depended on whether or not the event was sufficient to cause a breakdown in the most vital aspects of the psyche. Bettelheim had wondered what exactly had helped some to survive and others not. Were they stronger, physically or mentally? Or were they perhaps neurotic or psychotic already? The latter possibility raised the question as to whether it was this very psychical structure that had given them what he called the “will to survive”, where in normal circumstances it would have been taken as a mental deficiency. On returning from the camps the survivors seemed to occupy the space of both victims and heroes, a purgatorial status which only contributed to the ‘survivor’s guilt’ they reported.

Fassin and Rechtman comment that:

“The hypothesis of survivor guilt offered practical confirmation of the recast image of victims as witnesses…. With the survivors of the camps, testimony to trauma – more even than the testimony of the trauma victim – was gradually recognised as offering ultimate truth about the human condition” (Empire of Trauma, p.75-6).

1980s

Two major factors in the years leading up to 1980 resulted in a pivotal turning point in trauma theory. In the wake of the anti-psychiatry movement the psychiatric field needed to demonstrate the legitimacy of its diagnostic criteria. At the same time, the aftermath of the Vietnam war had produced huge political pressure from veterans’ groups and psychiatrists for recognition of the long-term damaging effects of what came to be seen as an unjust war.

Enter Robert Spitzer. Spearheading the American Psychiatric Association’s task force which since 1974 had sought to create a classification of mental disorders which could plug this legitimacy gap, the DSM-III was finally published in 1980. In it was a new classification: PTSD (‘post-traumatic stress disorder’). The huge controversy at the time over its inclusion is now largely forgotten. But in re-describing ‘traumatic neurosis’ as ‘PTSD’ it granted legitimacy to the new classification, and shed the stigma of ‘neurosis’ from the old label.

The introduction of PTSD effectively killed the debate about the nature of trauma that had until then so interested generations of psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. The Event was back as the sufficient aetiological agent. The very first criterion for the new diagnosis was simply exposure to an event that was deemed to be traumatic:

“A. The person has experienced an event that is outside the range of usual human experience and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone.”

All of a sudden there was no need to figure out anything about the subject’s personality or the depths of their psyche – you just look for the event, and if the magnitude of the event is deemed to be sufficient then trauma would be the normal reaction. How much simpler life became:

• No need to worry about how the event was processed psychically by the individual;
• No need to worry about whether or not there might have been an underlying predisposition for trauma (and the stigma this could lead to);
• No need to worry about the ‘gain from illness’ that was so important to Freud and his contemporaries (and the suspicion this could engender);
• No need to worry about whether you’ve got the right interpretation of unconscious material;
• No need to worry about looking for an ‘original’ trauma that might lie behind the event itself.

The specificity of an individual’s psychology, the particularities of their case, their history, and what they actually said were obliterated. All that was needed for trauma was the event. Moreover, you could even be traumatised without knowing it, just as it would be possible to be a victim without knowing it. ‘Trauma’ now came at the expense of the self.

This produced some perverse outcomes. Robert Lifton could argue in his 1973 book Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans that US army atrocities were due to “atrocity-producing situations”. Extraordinary events allowed for extraordinary outbursts of violence. Atrocities thus became re-transcribed survivor guilt, and their perpetrators re-imagined as victims. As Allan Young noted, this provided the perfect solution for US politicians looking for a way to navigate around the inconvenient truth that some soldiers had committed horrific acts of barbarism: they were put in this situation in the service of their country so really, they were patriots. What’s the difference between these and the atrocities committed by the Nazis, we might wonder? The laughable assertion was that, unlike the Nazis, American soldiers suffered too.

But for sufferers of trauma, it was not as simple as being recognised as victims of an experience that overwhelmed them. As Freud had realised, clinical intervention had to do more than just identify the event. Alongside this there developed a gradual shift from finding the traumatic event to bearing witness to the unspeakable. As the founding motto of aid agency Médecins du Monde articulates it, the task was both “to care for and bear witness”. But the witness was not always the traumatised subject. On the assumption that an unspeakable event may require special expertise to find words, often this meant such words were provided second-hand through the proxy mouthpieces of pressure groups and humanitarian organisations, not through the voices of sufferers themselves. The opportunity to re-open the investigation into unconscious meaning was foreclosed once again. This of course generated its own problems, and questions of victimhood, witness, and testimony became condensed into the ‘memory wars’ of the 1980s. Its most infamous articulation as far as psychoanalysis is concerned came in 1985 with Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth and the start of the ‘Freud Wars’.

