On the normativity of trauma

In these brief notes, I will sketch the outline of a longer thesis. I will offer just five theoretical points for consideration. The gist of these is (i) that generally our comprehension and intervention in relation to the processes of traumatization become notably constrained if we fail to grasp the germinal significance of the bodymind’s psychosexual energies in the constitution of our psychic life, as foundationally adumbrated by Sigmund Freud, and (ii) that more specifically we must focus on the erotics of hatred, the pleasures of dominative/subordinative othering, if we are to understand the psychic processes of traumatization, whether those of the victim, the perpetrator, or for that matter the bystanders.

My first point: The definition of trauma continues to dog both mental health and judicial or political disciplines―albeit in different ways that may or may not intersect usefully or problematically. As we all know, there are “external” definitions. Obviously, genocide is traumatic, rape is traumatic, any uninvited physical assault is traumatic, having your home violently invaded by thugs with guns or deluged in a mudslide is traumatic, losing a limb―even if the loss is due to a necessary medical procedure―is traumatic, and so forth. Then there are what might be called “internal” definitions, circumscribed by the individual psychic realities within which each subject lives. As psychoanalysts, we discuss these in terms of how certain lived‑experiences (specifiable or not necessarily so) overwhelm what we think of as the ego organization’s capacity to process the episodic or systemic events to which the individual has been subjected. The difficulty here is that we have to think seriously about what is entailed by―quote/unquote― a failure in the ego organization’s capacity to process (here I use concepts very much in the lineage of Heinz Hartmann).

There are some longstanding difficulties. Is the notion of a “failure to process” unassailably circular? Is it to be assessed by external or internal criteria? And, more poignantly and pertinently, what is the timeframe―or what are the temporalities―involved? Here, from a psychodynamic standpoint, we encounter the notion of the individual’s resilience (or lack thereof) that is both profound, yet eminently exploitable in quite inhumane ways. If you are damaged traumatically by any event, then your constitution (or the childhood parenting you received) might be held to be, in some way, “at fault.” Into such thinking, here all too easily creeps an idealization of the potential for resilience. From there, much can be attributed to deficits in the history of lived‑experience. In one frame, perpetrators can be exonerated; in another, blame is attributed to the victim. (Consider here of some of the controversies in which Robert Jay Lifton has been involved throughout his distinguished career; or consider certain aspects of Hannah Arendt’s essay on the “banality of evil”).

There is a weird flipside to the notion of resilience, which is that―at least from one psychoanalytic standpoint―healing requires that the status quo of psychic life be unsettled, in a manner that is far less palliatively reassuring than the tradition of ego psychology would have us believe. In this terminology, the notions of resilience to disturbance or disruption (traumatization), and that of resistance to healing intersect in ways that are quite quirky―but which we often endeavor to ignore theoretically and clinically. An approach that I have deployed in thinking about this intersection is to examine the complex theoretical and clinical concept of regression, and its admixture of both “positive” and “negative” valences.

For an example of the significance of unsettlement in healing, following the lineage of Jacques Lacan, one might argue that precisely those experiential events―which rent the Symbolic Order and the Imaginary fabric of our customary being‑in‑the‑world, tearing (tɛə), with mute horror or with tears (tɪə), and ripping a scag in the law and order of who, what and why, we think we are―are those very moments in which we face the (quote/unquote) “Real.” (Not “reality” in the ordinary sense, but rather the Lacanian register with the uppercase R). These are moments in which we succumb, so to speak, to an unspeakable or unsayable encounter with our annihilation―the void or abyss of deathfulness within life itself that ubiquitously permeates and indeed constitutes us. Such an “encounter” is thus an éclatement―a thunderclap of “enlightenment”―that might comprise a precious moment of (for want of a preferably term) realization.

My second point: In my presenting the “normativity” of trauma, please accept that I am not wanting to diminish, to any extent whatsoever, the seriousness of those who are victims of human abuses and natural disasters, about which we are all too familiar. Rather, I want to follow Freud’s radical subversion of the distinction between normality and abnormality―his strategy of exploring that which is allegedly “abnormal” in order both to invite within the “doors of perception” our understanding of the ailments of what is supposedly “normal” or “normotic,” and to empower the sophistication of our comprehension of resilience and resistance (as well as regression).

Today, I am suggesting that the better we can comprehend the normativity of trauma in terms of the inner structuring of our psychic realities, the better we can address and heal those who suffer gross traumas (however we define them). The direction in which this is headed is towards an appreciation of the mistakes we have often made by insufficiently considering the force of what I will call the “energetic erotics of hatred” in the trifurcate processes of traumatization. If you shudder over this terminology, think of these dynamics as the ubiquitous pleasures of hating, which are, by the same token, pleasures in being hated, subjugated, and finding the “resources” of one’s own‑most lack of mastery.

