Perspective Of Trauma Theory Research Articles

Harold Pinter: Traumatic Neuroses and Nervous Shock in Ashes to Ashes

The main purpose of this article is to present the hidden features of Post Ttraumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) in one of the major works of Harold Pinter, English playwright and 2005 Nobel Prize winner for literature. The selected play is Ashes to Ashes which was written in 1996. This play has been analyzed from the perspective of Trauma Theory which refers back to the Freudian psychoanalysis in second half of the nineteenth century where the effects of trauma depicted the trembling shocks of a mental and physical wound on the memory. In the 1860s, Sigmund Freud coined the terms Traumatic Neuroses and Nervous Shock as a reaction to the hysteric and trance states of those people who suffered from a mentally wounded psyche in deathly violent conditions. To prove our contention, we choose the main motifs of traumatic neurosis such as Hysteria, Trance states, Violent mood swings, Amnesias, Partial paralysis of the body, Anxiety and physical pain, Shell shock, Blocking of memory, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Raconter en bafouillant, bafouiller en racontant. Traumatisme et narrativité chez Hugo Claus

In this article two novels by Hugo Claus are analysed from the perspective of Trauma theory : Desire (1978) and The sorrow of Belgium (1983). Trauma destroys an individual’s life-narrative and results in a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In Desire it is Didi that seems to suffer from it : she lost her human identity and her awareness of time, she is barely able to speek – which means that she has lost the plot that can give her life meaning and coherence. The reader is never told what exactly is the matter : all he gets are flashes, which are not sufficient to tell him the whole story. Moreover, he is confronted with the fact that the language of the novel is very ambiguous. These two characteristics – the unability to get to a fullblown story and the loss of language – the reader shares with a PTSD-patient, which suggests that this novel has a performative aspect : the reader lives through the same drama as that of the characters. In The sorrow of Belgium, uncle Omer is confronted with a malfunctioning language and ability to narrate. His problem manifests itself in repetition and in misunderstandings due to the ambiguity of words. The reader encounters exactly the same problem at the end of the novel, when a passage that seemed rather superficial at first sight in reality turns out to be full of meaning. However, there are characters in this novel whom one would expect to be traumatised that nevertheless do not show the typical characteristics. Above all the father, Staf, talks endlessly about the terrible things that happened to him, even so much that the members of his family are no longer interested. The feeling of the « surplus » of narratives, that are as a consequence not healing any more but aim at hiding something, is a feeling shared by the reader while he is reading this strange novel, which gets in its turn a performative aspect.

Apocalyptic Writing, Trauma and Community in IMRE Kertész's Fateless

This article explores philosophical themes in Imre Kertész's novel Fateless. More specifically, it offers a reading of Fateless from a perspective of trauma theory and of the idioms of an apocalyptic coming in order to demonstrate that at the heart of this literary text there is a question of the subject's (im)possibility of community with another in the wake of a catastrophic occurrence. There are many figurations of community in the text, which testify to a collective and interpellative violence of the subject, and which are inscribed into a patriarchal organization of society. The world of the main protagonist, a Hungarian-Jewish adolescent Gyuri, is one that cannot exist without the paternal figure. In the wake of the father's departure for the camp, which for the boy gains a psychic significance of the scene of traumatic erasure, the book abounds with substitutive figures of paternal authority. However, there is also a radically different, subterranean communal theme in the book: it is a figure of a non-productive and non-accumulative community that the main protagonist experiences as an ethical demand of another's unjust and premature dying. This community is both unachievable and hyperbolic, and as such implicates the subject ethically and politically. After interpreting the various figurations of community in Fateless, this article concludes with reflections on love of another and on catastrophic writing.

Discourses of Frontier Violence and the Trauma of National Emergence in Larry McMurtry'sLonesome DoveQuartet

This essay offers a revision of frontier mythologizing by engaging issues of gender, race, and nation from the perspective of trauma theory. Crucial questions about the relationship between dominant frontier values, on the one hand, and violence against women and non-Anglo groups (particularly Mexicans and Native Americans), on the other, are explored in a close reading of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet. The analysis focuses upon the “symbolic economy” of violence represented by McMurtry's use of the captivity motif and his representation of violent mestizo or mixed-blood characters who symbolize the conservative racial politics of his reappropriation of the western genre. This reading of the contemporary neo-western reveals larger implications for the ways in which we might reread the U S frontier as a national trauma narrative.

Discourses of Frontier Violence and the Trauma of National Emergence in Larry McMurtry's <i>Lonesome Dove</i> Quartet

Abstract This essay offers a revision of frontier mythologizing by engaging issues of gender, race, and nation from the perspective of trauma theory. Crucial questions about the relationship between dominant frontier values, on the one hand, and violence against women and non-Anglo groups (particularly Mexicans and Native Americans), on the other, are explored in a close reading of Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet. The analysis focuses upon the “symbolic economy” of violence represented by McMurtry's use of the captivity motif and his representation of violent mestizo or mixed-blood characters who symbolize the conservative racial politics of his reappropriation of the western genre. This reading of the contemporary neo-western reveals larger implications for the ways in which we might reread the U S frontier as a national trauma narrative.

Supervising counsellors who work with survivors of childhood sexual abuse

This paper draws attention to issues for supervisors who support counsellors working with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse from the perspective of trauma theory. The author describes the effects of vicarious traumatization and the unconscious dynamics that contribute to this experience. A narrative approach is included as another way of supervisors listening to distressing stories, both those of clients and of their counsellors, and reflects on the value of bearing witness to those stories in supervision and of recognizing them as a source of healing.