1990s-2000s

We will touch on just a few areas over the last 30 years and the major contributions to the debate in that time.

The seminal tragedy which has provided a consistent reference point for scholarship – at least in the West – is 9/11, and the impact of the post-PTSD conceptualisation of trauma made its impact keenly felt. To have ‘experienced’ 9/11 it was not necessary to have been there on the ground in Manhattan. Two studies cited by Fassin and Rechtman reported rates of PTSD a month after 9/11 of 7.5% among Manhattanites and 4% in the US population at large (based on representative samples). That 4% however was the expected rate of ‘background’ trauma pre-9/11, and it did not rise after the attacks… except among those who had watched the events unfold on TV (Empire of Trauma, p.3).

The latest edition of the DSM (DSM-V from 2013) now lists its ‘Criterion A’ for a diagnosis of PTSD not as a trauma but as a ‘stressor’ for which it is only necessary that the person is “exposed to: death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence” either directly or indirectly (as a witness, first responder, or merely learning that a trauma had befallen a loved one). With this definition ‘victims’ proliferate and proximal distinctions matter less than political ones when it comes to deciding how a particular group has been affected by a ‘traumatic’ event. The status of victim is not always accepted by those who are alert to this. Meanwhile, although clinical interventions by aid agencies in disaster-hit regions over the past 30 years have often been classed under the banner of ‘humanitarian psychiatry’, Fassin and Rechtman make a persuasive case that these were more humanitarian than psychiatric. Many responders, even psychiatrists, treated psychological suffering in the broadest sense without regard for trauma theory or needing a reference to PTSD. Fassin and Rechtman argue that it was not trauma that prompted the call to help – in the beginning was humanitarianism (Empire of Trauma, p.174).

Several voices from the neurosciences have made their own contributions to trauma theory more recently. Bessel van der Kolk is one such major figure in the study of psychotraumatology, returning the field back to an organic model by suggesting that trauma is a different kind of memory – one that is ‘implicit’ or ‘nondeclarative’. This fits in nicely with notions of trauma as ‘unspeakable’ that were popularised in the post-Holocaust age. For van der Kolk, trauma is about dissociation. He believes that a failure of the integrative function of the brain (a function he ascribes to the thalamus) to on the one hand assign emotions (the job, he believes, of the amygdala) and on the other locate sensations in time and space (the hippocampus) produces ‘reactions without context’ which are taken as marks of trauma in PTSD. Therapy should aim to restore this integration. He is careful to say that traumatic experiences do not literally etch or imprint themselves on the brain, but the effect of indelibility is created due to damage of this integrative function when combined with the inability to extinguish external stimuli.

There are a few reasons to be sceptical about van der Kolk’s model. For one, it may be subject to the reification fallacy, but more fundamentally it doesn’t help us answer why some experiences are ‘etched’ or ‘imprinted’ more than others, given the external stimuli van der Kolk’s theory relies on are often not of a level that would suggest the integrative functions of the brain would be damaged or substantially altered by their occurrence. We would still need to explain how certain experiences lead to the inability or hindering of this function in the way he believes.

His position marks a contrast – thought not necessarily a conflict – from that of Laub, Felman, and other post-Holocaust theorists who privilege the ‘communal duty’ to testify to a trauma. Indeed, we might sometimes wonder whether they believe testimony is more important as a communal duty than as a way to treat or understand trauma. A distinction therefore needs to be made between the individual trauma and the communal impact. After all, are we analysing the person or the culture?

Moreover, testimony-based theories of trauma make it very difficult for us to distinguish between historical witness and dissociation. They oblige us – for good reasons – to take the testimony at face value, but how do we know what we are hearing isn’t a narrative marked by all the psychical defences of the primary process? We find the same ability to speak about a traumatic experience taken as proof of the effectiveness of more recent treatments, such as Shapiro’s EMDR therapy.

There are other interesting theories of trauma proposed within the last 10-15 years by the likes of Cathy Caruth, Ruth Leys,and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. But to do them justice would take us well outside the world of psychoanalysis and need a much more thorough exposition.

So in Part II we are going to look at five possible answers that psychoanalysis offers to the question ‘what makes a trauma traumatic’?

An early version of this article was delivered to the North West Regional Psychotherapy Association, Manchester, UK, February 2019.

