{

EWRT 1C Class 38

back short watch

In each of these puzzles, a list of words is given. To solve the puzzle, think of a single word that goes with each to form a compound word (or word pair that functions as a compound word). For example, if the given words are volley, field, and bearing, then the answer would be ball, because the word ball can be added to each of the other words to form volleyball, ball field, and ball bearing.

blue cake cottage

stool powder ball

Introduction to Trauma TheoryDiscussion:

Trauma Theory Bloom Balaev

AGENDA

Trauma Theory: the last 100 years.

Trauma has attracted the attention of many disciplines. The reason is easy to understand for those of us today, who have the historical knowledge of violence of the twentieth century and the experience of the ominous start of twenty-first century.

A Century of Traumas

The new millennium awakened to bloodshed of an unprecedented scale on 9/11; two subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the enormous loss of life and property in Libya and Syria threw the world into turmoil.

Shoshana Felman, Emory University Professor specializing in 19th and 20th literature and psychoanalysis, trauma and testimony, literature and philosophy, law and literature, calls the legacy of violence we inherited from the twentieth century “a century of traumas.”

This condition of the world has posed new existential and epistemological questions to human civilization, questions that trauma theory is trying to make sense of and answer

Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

Freudian Beginnings Freudian Dreams

Freud referred to dreams as“the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” Dreaming, which, according to Freud’s first theories, happened distortedly or symbolically, gives an outlet to the dark desires repressed in the unconscious or Id, so that sleep is not disturbed by primitive sexual and aggressive impulses (Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams).

Traumatic dreams vs. Freudian dreams

The World War I veterans plagued with PTSD puzzled Freud because the literal images they encountered in dreams could not be explained in terms of the dream theory he devised earlier in The Interpretation of Dreams.

.

The term trauma theory and PTSD:

What Freud once called “traumatic neurosis,” the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 officially acknowledged and termed as “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (PTSD), a concept significant to trauma theory.

The term “trauma theory” first appears in Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience (1996). The theory stems from her interpretation and elaboration of Freud’s reflections on traumatic experiences in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Moses and Monotheism.

Cathy Caruth defines PTSD as “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event [. . .] [T]he event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly [. . .] To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event.” (Caruth 3-5)Cathy Caruth is a Cornell

Professor of English and German Romanticism. She specializes in trauma theory; psychoanalytic theory. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History; Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke Wordsworth, Kant, Freud.

From Cathy Caruth (ed.) (1995) 'TraumaAnd Experience: Introduction’, Trauma:Explorations in Memory.” Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

{

Why is literature so important in trauma theory?

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? ...When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. …Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues.

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Trauma theorists deem literature important because of its ability to accommodate both the comprehensible and the incomprehensible. Literary language simultaneously defies as well as claims understanding, and all the pioneer trauma theorists—beginning with Freud and including Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman—turned to literature for theoretical support.

Literature accommodates the known and the unknown:

`Kurtz got the tribe to follow him, did he?' I suggested. He fidgeted a little. `They adored him,' he said. The tone of these words was so extraordinary that I looked at him searchingly. It was curious to see his mingled eagerness and reluctance to speak of Kurtz.

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

Literature can contain knowing and not knowing, the known and unknown, the knowable and unknowable all at once in language, a medium that itself oscillates between the expressible and inexpressible, the possible and impossible. Psychoanalysis, in its extension to trauma theory, makes use of this strange nature of literature and its medium.

From Bloom

1. The Fight-or-Flight2. Learned Helplessness3. Loss of “Volume Control”4. Thinking Under Stress—Action Not Thought5. Remembering Under Stress6. Emotions and Trauma—Dissociation7. Endorphins and Stress—Addiction to Trauma8. Trauma Reenactment9. Trauma and the Body10. Victim to Victimizer

Effects of Trauma

Q: Is trauma a way that children learn to cope and understand the world around them?

Q: Is it possible for people to analyze personal traumas to help themselves?

Q: Can one undergo enough therapy to forget a traumatic incident rather than repress it?

Q: How is Bloom’s description of “emotional memory” beneficial to trauma as a fight or flight response?

QHQ: Bloom

“Trauma, in my analysis, refers to a person's emotional response to an overwhelming event that disrupts previous ideas of an individual's sense of self and the standards by which one evaluates society. The term "trauma novel" refers to a work of fiction that conveys profound loss or intense fear on individual or collective levels. A defining feature of the trauma novel is the transformation of the self ignited by an external, often terrifying experience, which illuminates the process of coming to terms with the dynamics of memory that inform the new perceptions of the self and world.”

From Balaev

The trauma novel conveys a diversity of extreme emotional states through an assortment of narrative innovations, such as landscape imagery, temporal fissures, silence, or narrative omission--the withholding of graphic, visceral traumatic detail. Authors employ a nonlinear plot or disruptive temporal sequences to emphasize mental confusion, chaos, or contemplation as a response to the experience. The narrative strategy of silence may create a "gap" in time or feeling that allows the reader to imagine what might or could have happened to the protagonist, thereby broadening the meaning and effects of the experience.

From Balaev

Q: Why is trauma significant in in literature according to Balev?

Q: What characterizes the basic differences in Bloom and Balaev’s viewpoints in the discussion of trauma?

Q: How does the meaning of the trauma change as a person recounts it to/ processes it with different individuals?

Q: In psychology there is a concept of a cycle of a abuse, would this be considered intergenerational trauma as well?

Q: Is trauma developed through culture or through the individual?

QHQ: Balaev