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“The Forms of Traumatic Transmission” Multidisciplinary Readings and Dimensions

Psychoanalytical Approach on Traumatism: from Break-through of the Real to Psychological Wandering

Dr. Bertrand PIRET, Strasbourg

Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Practitioner attached to the University Hospitals of Strasbourg, head of the Trans-cultural Consultation

Head of the Parole sans frontière (www.p-s-f.com)

Private Business: 5, rue Grandidier 67000 Strasbourg

Contacts : 5 rue Grandidier 67000 Strasbourg France

Preamble

This paper shows how the first psychoanalysts were influenced by the First World War in their approach on traumatism. At that time certain psychological questions were asked to Freud and his students. These questions are still of current interest. These include the contrast between transference neuroses (and the theory of seduction linked thereto) and traumatic neuroses, the role played by the death-drive, the distinction between the symbolic neurotic symptom with sexual connotation and the traumatic symptom characterized by the non-symbolic repetition of the same, the contrast between anxiety and anguish. In the second part of the work, the breaking of the Ideal, the fading of the Other and the like are proposed as tools for understanding the collective factors in the genesis of the traumatism and in its relationship with politics. The feeling of shame and the memory-blank are underlined as the major features affecting the psychological transmission of traumatism. Finally, a clinical case is reported concerning a man whose symptoms consist of wandering. It is hypothesized that this behaviour is a fragile self-protecting device against the effects of traumatism, and the author suggests the ways for the adapted psychotherapeutic attitude which gives a possible framework to help the elaboration and symbolization of trauma.

Key words: traumatic neuroses, break-through of the Real, repetition, death-drive, shame, memory blank, wandering behavior.

Psychoanalytical Approach on Traumatism: from Break-through of the Real to Psychological Wandering

On the 28th and 29th September, 1918 Budapest hosted the 5th congress of the International Association of Psychoanalysts. The War was almost over in Europe, but the cease-fire was not yet signed and the psychoanalysts who were with Freud on that day, after several years of separation are going to share some experiences on the effects of the war on their practice and their theorization. The First World War had shown the techniques of the war and was characterized by the most horrifying destructions. Many medical psychoanalysts found themselves directly involved in receiving the injured people. Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi, Ernst Simmel and Ernest Jones’ (who were all also involved in the war) contributions to the Budapest Seminar were edited and constituted the first book of the new international psychoanalytical editions which were founded on the basis of this congress. It was titled, “Psychoanalysis and the War Neuroses [1]. »

These texts contain,the fundamental questions which we still ask ourselves today about traumatism. In 1920, Freud completely changed his theory about the Psyche and the Unconscious by introducing the death-drive. It can be thought that this theoretical amendment is the direct consequence of the War and Freud’s desire to include clinical and psychopathological particularities of the War and traumatic neuroses in his theory. It is a known fact as to how far the notion of death-drive triggered resistance even with Freud’s closest students. Today, still this notion is separated from the curricula of some schools of psychoanalysis which see it as a misplaced and useless wild dream.

Lacan’s subsequent conceptions which concern the Body, the Other, the Real and the Fantasy will throw the useful light on the delimitations of what can be called traumatism in psychoanalysis.

The term is eminently polysemous. In addition, it is familiar and this complicates our work. So familiar that we no longer know what exactly the word traumatism means, even in our environments. The first effort of clarification is essential.

Secondly, we can examine the hypothesis according to which a certain kind of wandering makes up an effect and or protection against the psychological traumatism at the same time, and how collective, social and political factors play a role in the transmission or even in the making up of the traumatism.

I.What is traumatism?

1. Traumatism, Sexuality and Death-drive

Abraham, Ferenczi, Simmel and Jones’ pioneer interventions during the 1918’s conference reveal the psychoanalysts’ malaise against the psychopathological symptoms of which the sexual dimension seemed to be absent. Their arguments were two-fold. On the one hand, they respond to the critics of the neurologists of the time who, when realising that they were confronted with the war-neuroses, made use of the absence of sex-triggering factors to outrightly refute any psychoanalytical theory. Abraham, Ferenczi, Jones and to a lesser extent Simmel, in their intervention took an initiative to show that despite the appearances, sexual aetiology played a major role in triggering the war-neuroses.