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

In Part I we looked at the history of trauma theory and framed its various debates against the backdrop of two key problems that any theory of trauma has to confront: the ‘event’ and its ‘affective weight’.

Problem 1: The Event – if a certain event or experience is often sought at the aetiology of the trauma, what makes this event traumatic rather than another? If the answer lies in the supposed magnitude of the event, why does the same event or experience seem to be traumatic for some but not for others; or for the same person but not immediately, sometimes only years later in their life? Although the event itself might be accidental, our selection of it as an aetiological agent cannot be lest that choice appear arbitrary. And once we have made that choice, what accounts for its effect? In other words…

Problem 2: Affective Weight – how it’s felt. In more psychoanalytic terms, the level of psychical investment or emotional ‘charge’ that is experienced. We cannot appeal to the ‘magnitude’ of an event here, given there are different ways that people react to the same event experientially. What we are looking for is rather an explanation of how the trauma becomes ‘traumatic’ in the way it is processed, ‘worked-through’ or ‘metabolised’ by each individual. These ways will be different for each person, and likewise the ‘affective weight’ a trauma carries will be felt differently for each person. It follows that the symptoms which are manifested following a trauma will take different forms, indicating that some unconscious process or dynamic is at work. This is where psychoanalysis has something to say.

In Part II we will look at four possible answers to the question ‘what makes a trauma traumatic?’ Some of the answers may already appear familiar, reflecting what is supposed to be commonly-known about trauma, so to each we will add a slight twist from the perspective offered by psychoanalysis.

1. Trauma always needs two moments… but based in reality, not just fantasy

A theory of trauma needs a theory of time. We find one in Freud’s work, hidden in the term Nachträglichkeit. It is Lacan who can claim credit for rescuing this word from Freud’s German original and for relieving English readers of Strachey’s choice of ‘deferred action’ as its translation. But it was Laplanche who revived it as a concept from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, bringing out its implications for the theory of trauma in his careful and highly-readable Après-coup: Problématiques VI. That work was published in English in 2017 (and you can read my review of it here).

Laplanche proposes a beautiful English neologism which perfectly captures the complexity of Nachträglichkeit: ‘afterwardsness’. It implies a theory of trauma which always needs two separate moments in time. What makes a trauma traumatic is not just a single important or shocking event – it has to also have an echo in a past event. Trauma is not at either of these two moments but is constituted as a trauma only in the second moment (Après-coup: Problématiques VI, p.122). In other words, trauma is the result of a message which sleeps for years and then demands understanding or translation après-coup.  

When most psychoanalytically-informed readers hear the term Nachträglichkeit they think of the case of Emma (Eckstein) from the late 1890s. But as he traces the history of the term in Freud’s work, Laplanche counts no fewer than 15 appearances in the Wolf Man case history twenty years later. This allows him to locate it at the pivotal moment in the split with Jung and the emergence of the Ur– phenomena (primal fantasies, primal scenes, primal father, primal repression) in Freud’s work.

Here’s an example of how ‘afterwardsness’ works. Let’s imagine that time is like an arrow:

• The arrow of time moving forwards: The heavy lorry drove over the rickety bridge, and 30 seconds later the bridge collapsed. This is an example of ‘progressive signification’: the past determines the present.

• The arrow of time moving backwards: The bridge collapsed and the engineer realised she had built it wrongly. This is an example of ‘regressive signification’: in the present we reinterpret the past.

Laplanche uses these two models to contrast Freud’s Nachträglichkeit (afterwardsness) to a term preferred by Jung, Zuruckphantasieren (retroactive fantasising). The first keeps the arrow of time moving forward, privileging the original event which leads to its later effects. The second allows for a re-conceptualisation or re-interpretation of the past, meaning that finding the original event doesn’t matter quite so much. Laplanche’s argument is that Freud always comes down on the side of Nachträglichkeit when looking for the explanatory power of trauma – indeed, for all psychical life – in contrast to Jung’s Zuruckphantasieren (it’s true that Freud sometimes uses this term, but he doesn’t give it much importance). However Freud never completely succeeded in defeating the regressive resignification-retroactive fantasising model, as we will see.

