The Silence From A Petrified Past

Abstract

Patients traumatized by events beyond the limits of human experiential endurability often reveal a shattered self with no continuous personal core. These events seem to have occurred without a witness, possibly because their inhumanity caused the subject to disappear while the events were taking place. Such patients suffer from their sudden emergence of dissociated sets of memories which seem to have registered the entire circumstances of the trauma in a frozen state. The therapist's interventions seem to have no impact at these moments. This may be so because there is a self other than the patient's that is present at a scene which belongs to a past that never ceases to recur. These reenactments of past traumatic events reveal a self condemned to disbelief whenever testifying to an inhuman situation devoid of any subjectivity. Vignettes from the psychoanalytic treatment of a patient who suffered from traumatic ?memories? will illustrate the points above. The testimonies of homeless children and of Holocaust survivors also point to this silencing of voices wounded by an inhuman past. Questions regarding the ethical dimension of psychoanalysis and its witnessing to present day injustices ? as opposed to silencing them ? are addressed.