Trace et mémoire du trauma : de la mémoire du corps à la mémoire symbolique

Abstract

ObjectiveThis article presents a reflection, at the meeting point between psychoanalysis, philosophy and art, on the relationships that the construction of memory entertains with different forms of the trace of a traumatic event. The interactions of psychic and physical, material and symbolic traces of the trauma are analyzed to understand their vicissitudes and possible elaborations, at the articulation between the individual and the collective. MethodStarting from an analysis of the psychic processes mobilized by the trauma, the enabling conditions and the issues at stake in the work of memory for the person's subjective and social life are examined. The concepts of trace, memory, oblivion, repetition and remembrance are explored in the light of a documentary film by J. Oppenheimer on the Indonesian massacres of 1965 and texts by J. Améry and I. Kertész referring to the Shoah. ResultsThe traumatized subject suffers in his body from the incessant return of physical and psychic, fragmentary and haunting traces, which often do not deploy as a remembrance as such. Memory is a diachronic process that selects, arranges and transforms traces into a subjectivated remembrance on which the subject can rely to survive trauma. Writing is a particular form of elaboration of the trace: it stages the possibility of the shift from a somatic inscription, “in the flesh”, of the traumatic event that undermines the psyche, to a symbolic and exosomatic inscription. Writing enables a rewriting of experiences on the very limits of possible experience, and of what, having marked the body, nevertheless leads to the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of telling and representing that experience as history. DiscussionThe elaboration of memory cannot be considered as a strictly individual process. In the ordeal of the elaboration of remembrance, the subject of the trauma cannot be left aside by the other. The work of memory thus always implies a discursive construction of remembrance that calls for examination. In this sense, the archaeologist, the historian and the therapist in some instances provide the conditions that enable this construction, and in other instances question it. Nevertheless, most of the work of memory consists, from the point of view of the therapist, in the successive positions that the subject adopts towards remembrance at each recall. ConclusionBy way of writing, the work of remembrance engages the subject, through his bodily drives, in a construction of the trace that can enable him to preserve his integrity in the face of the disaster. In this way he can remember, not so as to “forget”, but to relieve himself of having to bear alone within him the traces of the traumatic unrepresentable.