What’s the difference between the two? Throughout his work, Freud is meticulous about finding a place for every historical fact in a case – to keep the arrow of time pointing forwards – so that the past always has explanatory power over the present. You have to find the point in the past in order to have a therapeutic effect in the present, he believes. Laplanche describes it as the difference between painting an image with a broad brush versus constructing a jigsaw puzzle. In building a jigsaw puzzle, you not only have to find a place for each little piece in the whole picture, you also have to make sure that the picture is still comprehensible when its put together.

In the fantasy versus reality debate therefore, Freud will always come down on the side of reality, Laplanche argues. This is not because Freud neglects the importance of a ‘psychical reality’ but because he wants to establish a place for the facts which have created that psychical reality. Hence why he avoids Jung’s term – to prevent the inversion of the arrow of time.

But what happens when facts don’t have a place, or when there are gaps between them? Freud reaches outside the jigsaw puzzle.

Let’s follow Laplanche and take the example of the Wolf Man’s case. If Freud wants to justify the importance he gives to the castration threat, he has to explain how his patient would have figured out that women could be castrated in the first place. Freud knows the Wolf Man has a peculiar interest in women with large buttocks, especially when they’re in a certain posture (SE XVII, 41); and he knows that this relates in some way to the scene in which he witnesses Grusha scrubbing the floor (SE XVII, 92-93). But how to connect this to the dream about the wolves? Freud looks further back. Maybe the Wolf Man witnessed a scene of coitus a tergo (anal sex) between his parents (SE XVII, 37)? Maybe it wasn’t his parents, maybe it was the animals on his estate (SE XVII, 57)? Then comes the crucial speculative leap that was to become so important in hastening the split with Jung.

Instead of relying on the notion of Zuruckphantasieren (retroactive fantasising) to explain the timeline, Freud injects phylogenesis. If I can’t find the hypothetical scene of parental coitus in the patient’s memory, Freud thinks, maybe that doesn’t matter quite as much as I thought it did. In fact, even if there were an infantile memory of this scene, why would it be so important as to produce all the effects that I’m witnessing in my patient on the couch? Perhaps, Freud suggests, such a scene isn’t unique to the Wolf Man’s case after all – or indeed to all neurotics – but is part of “the regular store in the – conscious or unconscious – treasury of their memories” (SE XVII, 59). This universal stock of memories would be, “The phylogenetically inherited schemata… like the categories of philosophy” (SE XVII, 119).

And then we find the astonishing line:

“Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary schema, they become remodeled in the imagination” (SE XVII, 119).

It’s an extraordinarily audacious leap. Freud is effectively telling us that if the facts of the family history don’t fit his theory, so much the worse for the facts. But he is also re-learning his own lesson from the 1890s when – after a fruitless search for a scene of infantile seduction at the origin of the neuroses – he came to the conclusion that fantasy was indistinguishable from reality. “I no longer believe in my neurotica” becomes ‘I no longer believe that the scene I am trying so laboriously to reconstruct in the case of the Wolf Man actually happened’.

So we end up with a schema that looks something like this:

I – The fantasy is determined, après-coup, by the infantile scene

II – Retroactive fantasising (Jung) that Freud never agreed with, but never managed to decisively kill off as an idea

III – Phylogenetic primal phantasies

Daring and original though this hypothesis is, according to Laplanche there are three mis-steps that Freud makes over the course of his career which leave it tantalisingly incomplete (Après-coup: Problématiques VI, p.153):

• He is a prisoner of the arrow of time – Freud fails to recognise the subtlety of his own theory: that Nachträglichkeit can work in more than one direction. He is always looking for the ‘original’ or ‘primal’ event. The Ur- phenomena (primal fantasies, primal scenes, primal father, primal repression) that followed the Wolf Man case study and precipitated the split with Jung were a product of this – as was his recourse to phylogenesis.

• He overlooks the importance of the other’s desire – especially the extent to which it appears as what Laplanche will call an ‘enigmatic message’ from the other. Freud was simply not as interested as he should have been in the desire of the parents (for each other, for the Wolf Man, or for the Wolf Man’s sister – in whatever degree). Were he to have probed this aspect more, Laplanche suggests, Freud would have understood the way in which this enigmatic desire was messaged to the child and the effect its translation had to undergo, which bore the key to determining the shape of the Wolf Man’s later neurosis.