On the other hand, the same authors strongly insist that the war-neuroses and traumatic neuroses cannot be superimposed with the transference neuroses. Both Ferenczi and Abraham insist on the narcissistic regression characterised by these affections, that is, a decline on the impulse of the ego to the detriment of the erotic impulse and libidinal investment. Ernest Simmel proposed the notion of mind-dissociation provoked by the terror and fear of death. He left the question over the sexual aetiology’s involvement open and in contrast with his colleagues, he does not seek to absolutely maintain a united theory of neuroses on the hysteria model (according to the distinction and also the similarities between the traumatic hysteria and non traumatic hysteria). The major enigma which was presented to everyone was evidently the one related to predisposition. Why should certain individuals develop the war-neuroses while others would not, when exposed to the same threatening situation?

Event and Predisposition

These questions are still very recent. The contemporary trend emphasised by the Northern America of statistics diagnosis tends to confuse traumatism and the event itself by including the occurrence of an event of serious and exceptional intensity in the definition of the post-traumatic stress syndrome. And yet the traumatism is not the event itself but a psychological consequence. It is the manner in which the event will be received, elaborated, metabolised by the mind and the set of symptomatic consequences which will result from there. It follows that we cannot predict anything from these psychological consequences on the basis of the event itself. There is no proportionality relation between the intensity of the triggering event and the intensity of the traumatism. Although it is evident that all the events do not have the same general significance, or the same symbolic range, the stroke of a natural catastrophe is in no way comparable to the dehumanising organised torture. It is clear that the occurrence of the psychological traumatism shall depend on the strictly individual factors.

Sexual Aetiology and Death-Drive: the Distinction between the Transference Neuroses and the Traumatic Neuroses.

What are the individual factors? To explain them, the Freudian theory must apply.

In the first place, Freud estimates that the neuroses are the defence mechanisms against the outbreak of the traumatic moments. This event is traumatic because it repeats the previous event which was also traumatic itself. The notion of repetition is central right from Freud’s first elaboration. Nonetheless, what is it that repeats itself?

As indicated above, Freud first thought that the inaugural traumatic moment of neuroses awakened the real event of the past, most often a sexual seduction attempt of a child by an adult. Freud then left this first theory called traumatic theory, particularly the theory on hysteria, by introducing the notion of fantasy. The traumatic moment no longer necessarily refers to a real event of the past, but to a fantasy. And the occurrence of a real event in the past is neither indispensable nor essential in the formation of the fantasy. What therefore repeats the traumatic moment is a fantasised traumatism, that is, a childish conflict of a sexual nature. The fantasy is central in the conception of transference neuroses such as hysteria, obsessional neuroses and phobia. When talking of traumatism in relation to these neuroses, it should be borne in mind that, it is about the traumatism in relation to an event which has never taken place, which is of the unconscious nature in relation to the childish world and the fantasy.

Freud’s students are going to try to insert the traumatic neuroses and the war- neuroses into this framework. Sometimes they will do this successfully and, thanks to the sufficiently detailed psychoanalytical work, there are enough numerous examples of patients for which the symptomatology of a traumatic neurosis was able to be put in relation with a sexual aetiology which was hidden by the recent traumatic factors. However, there are firm differences between the classical transference neuroses and traumatic neuroses, starting with what the clinicians have earlier pinpointed as the reviviscence or repetition syndrome. Freud will stop there and this clinical element together with a few other elements will justify the setting up of the death-drive and compulsion of repetition in a form of repetitive nightmares and traumatic neuroses. A new conception of traumatism appears from the 1920 text “Beyond the Principles of Pleasure” which enables us to draw a distinction between the transference neuroses and traumatic neuroses almost word for word. Freud then takes an opposite view of his most faithful disciples at the risk of triggering resistance.

