Gregory Bistoen

Nachträglichkeit: A Freudian perspective on delayed traumatic reactions:

The Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit is central to the psychoanalytical understanding of trauma. However, it has not received much attention within the contemporary field of trauma studies. This paper attempts to reconstruct the logic inherent to this concept by examining Freud’s remarks on the case of Emma. Furthermore, it is argued that Nachträglichkeit offers an interesting perspective on both (a) the well-established yet controversial finding that traumatic reactions sometimes follow in the wake of non-Criterion A events (so-called minor stressors or life events) and (b) the often-neglected phenomenon of delayed-onset PTSD. These two phenomena will appear to be related in some instances. Nachträglichkeit clarifies one way in which traumatic encounters are mediated by subjective dimensions above and beyond the objective particularities of both the event and the person. It demonstrates that the subjective impact of an event is not given once and for all but is malleable by subsequent experiences.

Trauma, ethics and the political beyond PTSD: the dislocations of the real

This book deals with a series of problems associated with the contemporary psychiatric approach to trauma, encapsulated in the diagnostic category of PTSD, by means of a philosophical analysis inspired by the works of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou.

Badiou's theory of the event and the politics of trauma recovery

There exists a conceptual parallel between psychological accounts of psychic trauma on the one hand, and French philosopher Alain Badiou’s notion of the event on the other: both are defined by a relation of incommensurability or excessiveness with regard to the pre-existent context or system. Further development of this parallel, i.e., viewing trauma as an event in the Badiouian sense, enables us to pinpoint and clarify a logical fallacy at work in psychological theories of post-traumatic growth. By thinking of trauma recovery as a process of accommodating the pre-existent mental schemata to the “new trauma-related information,” these theories risk taking as a given that which must first be constituted by the subject: the “content” (i.e., “information”) of the trauma. By emphasizing the necessity of the activity of the subject for the development of a new context that allows the event to be “read,” Badiou’s theory of the subject offers a way around the aforementioned logical fallacy. In so doing, it re-introduces the essential yet generally neglected political dimension of trauma recovery. This is illustrated through the example of the speak-outs of the 1970s women’s liberation movement.

The Lacanian Concept of the Real in Relation to the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

The title of this chapter is reminiscent of Alenka Zupancic’s (2000) book Ethics of the Real, which situates and typifies the ethics particular to psychoanalysis, as developed by Lacan mainly in Seminar VII (1959–60). In what follows, this paradoxical notion of an ‘ethics of the real’ will be scrutinized, whereby the primary focus on trauma is momentarily abandoned. Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of this excursion will be to illuminate the interrelations between trauma and ethics. In Chapter 2, I argued that the practices associated with the PTSD construct dovetail with the assumptions underpinning today’s prevailing ethical stance, encapsulated in the human rights doctrine. A brief discussion of Badiou’s critique of this type of ethics laid bare the problems associated with it, despite its merits: the emphasis on vulnerability reduces those affected to the position of victims and strips them bare of their agency. In turn, this risks producing a general attitude of ‘nihilistic resignation’ that obstructs the envisioning of alternatives, and thus serves to consolidate the status quo. The framework of PTSD was thereby shown to be interwoven with this particular ethical position — in contrast with the popular outlook that considers it a merely technical, value-free construct. Given the problems associated with both PTSD and this type of ethics, a search for alternatives is warranted.

Act and Event: Ethics and the Political in Trauma

The previous chapters introduced Lacan’s concept of the real and related it to the fields of trauma, ethics and politics respectively. In Chapter 3, it became clear that the real cannot simply be equated with the external referent of our representations in the sense of the Kantian das Ding. Although the real by definition resists recuperation in the symbolic, it should not be conceived as a natural realm of being before it is contaminated and disrupted by the intervention of the signifier. Rather, the real is a strange sort of surplus created by our advent as beings of language, a dimension of being that only ever presents itself as a ‘lack’ in the signifying chains building up the plane of social reality. In Chapter 4, I drew primarily from Zupancic’s work to argue that Lacan grounded his specific conception of ethics in this lack. The fact that ‘there is no Other of the Other’ (Lacan, 1957–58) (that is, no external guarantee to ground the specific maxim that motivates our actions) necessitates the supplementation of some sort of ‘act’ that compensates for this lack. In what first appears as a paradoxical claim, the subject is considered the after-effect of this ethical act. Subjectivity and ethics are thus intimately connected with the limits of the symbolic-imaginary order; it is where this order ‘lacks’ something that the subject is called into being in a moment of terror.