• He introduces a ‘translational’ model of repression but does not advance it – we might add: ‘does not advance it to a theory of trauma’, because this is clearly what Freud is getting at. In a letter to his one-time close confidant Wilhelm Fliess of 6th December 1896 (the famous Letter 52) Freud proposes a model of memory that lays the groundwork for this. Under this model, each memory is broken up into separate memory traces which are in turn inscribed separately across a psychical apparatus, stratified as if they were notes on the stave of a musical score. From time to time, at different points in life, they are re-arranged so that the excitation attached to them can be left behind. This helps us ‘move on’ from the ‘affective weight’ that the excitation carried (time heals). The result is a new inscription of the memory trace with the effect that “memory is present not once but several times over”. During this process of re-arrangement and re-inscription some things get lost, in the same way that a message gets lost in translation when it is transcribed into a different language. “A failure of translation is what we know clinically as ‘repression’”, Freud proposes. While this is a really eloquent and clever theory, what about the things that are ‘to-be-translated’? This where Laplanche has something to say. Freud misses the real implication of the seduction theory, he claims – that humans are translation-making machines – because he doesn’t have a theory of the ‘to-be-translated’. In Après-coup that is precisely what Laplanche tries to add.

2. The sexual is traumatic… but not in the way we might think

And what about sex? To the question ‘what makes a trauma traumatic?’ Freud is convinced that the answer has to do with something sexual in nature. But it’s not enough to say that the sexual is traumatic in and of itself; or even to say that the sexual is traumatic because of some instance of infantile abuse. Real though one may be, by September 1897 Freud had already abandoned his hope that this could provide the complete explanation he was looking for. Instead, he thought that what linked the sexual and the traumatic was an encounter with the sexual which could not be understood as sexual in the moment – in other words, experiences that were ‘sexual pre-sexual’:

“In every analysis of a case of hysteria based on sexual traumas we find that impressions from the pre-sexual period which produced no effect on the child attain traumatic power at a later date as memories, when the girl or married woman has acquired an understanding of sexual life” (SE II, 133).

Around this observation Freud developed quite a clever theory. When he looked at trauma in the mid-1890s he wondered why his patients had such trouble in remembering their traumatic experiences. All seemed to involve scenes of a sexual nature, he noted. His idea was that in normal circumstances traumatic experiences will lose their unpleasurable charge with each successive recall from memory. Time heals, we move on, and gradually we deal with what is in the past. But sexual experiences are different. The magnitude of excitation actually increases as we become more sexually mature, progressing from childhood to adolescence and through to adulthood. Writing to Fliess, he ventures:

“The memory behaves as though it were some current event. This case can only occur where the events are sexual; because the magnitude of the excitations which these release increases of itself as time passes (i.e., as sexual development takes place)” (Freud, Letter 52 to Fliess, in The Origins of Psycho-Analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Drafts and Notes, 1887-1902, p.176).

This is why we find that trauma always occurs in two moments (think of the case of Emma). Like sexuality itself, it has a diphasic onset. It is also why Laplanche’s big idea – the ‘General Theory of Seduction’ – is so apposite.

Laplanche’s model involves the transmission of an ‘enigmatic message’ directed to the child by the parental other, with ‘enigma’ here implying that it can come without any intention or overtly sexual resonance on the part of the adult. These enigmatic messages are always linked to the body, and they will always refer to what he calls an ‘exchange zone’ – that is, some kind of opening on the body or privileged point of interface in the relationship between child and caregiver. They constitute the ‘sexual pre-sexual’ experiences Freud was describing. The work that the child has to do to decipher these enigmatic, mixed messages kick-starts the process of sexualisation and socialisation

Let’s take the example of Little Hans to explain this. One morning:

“Hans was given his usual daily bath by his mother and afterwards dried and powdered. As his mother was powdering round his penis and taking care not to touch it, Hans said: “Why don’t you put your finger there?”

Mother: “Because that’d be piggish.”

Hans: “What’s that? Piggish? Why?”

Mother: “Because it’s not proper.””

(SE X, 19)

What’s going on here is that a relationship is being established between the mother and a certain part of Hans’ body, signalled to Hans as a kind of taboo. Hans is not sure why, but he knows that this part of his body is special in some way to the mother – it is a privileged area (an exchange zone) which is the locus of an interest he cannot quite fathom (an enigmatic message). Thus the body starts to get mapped and zoned, and a self-representation is achieved that results in certain parts having special significance as loci of these enigmatic messages (that is, they are sexual pre-sexual). In his own reading of Freud, Lacan will later situate the objects a at these points. For Laplanche, what we see in Hans’ example is a process of implantation and translation.