The traumatic neurosis hypermnesia [3] is opposed to the amnesia which characterises the transference neuroses especially hysteria, whether childish amnesia or the amnesia which surrounds the traumatic moment which triggers neurosis. The problem of the traumatised is not to forget the scene and the events in which he was victim. These scenes come back in a repetitive, uncontrollable manner to haunt the conscience and the sleep of the patients.

Whatever the transference neurosis can repress is made present by the traumatic neuroses and the terrifying presence which gives the sentiment of reliving the initial traumatic scene to the traumatic neuroses. There is no possible repression in the traumatic neurosis. The event persists and insists in a form of almost hallucinatory presence and cannot even reach the status of being a souvenir, a souvenir that one can forget.

While the anguish is the state which characterises the transference neuroses, especially hysteria and phobia, the traumatic neurosis is characterised by anxiety. According to the Freudian conception, anguish as a mechanism of preparation and therefore of protection against danger, is precisely what the traumatic neurosis lacks. The traumatising event reaches an unprepared mind and which is therefore very vulnerable.

In appearance, nothing has to do with a childish sexual aetiology in the traumatic neuroses. The dimension of the current occupies the entire scene. The temporality is modified. The traumatised is no longer part of the historical continuity where the present forges itself through the past impressions and the future projections. The traumatic event has brought about a radical tear between the past which is inaccessible from now on i.e. the one in which life was normal and, the present which lasts without any anticipation in future.

In the patients’ speeches, the past experience, that is, before the accident or before the traumatism is no longer counted and they are possibly writing down their affected life. While in the transference neurosis, the unconscious sexual desire’s manifestations and the libidinal investment are reparable, the traumatic neurosis pain is rather of not having any desire and not being able to invest in any relationship. Some appear to be the living-dead.

In essence, there is no symptom in traumatic neurosis according to the freudian neurotic symptom, that is, the one which develops from the unconscious intra-psychological conflict of sexual nature. The symptoms of the traumatic neurosis themselves are the reiterations of the initial traumatism rather than the translations as the metaphorical symptoms of transference neuroses can be.

We can therefore imagine how much reception and listening to the person with traumatic neuroses necessitate particular modalities and requirements. One has to be able to listen to a difficult, hesitant and often shameful speech, taking very long time and centred on the triggering events or the corporal pain. The repetition syndrome by its insistence also risks blocking the speech all the more by awakening the same sentiments and horror in a sterile and repetitively identical manner. The transference is done in a difficult manner because the events’ invading experience justifies a tremendous logic of evidence relating to the cause of the symptoms. There is no other knowledge that is asked beyond the evidence of the experienced horror.

All these points are opposed to the transference neuroses and the traumatic neuroses up to the psychoanalytical work principle itself, which consistently encourages repression in one case, while it would rather consistently promote oblivion on the other. What is the psychoanalyst’s intervention status, his interpretation and the importance of his presence in this situation so particular? Symbolic Repetition and Reiteration of the same.

From the psychopathological point of view, it is necessary to oppose the distinct mechanism. In the normal neurosis, the trauma causing event is repressed and it then turns into a symptom. For example, this is Dora’s cough as described by Freud [14]. The repetition is going to be situated within the symptom and in such a way that it will be repetitively addressed to the Other. Neurotic symptom is already a symbolic formation, a trial of translation of the trauma through the body or the idea on the basis of the representations, the signifiers which built up the subject’s story up to this event. In other words, the event is going to make sense according to the expectations and the subject’s unconscious desires. When he recalls of the unforgettable or guilty desires, he is therefore repressed and produces the symptom. This is sometimes an easily identifiable metaphor. The repetition aims at symbolising the trauma through the symptom in connection with the Other. This is a recognition demand which is in search for its address.

