Topologies of Trauma : Essays on the Limit of Knowledge and Memory

by Belau, Linda

• ISBN13: 9781892746979
• ISBN10: 1892746972
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-17
• Publisher: Other Press

Summary

This collection of essays explores the mental geography of trauma -- its forms, causes, and possibilities for resolution. Drawing on extensive clinical experience, the contributors offer insightful interpretations of the ways in which memory, repetition, and working-through interact and function, both as modes of conceiving trauma and as components of psychoanalytic technique. Integrating a wealth of material, including the AIDS pandemic, the category of "the pathetic," contemporary television programming, and Schelling's theories on the absolute past, the contributors tease out the meaning of remembering. Repetition is then examined in detail, bringing Freud's Fort-Da paradigm to bear on the question of trauma as well as Jean Laplanche's theory on the relation between seduction and the genesis of trauma. The link between narcissism and trauma repetition is explored, pointing out the way that translation and repetition are interconnected in the psychoanalytic context. Having established the role of repetition in processing trauma, the contributors discuss the process of working-through traumatic events via mourning, analyzing Toni Morrison's Beloved as well as Chilean political upheavals. These insights are extended in the final essays, which focus on the artistic response to World War II and the Holocaust. Book jacket.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	xi
Introduction	xiii
Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through: Trauma and the Limit of Knowledge
Linda Belau
I. Recollection	1	(72)
``Das Vergangene wird gewuβt, das Gewuβte aber wird erzahlt'': Trauma, Forgetting, and Narrative in F. W. J. Schelling's Die Weltalter	3	(30)
David Farrell Krell
Interminable AIDS	33	(20)
William Haver
Demarcations: Pathetic, Unfinished Thoughts on a Life by Default	53	(8)
Fadi Abou-Rihan
One Train May Be Hiding Another: History, Memory, Identity, and the Visual Image	61	(12)
Thomas Elsaesser
II. Repetition	73	(104)
The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud's Dora, the Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm	75	(26)
Ellie Ragland
An Interview with Jean Laplanche	101	(26)
Cathy Caruth
The Catastrophe of Narcissism: Telling Tales of Love	127	(24)
Charles Shepherdson
Trauma, Repetition, and the Hermeneutics of Psychoanalysis	151	(26)
Linda Belau
III. Working-Through	177	(96)
In the Future...: On Trauma and Literature	179	(32)
Petar Ramadanovic
Obstinate Forgetting in Chile: Radical Injustice and the Possibility of Community	211	(22)
Brett Levinson
Representation, History, and Trauma: Abstract Art after 1945	233	(18)
Herman Rapaport
Transcryptum	251	(22)
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger
Index	273