My third point: Let us not underestimate the significance of the first two, somewhat paradoxical, points that I have just advanced. Because it is here that the legal‑judicial standpoint can intersect with the intrapsychic issues in a manner that can always be―and of course has routinely been―exploited by the wealthy and the powerful. These issues surrounding the notion of trauma―which as a psychological phenomenon only gained scientific traction at the end of the 19th Century―beg for further analyses in the spirit of Antonio Gramsci or Michel Foucault.

As an example, consider the 1972 disaster in which a huge mudslide of black wastewater, cresting almost 10 meters high, deluged 16 small towns in Buffalo Creek, West Virginia. It instantly killed 125 people, grossly injured well over 1,000, and left over 4,000 people homeless. The cause was a failure on the part of the Pittston Coal Company (today a multibillion conglomerate) to maintain the dam located on a hillside in Logan County, a dam certified as safe by governmentally‑appointed Inspectors. In the subsequent lengthy litigation, the Attorneys hired by the Company, along with their designated “mental health experts,” claimed that most victims of the disaster did not merit reparative compensation for their emotional suffering, because they each had (quote/unquote) “preceding psychiatric conditions.”

There is an immensely serious and difficult issue here. Freud made what is―I believe―a valid argument, but also one that can be grossly perverted; namely, that traumatization necessarily builds upon prior experiences that have been traumatic. To the extent that this formula indicates a truth about the historicity and the historicality of the human condition, it is clearly vulnerable to spin‑doctoring according to the dictates of capital―used and abused by the ideologies of power. But it also points to the necessity of our understanding more clearly what might be called the originative or germinative experiences of normative traumatization.

My fourth point: My fourth point is that what psychoanalysis teaches us about what I am calling “normative trauma” is far more complicated than our textbooks would imply. The human psyche is deeply and doubly ruptured: Once inevitably and irreversibly (the so‑called “horizontal rupture”) and, in a second way, perhaps not entirely inevitably and surely reversibly (the so‑called mechanisms of vertical splitting). I believe that this is insufficiently addressed, despite our long history of theorizing and clinical experience.

What Freud discovered was not the unconscious, as promulgated in sophomoric texts. Rather, it was the unconscious‑as‑repressed, which is different from the consequences of suppression. We all suppress many contents of our thoughts and feelings: Yesterday’s lunch, the telephone number of our first lover, how our parents may have freaked out when they found us self‑pleasuring, and―if you are daydreaming in this very moment―you are suppressing, by selective inattention, even the ideas that comprise what I would like to think of as the force of my argument. By contradistinction, with repression, our representations of lived‑experience are de‑formed, leaving us with what we might think of as meaningful traces of energy that remain active within our bodymind. (You may, not inappropriately, think here of the writings of Bessel van der Kolk or Peter Levine).

In short, what Freud called the “repression‑barrier” is crossed, and, as I have discussed in several recent writings, this “barrier” is the intrapsychic inscription of the incest taboo (that is a humanly universal condition, even with performative variations across cultures). This is the horizontal rupture of the human psyche. Whereas there are methods by which to work and play along it in a manner that is liberatory (notably the expressive method of free‑associative speaking and listening) the barrier is not to be undone.

The vertical ruptures or various splits in the human psyche are of a quite different character ontologically. From infancy, the good and the bad are held as separate and distinct representational realities, cognitively and affectively. To greater or lesser extent, we all continue to live in a world in which the pleasure and unpleasure of fantasy hold greater weight for us than the (quote/unquote) real world in which―as we all should surely know, but typically decline to acknowledge―the “good” and the “bad” are mostly all mixed up. Even the most (quote/unquote) “mature” of us, usually persist in idealizing some and denigrating others―affectively if not cognitively splitting the reality in which we live psychically. As Freud demonstrated―in at least three different terminologies, in 1895, in 1911, and again in 1925―deepdown the pleasure or unpleasure, the forces of love and hate, trump reality, along with matters of judgment, existence, and so forth. This led to the theory of the splitting of the ego organization’s representational system, presaged in the 1927 paper on fetishism, developed in the posthumously published paper on this concept, and notably further developed in the lineages of Melanie Klein’s theorizing.

