Self-Intimacy and Individuation
5.7 Trauma and Nachträglichkeit
The same kind of interpretation provided for parapraxes is to be found in the psy- choanalytical view of the unconscious erasing of traumatic memories, entailing the repression of the impulses deriving from the trauma in the conscious sphere: a repression which, according to Freud, has damaging effects that give rise to all the
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various forms of neurosis (Freud 1920).12 A certain event, labeled a traumatic event, is thus seen to engender an overexcitement of the nervous system—which the latter
“has difficulty in abolishing through motor reaction” (Freud and Breuer 1892–1895, p. 156)—capable of breaking through that wall which protects the mind from par- ticularly dangerous excitations. This process would be accompanied by painful inner representations, the repression of which is seen to lie at the basis of pathogenic effects. It is as though, after the trauma, a residue remained within the breached wall, encapsulated within the psychic apparatus, capable of exercising an enduring pathogenic effect (this residue being the repressed representations). This first con- ceptualization—which was developed with a closed organism in mind (a “living vesicle,” as it is called in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”), protected against excita- tions by a kind of shield—remains the foundation of all other conceptualizations.
Psychoanalytic treatment would therefore consist in reactivating these represen- tations by tracing their causal links back to their source, so as to engender a kind of catharsis capable of integrating the foreign body, according to the well-known Freudian adage “remember, repeat, and work through.” The reintegration of the past would be favored by the therapeutic setting, which would provide a new and safe container for processing the event.
This view of a protective wall,13 which, in different forms and with various nuances, shapes all psychoanalytic literature on trauma (Garland 1998; Fonagy et al. 2002), came to be reinterpreted within the framework of the theory of attach- ment in terms of the capacity of emotional regulation. Being aware of situations that present potential risks, a child’s caregiver will protect it from affect states which it would be incapable of regulating on its own. Hence, a child’s early relations with its caregiver provide a kind of filter against harmful stimuli, a protective wall, while at the same time laying the foundations for the child’s system of representation of its own inner states (mentalization).
The individual capacity to modulate affect states, which is to say, to build the wall (der Reizschutz), would be connected—throughout one’s life—to the mental- ization system, which in turn would depend on the person’s affective reciprocity with his or her caregiver (mentalized affectivity). The trauma experienced would shatter this barrier, which evidently may already be more or less undermined by the quality of one’s attachment (e.g., secure, insecure, disorganized)—so much so, that
12 Freud’s casual use of the term trauma to describe “any excitations from outside which are power- ful enough to break through the protective shield (den Reizschutz zu durchbrechen) … with a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli” (Freud 1920, p. 29)—which has become en vogue once again through the ambiguous category of post-traumatic stress disorder—points to a quantitative view of affections which has its roots in Aristotle (Met. Delta 21, 1022 b 15–21).
However, alongside a quantitative definition of affections, in Chapter 21 of Book Delta of the Metaphysics, Aristotle puts forward another three definitions, pertaining to quality: according to the movement of alteration, according to the act of changing, and according to one’s disposition.
13 The term Reizschutz, which is usually translated as protective wall or shield, literally means
“protection against stimuli.”
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some people have spoken of “attachment trauma” (Schore 2002; Solomon and Siegel 2003).14
If, as a consequence of abnormal attachment, a child experiences an altered development of its ability to access painful mental states, it will learn to dissociate itself from them, as it cannot restrain accompanying them. Over the course of his adult life, a patient who has not acquired the ability to think about personal painful emotional experiences, in certain circumstances will associate the recent traumatic event with the inner representation he has repressed in his childhood, thereby giving rise to a symptomatology. As noted by Stolorow (2011), developmental trauma is viewed as the instinctual flooding of an ill-equipped Cartesian container.
As in the case of the forgotten set of keys, when it comes to the erasing of trau- matic memories, the psychoanalyst explains the experience, not in relation to the person experiencing it and the circumstances in which it occurs, but rather by invok- ing causal links. On the other hand, the psychoanalyst finds himself at a loss when it comes to explaining the weaving and unweaving of memories and hence the remodeling of the personal history of a patient.
In relation to this historical aporia faced by psychoanalysis, a lively debate has sprung up in recent years on the term Nachträglichkeit, which Freud uses with dif- ferent nuances at different stages of his copious production and which is fully artic- ulated in his book Moses and Monotheism. Without wishing to enter into this psychoanalytic debate, it seems to me that the confusion surrounding this term points to the difficult underlying problem—reflected in all of Freud’s work—of the polarization between scientific explanation and hermeneutical interpretation: two cultural traditions which Freud sought to bring together in the early twentieth century.