Freud thought that as we progress through the ‘epochs’ of life – from childhood to adolescence and on to adulthood – memories (or, more precisely, memory traces) will undergo re-transcription and re-translation in the process of dealing with certain things in our past. In Laplanche’s terms they are ‘metabolised’. If this process fails – if something cannot be translated because it is too hot to handle, too traumatic, or overly-sexual – the result is repression (Freud, Letter 52 to Fliess, p.175).

Laplanche’s re-reading aligns nicely to what Freud was getting at: repression is the result of a failure of translation of these enigmatic messages. The difference in Laplanche’s general theory of seduction (compared to Freud’s original, pre-1897 theory) is that it doesn’t presume any overtly-sexualised or abusive intent on the part of the adult towards the child. Instead, Laplanche emphasises the difference between representing to oneself (in French, se representer) and signifying to someone (to a child, by an adult). In fact, the situation is the same for the parents. “These messages are enigmatic for the one who sends them”, he adds. “In other words, they are compromised by the sender’s unconscious” (‘A Short Treatise on the Unconscious’, p.93).

This gives an elaboration to one of the elements Freud misses in his hunt for the ‘primal scene’ of the Wolf Man: the sexuality of the parents, how they dealt with and metabolised their own enigmas, was simply not something Freud seemed to care about that much. Instead, he sort of bypasses the question and heads straight for a phylogenetic explanation in order to root the particularities of the Oedipus complex in human prehistory. We can see how what Dominique Scarfone has called the “fundamental anthropological situation” was very different for Freud and Laplanche. If we care more about the ‘enigmatic message’ and how it has been metabolised however, we don’t have to care quite so much about the material reality of an original scene of sexual trauma. Or in other words, the event.

3. Trauma resists representation… but not inscription

Just as we saw with Freud’s early idea about how traumatic memories are dealt with, all of the different models of trauma share the idea that there is something about a traumatic experience which cannot be integrated by the subject’s psyche. In Part I, we saw this notion appear in different guises, and with different clinical perspectives on what should be done about it:

• We have to re-establish the chain of memory (early Freud);
• We have to construct a historical truth where memory fails (later Freud);
• We have to forge new associative links between traumatic memories and more “adaptive” ones (Shapiro and EMDR therapy);
• We have to strengthen the ‘integrative’ functions of the brain (the thalamus, it is assumed) to build connections between its ‘emotional’ (amygdala) and ‘sensorial-temporal’ (hippocampus) regions (van der Kolk);
• We have to help people to tell their story, give them a voice with which to articulate their testimony (Felman, Laub);
• We have to narrative-build, reconceptualising retrospectively the past in light of the present (Jung’s Zuruckphantasieren)

As we’ve seen, each of these ideas has problems. A simpler distinction however has been emphasised by the British psychoanalyst Darian Leader: that between representation and inscription.

Following a traumatic experience it might be more fruitful, Leader suggests, to look for the production of a minimal inscription existing purely as a marker for the experience, rather than a record of it. This minimal inscription may link to a wider narrative, or it may not. It may carry some kind of meaning, or it may not. Just as Lacan’s idea that the ‘phallus’ is nothing more than a symbolic memorial to a lack, and only indicates the presence of a fundamental irreconcilability in the process of becoming a sexualised subject, so this minimal inscription of a trauma would stand in the place of something inassimilable to the psyche which can never be put into words or images:

“It’s as if at the point where something can’t be thought the psyche fixes on tiny contingent details… [for example, markers of space] which generates the same meaningless elements – geographical, topographical – which have been abstracted from the original situation as simply markers, points of inscription, of something that can’t be thought or imagined” (Leader, comments at LSE’s ‘Why Remember?’ conference, 2015).

Leader has elaborated on this idea in his latest book, Why Can’t We Sleep? He proposes that what can’t be bound psychically – by being assimilated into the pre-existing complexes formed during childhood which have come to structure our unconscious – returns in the phenomena associated with trauma such as recurrent nightmares, waking flashbacks, and bodily dissociation. Such manifestations will resist being framed into a coherent narrative, precisely because they don’t fit into the network of representations we have constructed to explain ourselves and our world:

“Trauma involves a fracturing of subjectivity, a rupturing of physical and psychical boundaries that will not produce a nice neat story, but rather, one with contradictions, inconsistencies, and errors” (Leader, Why Can’t We Sleep?, p.86).