Individualization, Decontextualization and Depoliticization in the Biomedical PTSD-Approach to Trauma

The feminist trauma theorist Judith Herman was amongst the first to insist, in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1997), on the necessity of a political movement alongside the practices of studying and treating psychological trauma. She argues that ‘advances in the field occur only when they are supported by a political movement powerful enough to legitimate an alliance between investigators and patients and to counteract the ordinary social processes of silencing and denial’ (p. 9). In this sense, Trauma and Recovery is itself a political book: it starts from the controversial thesis that mechanisms on the social and individual level work together to deny or repress the truth of trauma, which is rendered literally unspeakable. The intriguing thesis put forward in Trauma and Recovery is that the process of healing from trauma is essentially embedded in a wider sociopolitical framework that must always be taken into account.

The Lacanian Concept of the Real in Relation to Politics and Collective Trauma

In the spirit of the previous chapter, I will now turn towards the place of the Lacanian category of the real in the field of politics. The link with trauma will become evident much sooner in this chapter, specifically when we discuss the formative role of shared fantasies in social groups — and the deteriorating effects that follow the traversal of such foundational structures. In recent years, several authors have argued that it is precisely in such moments of (traumatic) rupture that the political surfaces, as something distinct from and constitutive of politics as we know it (for example, Eisenstein & McGowan, 2012; Johnston, 2009; Laclau, 1990; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Stavrakakis, 1999).

The Lacanian Concept of the Real and the Psychoanalytical Take on Trauma

In Le Desir Foudroye, French psychoanalyst Sonia Chiriaco (2012) clarifies the specificities of the Lacanian psychoanalytical approach to trauma by means of a series of clinical case studies. She argues that the strength of this framework lies in its unique emphasis on the presence of a subject behind the victim of trauma. Going against the grain of contemporary trauma theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis does not exclusively focus on the traumatic event in itself, but rather on what the (unconscious) subject has done with it or made of it. During the analysis, the subject must attempt to articulate the real that was encountered in all its brutality and senselessness. In the diversity of case studies discussed, Chiriaco makes visible that the subjective experience of a trauma is always singular, and that the psychoanalytical experience aims at the invention of a unique solution to exit the traumatic impasse. Psychoanalysis holds that even in trauma, there is a certain implication of the subject in its suffering. Acknowledging this gives back a minimal form of responsibility and agency to the subject, the road to revive the desire which was ‘struck down as if by lightning’ (foudroye) by the trauma.

A Critique of the Ethics of Human Rights in Its Relation to PTSD

Alain Badiou’s Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001) remains to date one of his more successful and bestselling books. It starts off with a polemical charge against contemporary ethics in its relation to the discourse on human rights (pp. 1–39). Badiou observes that ethics, today, has become a matter of busying ourselves with these rights, of making sure that they are respected. Despite the seductive power of this doctrine, rooted in its apparent self-evidence, Badiou contends that it must be uncompromisingly rejected. This is because, in his analysis, it operates as an ideological support for the current political situation by presenting as potentially evil any organized political collectivity that seeks to challenge the prevailing way of the world (that is, parliamentary democracy and neoliberal economics) and its absolute injustice. Similar concerns regarding this discourse of the rights of man1 have been formulated by, among others, Dominique Lecourt (2001) and, as Jacques Ranciere (2004) remarks, Hannah Arendt (1951), who devoted a chapter of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism to the ‘Perplexities of the Rights of Man’. In what follows, we will first describe Badiou’s characterization of this form of ethics and the purported reasons for its dominance in our times. Next, we aim to show that the discourse of trauma is one of the most powerful representatives of this orientation, its avatar on the ground, one of the prime manners in which the ethical ideology of today is practically translated or applied in situ.