This confusion is particularly evident in the conceptualization of the meaningful- ness of biographical phenomena, which are initially understood as motives (i.e., causes of a particular kind) and then slowly but steadily reinterpreted by Freud in terms of causal links. The cultural dialectic which underlies this structural
14 The research on attachment which one of the authors of the present book conducted with Guidano in the early 1990s (Guidano 1991; Russiello et al. 1995; Arciero 1994, 2002; Arciero and Guidano 2000) was aimed, not so much at interpreting the difference between various forms of reciprocity on the basis of the level of security/insecurity of early relationships, but rather at grasping—within the context of a non-representational epistemology inspired by Merleau-Ponty—the various forms of attachment as a source of emotional organization and the narrative capacity of the individual as a means of emotional articulation and regulation. By making the relational system coincide with that of emotional organization, this approach opened up a new research horizon that placed affec- tivity at the center of every relationship and hence implied a radical contextualization of all the aspects of human psychological life. This perspective, which was developed together with Guidano, pointed to the need to study individual differences. On the other hand, by generating dif- ferent forms of misattunement and misregulation in continuity with early experiences, the endur- ance of the same forms of emotional organization throughout one’s life may be seen to lay the foundations for the understanding of various personality disorders (Arciero and Bondolfi 2009).
This perspective also helps understand the findings made by some recent studies on emotional experience among street boys living in extreme adversity in post-conflict Sierra Leone (Ardizzi et al. 2013, 2015).
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confusion of psychoanalysis, and whose origins are still largely unexplored, contin- ues to guide the contemporary tendency to redefine—après coup—this Freudian term. This point is clearly summed up by Dahl in a paper on the topic, as its abstract suggests: “The two temporal vectors of Nachträglichkeit are discussed: the first consists in a causal process which operates in the direction of the time to come against the background of a factual experience; the second consists in a backward movement which enables an understanding of the unconscious scenes and fantasies which occur at the level of primary processes” (Dahl 2010).
On the one hand, we have the reconstruction of one’s history, with a causally determined sequence of meanings; on the other, we have a hermeneutic investiga- tion of a hypothetical psychic system, the unconscious, which is invented—and hence assumed—by the theory itself, whose operational rules guide all possible interpretations of experience. Thus what remains unquestioned is the very founda- tion of the problem, the incoherent articulation of which stands at the basis of the whole psychoanalytic edifice. Clearly, to grasp motives as causes is to refuse to acknowledge that each individual act rests on something—a motive—that is acknowledged by the person performing the act, on the basis of his being engaged with that which addresses him (Arciero 2002).
To further elucidate this point, let us focus once more on what a psychoanalyst would describe as the erasing of a traumatic memory.
Let us suppose that one of the two partners in a couple suddenly informs the other that their relationship is over: an unexpected and unsought-for separation. Let us also suppose that, in order to cope with the pain of separation, the forsaken part- ner immediately starts a new relationship—precisely as a means to deal with the effects of the painful event. The memories and, with them, the emotional manifesta- tions related to the person’s bereavement gradually vanish. Are we to regard this
“strategy” of the patient as a form of dissociation? Furthermore, if the patient’s ability to think about his personal experience is actively inhibited, is this the result of the associating of the recent traumatic event with a repressed representation per- taining to an altered form of early reciprocity?
But if one of the modes of forgetfulness implies that the patient does not appro- priate the painful event and avoids it instead, this does not mean that the capacity to access the event is inhibited. Forgetting here may simply be a consequence of the fact that the more a given experience is avoided, the less the person realizes that he is avoiding it. The experience remains unthematically present in a distant back- ground, and such distance amounts to more than just retention: it is an active posi- tion with respect to the past.
The dissolving of a memory, therefore, does not imply its repression into the unconscious; rather, the very opposite is the case, in the sense that—to return to our example—the reorienting of one of the two partners toward a new relationship takes place through active avoidance and hence through the presence of that “traumatic”
experience which gradually vanishes, as the individual becomes involved in a new relationship: the experience in question becomes unprominent the moment in which it is no longer necessary for it to be present. However, it still remains available, since it can be remobilized in terms of sense by biting into a madeleine, having a morning
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dream, or simply thinking about it—in other words, by thematizing that content which is unthematically present.
On the other hand, while the avoidance of unpleasant emotions related to the separation continues to be unthematically present, every negative variation affecting the person’s present relationship corresponds to the opening up of an access to those painful feelings which this new condition ought to have helped him cope with. For example, if the person in question entered into a new relationship as a means to face the sense of emptiness connected to the perception of loneliness caused by the sepa- ration, every resurfacing of this sense of existential loneliness during his present relationship will correspond to the reemergence of the sense of emptiness and of the symptomatology which may spring from it. Just like when I realize that I have for- gotten my keys on the doctor’s desk as I am heading toward my car to return home, in this case too a certain situation will reopen an access to a past experience; but unlike in the case of the keys, it might be difficult to integrate this past experience within the present meaningful context. Clearly, this does not imply that symptoms are the price paid for the repression of experiences, as psychoanalysis claims; rather, what it implies is that the possibilities of meaning pertaining to the person’s present life condition do not allow him to grasp, and hence thematically integrate, a past experiential condition that therefore proves foreign to the individual, even though he perceives it as his own. While this state of affairs does not correspond to a symp- tom in itself, it may lead to the emergence of one. So it is possible to argue that the genesis of a disorder lies in the relation between the prereflective sphere and its narrative reconfiguration (Arciero 2002, 2006; Arciero and Bondolfi 2009).