Therapeutically therefore, beginning with this minimal inscription and allowing it to come to the fore might be key in taking the first steps towards a psychical elaboration. In place of a memory for instance (a representation) it would stand in the place of a representation. The psyche could alight on any element, anywhere to produce this – whether a memory-trace of some small detail that is divorced from the traumatic experience itself; an inscription on the body, like a tattoo or scar; or through a textual element or an image like those we find in abstract art. All that matters – in what Leader calls these “practices of inscription” – is that there be the most minimal form of psychical registration, with the sole function of allowing the work of psychical processing to get started. A therapy of whatever kind could then be elaborated and built from there.

As Leader notes, this is very different from an approach which aims to recover a memory, to push someone to represent what has happened, or to encourage them to construct a story around it. If these inscriptions are markers of impossibility – the impossibility to articulate a traumatic experience – we “have to respect the limits of what can pass to the level of language or imagery”. Thinking about the debate between Freud and Jung, attempting instead to merely overcome it would entail the kind of regressive resignification or retroactive fantasising (Zuruckphantasieren) that Freud had been so uneasy with. His ceaseless and highly speculative effort to trace the origins of trauma further and further back – to the origins of human history, even – would seem to be on to something. As so often with Freud, his intuition proves more productive than his conclusion.

In some ways this perspective has parallels with the notion of the ‘real unconscious’, an idea which has undergone substantial elaboration in Lacanian circles in recent years. Its heritage is in Lacan’s late work, particularly the work on Joyce and the sinthome from Seminars XXII and XXIII. The essential argument – for example, the one put forward by Jacques-Alain Miller in his text ‘The Real Unconscious’ – starts from the idea that the signifier as such signifies nothing. This itself is a point made again and again by Lacan, but refined in one of the last sessions of Seminar XXIII (13th April, 1976). The unconscious always supposes a knowledge, Lacan says, and that knowledge is always a spoken knowledge. So, when it’s spoken it can be interpreted. We can say therefore that knowledge needs two supports, two signifiers, which he calls S1 and S2. The job of S1 is to support the subject – “The signifier represents the subject…”, as we recall from the Lacanian aphorism – “… for another signifier”, S2. Hence subjectivity is suspended in the gap between two signifiers. But, as Miller points out, S1 isn’t a representing signifier – in effect it signifies nothing. This is what Joyce’s work makes so apparent, his playful manipulation of the materiality of the signifier-as-such rending it from a meaning we might otherwise have anticipated. So, when we are looking for what is truly unconscious we shouldn’t look for some hidden meaning but for the lack of meaning, Miller suggests. It is on these grounds that he makes a distinction between the ‘real’ unconscious and the ‘transferential’ unconscious: the ‘real unconscious’ is the unconscious without meaning.

This might all sound very vague and theoretical, but it has important implications for a clinic which encourages ‘practices of inscription’ over the production of a meaning, narrative, or the integration of memory as a response to trauma. Where words and images fail, we have three choices: either fall into an unfathomable abyss (psychotic foreclosure); attempt to force a meaning, memory, or narrative into being (retroactive reconstruction); or to respect the limits of speech and memory and work therapeutically within these boundaries.

The latter is the solution Lacan was closest to with his excited preoccupation over the Borromean knot in the late 1970s. As he said in Seminar XXIII, the point of this topological model is to show how the register of the real makes the imaginary and symbolic registers hold together (13th April, 1976). After all, what better example can there be of how representation in words and images can fail than the Borromean knot itself – as Lacan and his collaborators found when attempting to reproduce it in their letters back and forth to each other:

4. Trauma is a reaction to an unbearable proximity… not to an event, but to the other’s desire

The final possible answer we will look at to the question of what makes a trauma traumatic begins from another commonly-noted factor: that trauma is always marked by an over-proximity, an unbearable closeness of some kind. This is often not a physical proximity but one in psychical reality, a reality whose space is different.

Different how? Lacan hit upon the perfect representation of the nature of psychic space when in 1953 he identified a topological model that seemed to defy the standard inside-outside, internal-external dichotomy which had – and still does – govern psychological thinking: the torus. What makes the torus so special, Lacan thought, is that its “peripheral exteriority and central exteriority constitute but one single region” (Écrits, 320-321). In other words, its inside is its outside.

(For more on topology, check out the two-parter on why topology matters in psychoanalysis).

