John L. Roberts - Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject

Recent scholarship has inquired into the socio-historical, discursive genesis of trauma. Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject, however, seeks what has not been actualized in trauma studies that is, how the necessity and unassailable intensity of trauma is fastened to its historical emergence. We must ask not only what trauma means for the individual persons biography, but also what it means to be the historical subject of trauma. In other words, how does being human in this current period of history implicate ones lived possibilities that are threatened, and perhaps framed, through trauma? Foucauldian sensibilities inform a critical and structural analysis that is hermeneutically grounded.

Drawing on the history of ideas and on Lacans work in particular, John L. Roberts argues that what we mean by trauma has developed over time, and that it is intimately tied with an ontology of the subject; that is to say, what it is to be, and what it means to be human. He argues that modern subjectivity as articulated by Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan is structurally traumatic, founded in its finitude as self-withdrawal in time, its temporal self-absence becoming the very condition for agency, truth, and knowledge. The book also argues that this fractured temporal horizon as an effect of an interrupting Otherness or alterity is obscured through the discourses and technologies of the psy-disciplines (psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy). Consideration is given to social, political, and economic consequences of this concealment.

Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject will be of enduring interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists as well as scholars of philosophy and cultural studies.

John L. Roberts is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of West Georgia. His research interests include theoretical and philosophical approaches to psychology, histories of consciousness and subjectivity, and psychoanalysis.

Some time ago, I sat with a man dying of cancer. Sleepless in the days before his death, he sat on a couch in his modest home speaking with me of the most significant experiences of his life his parents divorce, fathers death, and relationship with an estranged son. As his life dwindled, he became drawn to the receding horizon of those elusive questions: Who am I? Who have I become? Who was I in the end? I felt honored to be with my friends struggle, to be allowed into this most precious of spaces, where his being could be actualized and memorialized. I am always deeply affected by these conversations, where we take hold of our own being in death and in life. Yet, I am also curious about this experience. Where did it come from, and what does it mean to ask oneself who one is? Strikingly, however, the pursuit of self-knowledge is far from an optional one, a luxury of our age. For us modern Western subjects, questions of identity premised on biographical memory inform our own sense of responsibility to others and ourselves. We may say, Im sorry to disappoint you, but thats just who I am . Underlying conventional moral imperatives is the more foundational injunction to take possession of who one is . Therefore, we place an ethical value on knowing and speaking to our own idiosyncratic being, which we have the obligation to reconstruct through our own time.

Ones reconstruction of biography, however, can break down, leaving gaps in memory. In other words, memory may be disrupted, or even diseased. Trauma is precisely that psychological and cultural architecture that allows us to understand how events of both formative and intervening intensity may dislocate our sense of who we are, and how pathogenic memories form. Certainly for contemporary life, the intensities of rape, torture, genocide, and accidents are thought of as traumatic. But this was not always the case. Suffering, as the contingent intervention of external events with searing intensity, did not always bear upon the biographical being of the subject, pressing into memory as unrepresentable, unmasterable. As Ian Hacking (1995) remarks, One feature of the modern sensibility is dazzling in its implausibility: the idea that what has been forgotten is what forms our character, our personality, our soul (p. 209). Beginning in the nineteenth century, trauma first emerges in connection with railway accidents as railway spine, connected as part of a wide web of knowledge around the doubling of consciousness, which included mesmerism, multiple personality, and hysteria all involving an interruption in recollected experience. What follows from Charcot (1889), Freud (1920/1961), and Janet (1925) to van der Kolk (2014) and other clinical discourses is that trauma appears etched into the fabric of not only the way we think and speak, but also how we are affected and constituted. Such discourses embody the tension between repression and dissociation as ordering theoretical principles, which implicate the status of trauma as a discrete experience over against one more structural to the modern subject. Pursuant to differing theoretical strategies, and responding to differing socio-historical conditions, the shifting ground of psychiatric and psychological classification, thus, indicates important yet distinctive ways in which our struggles are encoded, recognized, and addressed. For instance, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), as well-documented (Young, 1995), foregrounds acute, event-based trauma, whose prototypical instance is the wartime experience of the American Vietnam soldier, and more recently such narrowly constituted understandings have been challenged to include more developmentally chronic deprivations and violations (e.g., Herman, 1992). These formulations are central for the disease model understanding of trauma, and for its standardized, technological remediations in cognitive and behavioral therapies, among others. Alongside these developments, psychoanalytic thinking persists, trauma being the originary epicenter of a division of human being, and fundamentally formative of a subjectivity circulating around events in early life that displace memory. Trauma especially for Lacanian perspectives alters us in taking something from us, alienating us from ourselves, but giving us a different, an Other being in return. Moreover, these understandings of trauma as primordial would ostensibly include existential-phenomenological renderings such as that by Stolorow (2011) or Bracken (2002), where our being-in-the-world is unsettled as part of our condition as beings thrown into time.