Trauma: explorations in memory

TLDR

Traumatic events are intense and often not immediately recognized as truth, and understanding them requires exploring where and why conscious understanding and memory fail, with literature, sociology, film, and activism offering indirect ways to access trauma. This work analyzes how literature and new clinical and theoretical approaches deepen understanding of traumatic experience. The study combines essays and interviews to engage analysts and critics on trauma interpretation and contemporary discussions of child abuse, AIDS, and historical atrocities such as the Holocaust.

Abstract

Because traumatic events are unbearable in their horror and intensity, they often exist as memories that are not immediately recognisable as truth. Such experiences are best understood not only through the straightforward acquisition of facts but through a process of discovering where and why conscious understanding and memory fail. Literature, according to Cathy Caruth and others, opens a window on traumatic experience because it teaches readers to listen to what can be told only in indirect and surprising ways. Sociology, film and political activism can also provide new ways of thinking about and responding to the experience of trauma. This work offers an analysis of what literature and the new approaches of a variety of clinical and theoretical disciplines bring to the understanding of traumatic experience. The combination of essays and interviews is intended to be of interest to analysts and critics concerned with the notion of trauma and the problem of interpretation and, more generally, to those interested in current discussions of subjects such as child abuse, AIDS and the effects of historical atrocities such as the Holocaust.