When talking about trauma we often hear people refer to getting ‘distance’ from an event, a ‘hole’ left in their lives, or something from the ‘outside’ that has caused a problem ‘inside’ them. These expressions describe the kinds of spatial proximities that interest topologists. As Lacanian psychoanalyst Eric Laurent has noted, in the same way that the torus allowed mathematicians to re-think the notion of distance in geometry, so too can we use it to re-think psychical distance in trauma (Laurent, Lost in Cognition, p.101).

This is not a metaphor for Lacan. This is the structure of human reality itself. Lacan stuck to this conviction all the way through his teaching, returning to it in his very last Seminar to give it its most radical articulation: “The structure of man is toric”. To which he then added, as if this wasn’t enough: “The world is toric” (Seminar XXIV, 14th December, 1976).

But the twist to our final hypothesis is that the kind of proximity which is problematic in trauma is not to an event but to an other. This conclusion would not naturally seem to follow from Lacan’s assertions about the nature of psychical space. After all, so many ways of treating trauma in fact take proximity to the other as their aim. Think of the way that Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman privilege the effort for a communal registration of trauma, as we saw in Part I; or how historical traumas suffered by certain groups, passed down through testimony and stories shared across generations, can lead to a common group identity or common group narrative. Yet the communal nature of these narratives is in many ways their drawback. In starting from the group they obscure the narrative of the individual, with all the singularity and specificity that a truly subjective experience entails. As we saw in Part I, acknowledging this is vital in understanding what makes a trauma traumatic for one person but not another.

But why proximity to the other’s desire in particular? The Lacanian hypothesis is that an other – any other, whether a loved one or a stranger – always evokes an enigmatic question in us, one that we must ask both of ourselves and of them. Che vuoi? – ‘what do you want?’ – is how Lacan phrases this question in the late 1950s while sketching his famous ‘Graph of Desire’, and it’s no accident that its form most closely resembles a question mark:

This question – Che vuoi? – designates the fact that there will always remain something fundamentally enigmatic about the other’s desire for us: how they see us, what we are for them, and what they might want of us beyond what we can or want to give. In Lacanian parlance, ‘other’ is a term used to denote the radical alterity of another person, but most particularly the alterity of their desire, which will always remain opaque at its heart.

With all this said, it is clear nonetheless that we cannot see the processing of trauma only as a matter of individual agency. It has a function deeply embedded in social and political relations, and we could see Freud’s project in Totem and Taboo – which he called his favourite work – as an attempt to reveal this function beyond its individual manifestations. If we recall Durkheim’s definition of mourning as less an individual act of grief than a duty of the community, it is the presence of a third party that would allow us to move from an intra- to an inter-subjective space in which we can deal with trauma. As we see all around us, there has to be some form of registration of an experience in the domain of the Other in order for it to count as an experience per se. Facebook’s Crisis Response feature – allowing people to mark themselves as safe when there is a disaster or threat in their area – extends the core function of its social network to capitalise on this requirement.

Conclusion

We have seen that there is a fundamental problem with theories of trauma that rely too heavily on the ‘event’ and its magnitude for explanatory power. With this in mind, we could sort and order theories of trauma into those that imply retroaction (for instance, the tradition that begins with Freud’s complicated notion of Nachträglichkeit) and those that imply retrodiction (the regressive resignification implied by Jung’s Zuruckphantasieren, for example). And yet within this another distinction could be made: one that separates ‘scenes’ from ‘screens’.

We know very well the problems of relying on memory to provide an accurate record of an event; and we know equally the hermeneutic traps that are laid for us when we attempt to construct such memories (‘scenes’). Trauma however does not reside in memory, and its persistence is not the result of our inability to recover it through an effort to re-establish the continuity of memory. As Freud showed, memory is neither a transcription nor a fixation – it is more like a transmission or a screen.

As such, the only model of trauma that would seem to make sense is a non-representational one. That is, one that recognises and works within the limits of what can be remembered, reconstructed, put into words, or set into images. ‘Practices of inscription’ and topological models like the torus are non-representational, and so point us towards possible responses to traumatic experiences in ways which may or may not be avowedly psychotherapeutic. In contrast, responses which involve narrative-building or the imperative to create a testimony (whether individually or communally) might provide comfort, insight, and some therapeutic value, but they tell us very little about the nature of trauma itself, and in particular what makes a trauma traumatic.

An early version of this article was delivered in a talk to the North West Regional Psychotherapy Association, Manchester, UK, February 2019.

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

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