These diverse sets of discrimination are what psychoanalysts might call (although we argue about it a lot) the vertical ruptures of our psyche. In short, by various mechanisms of cognition and affect, we split the representations of the good, which means―usually but far from invariably―me or us, from the representations of that which is other, which is definitionally inferior, bad, stupid, weak, subaltern, etc. And, most saliently, that which is to be derided, discounted, subordinated and subjugated. We know quite a bit about these ruptures. After all, what is sexism, racism, and all the enormous range of permutations and combinations of othering that we achieve in our representational world? All, of course, (quote/unquote) “justifiable” within the inestimable permutations and combinations of the ideologies of domination and exploitation. Egregiously, our diverse lineages of theorizing have tended to occlude the erotic or energetic source and ground of these phenomena.

I am suggesting here that, in some respects, we are all traumatized by this double rupturing of our psychic life. This does imply that―and here I could reference, among so many other seminal texts, Albert Memmi’s The Colonizer and the Colonized―that the oppressor is traumatized, as are the oppressed. Please note that this does not mean “equally but oppositely” (which is perhaps the Achilles’ heel of so many reconciliation commissions). Yet can we doubt that the men who rape, he who advances capital at the expense of the “bottom billions,” the master of the torture chamber and the teacher who lashes out at a helpless child, etc., render themselves as inhuman as much (or perhaps in some ways even more) than they succeed in dehumanizing their victims?

Surely a central question here (the question that must be examined far more intensively than it has been hitherto) is: What intrapsychic dynamics sustain participation in the traumatization of others? It is, from the sort of radical psychoanalytic standpoint that I propound, a question of the way in which the horizontal and the vertical rupturing of our lived‑experience intersect or interact. On a clinical level, it is the question on which practitioners such as Otto Kernberg have made a start that may be helpful (although operating almost exclusively in this clinical context). That is, a flawed start to the extent that this generation of psychoanalytic thinkers would have us believe that we all require an “other” that is the recipient of our hatred in order to emerge and function in an manner that is, in any sense, “normal.” From the standpoint of social and political theory, surely psychoanalysis can offer a more emancipatory horizon than that which is derived from the aphorism that caring―to borrow slightly from Martin Heidegger―is founded on the energetics of hatred.

Fifth point: My fifth and final point is propaedeutic, yet the questions it raises seem vital to the humanity of our future in almost every context. To aim for a deeper understanding of the erotics of hatred is not necessarily to embrace some sort of idealist theory than might claim the inheritance of Max Weber or Harry Tawney. Rather, it is to suggest that we need far greater focus on understanding both of how these two ruptures in our psychic life become entwined, and with this―that is to say, I believe this will lead us toward―of how we are all erotically attached to the quotidian politics of domination and subjugation. That is, we need via psychoanalytic thinking, a far more powerful critique of traumatogenic ideologies (than we can be said to have even after a dozen decades of insight provided by this discipline). And this statement is not to be construed as any lack of appreciation for those who have made substantial strides in this direction.

In short, my thesis is that we have disempowered ourselves theoretically to the extent that we have retreated from the seminal Freudian insight that there is energy that runs between our biology and our psychology (we can discuss this neuroscientifically, but at this juncture―as I have argued elsewhere―this translates minimally into the aporia of lived‑experience.

My point is that it is a profound error to ignore the erotic fantasies that inhere to the traumatizing actions of both perpetrators and victims, as well as the collusive legions of bystanders. Such fantasies involve the sheer pleasures of hating in the interests of a specious mastery, as well as the catastrophes of our personal and inevitable encounters with the impossibility of mastery (what might be called the inherent authorial or agential “castratedness” of our human condition).

The actions of the CEO of the Pittston Coal Company, its Board of Directors, and the government Inspector of the Buffalo Creek Dam’s safety (who was presumably well reimbursed for his negligent services) may be necessarily, but not yet sufficiently, explained in terms of material greed. We must not retreat from considering the energized erotic fantasies of hatred and domination: Perhaps those of the enormously explosive dumping of fecal matter that will flush away the valley below; perhaps the gargantuan eruption of toxic ejaculate, not affirming life, but spewing death and destruction. And so forth.

Such erotics of hatred are, after all, some of what engages us in the acts, events and processes of traumatization, in which we are all painfully and profoundly embroiled; making whatever is “other” always a target of the cruelties of subordination, a victim.

If one embarks of a genuinely psychoanalytic journey of self-discovery ― a radically hard process of ongoing free-associative interrogation and deconstruction, rather than a soft procedure of adaptive psychotherapy ― one rapidly comes to an experiential and existential crisis.

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* Some of these notes were originally presented as a talk in October 2020 at a zoom conference organized in Washington, DC, by the Contemporary Freudian Society. The title of the conference was “Trauma and Mind in War and Life: Psychoanalytic, Psychodynamic, and Philosophical Perspectives.”