On what exactly does the repression hold? Not only on the remembrance of the traumatism but also on the unconscious role or enjoyment by the subject in this fantasy, that is, the subject’s contribution to this fantasy. This subject’s place is indicated by its symptoms such as disgust, shame, guilt, anguish, etc, which allow the subject to remain hidden and it shies away in recognising its participation in the fantasy. Therefore, the fantasy is an unconscious formation whose function is to fake and hide the reality and to prevent the souvenir to occur whether the souvenir of the real fact or the imaginary. The traumatising souvenir thus finds itself divided, decomposed and disintegrated into several fantasies which make it less recognisable unless reconstructed through the analysis. Inversely, the initial traumatic experience is not repressed in the traumatic neurosis and it does not enter into resonance with the symbolic network which characterises the position of the structure of the subject in this given moment. In other words, the event and the signifiers which possibly designate it are not integrated and they do not resonate with echoes of the pre-existing fantasy and do not acquire any significance in the unconscious. The trauma souvenir is neither modified nor divided into several fantasies. On the contrary, it presents itself and it persists as it is, unforgotten and unrepressed. We find the classical description of the “strange body” in a paradoxical position of being inside the subject’s mind but without significant contact with what determines this subject from the unconscious’s point of view. The repetition which therefore shows up in this non-tight or non-linked situation of traumatism is not symbolic. It appears as a desperate trial which still fails to make sense. It is rather the reiteration of the same or a repetition of the inaugural which repeats itself in the same manner. Therefore, this is how Freud interpreted the repetition of traumatic nightmares. Jacques Hassoun has perfectly described these two types of repetition in his work on death-drive [5]. The question is therefore that of seeking to know why on the one hand, in some cases, the event does not get integrated into the subject’s symbolic network and on the other hand, how we can promote this integration in the therapeutic situation.

Two Opposed Conceptions of the Traumatism: the Traumatism as an Echo of the Childhood, the Traumatism as the Break-through of the Inaugural Real.

Although useful, this distinction does not however resolve all the ambiguities. The essential problem is the one that has to do with the status of the real for the mind. In other words, the manner in which the mind accepts and tolerates the new radical nature and the rupture. We know that the essential function of transference neurosis is to establish the continuity illusion by assuming an intervening position between the subject and the object or between the subject and the real event i.e. what befalls him/her or the fantasy which brings back the already known, the long-awaited or the desired. As a result, we do not have direct access to the reality of the world. But we only have access to its interpretation through the fantasy, which would be the minimum definition of the psychological reality. So how surprising is it possible? How can the opening into the new be done? This is the essential question of traumatism that the clinic very accurately shows through the notions of surprise and terror which always characterise the notion of traumatic neuroses.

By appealing to this notion of the real, in the lacanian sense of the word (which designates what is beyond the language and the representation, that is, what we only have access to as mediators) we can describe three stages of the traumatic process to the limited extent. 1) The first stage would involve the transference neuroses. The real event suddenly enters in echoes with the network of signifiers into the unconscious and triggers the reactivation of the fantasy. The trauma will therefore be repressed and the symptoms in return will correspond to this repressed. 2) The second stage is the one in which the event awakens the desires which are so unforgettable that the fantasies which are thus reactivated, are going to remain isolated from the subject, and it is the non-recognition of the subject’s contributions to these fantasies which will induce the traumatic symptomatology. We can take an example of the syndrome of the survivor where the sentiment of quilt is sometimes interpreted as the impossibility to realise that the death of a comrade-in-arms was planned and that the fulfilment of this wish is associated with survival. This is also contained in the story related by Anny Dupersey in this book “Le voile noir” [6] where it appears that she lived several decades without being able to elaborate her parents’ violent death trauma and that she was not able to morn due to the association of this death with an untold and shameful desire which corresponded to the fantasy that she had of being an orphan as a young girl. 3) We can imagine the third stage where the real event can be assimilated to a signifier so new for the subject that it is going to block the evolution and the elaboration of the childish fantasies. In other words, this refers to the discovery of a dimension of the real which has totally escaped from the subject. The integration of this new element supposes a complete reorganisation of the structure of the subject, that is, a new reading of his history and of his relationship with the world. These are the basic details which structured the subject until then, especially in its relationship with sex and death according to the narcissists, the maternal and the paternal functions are taken in default and should change. The particularly horrible and monstrous traumas which are related to the war, that is, the torture or the exterminations which subject any subject beyond what could be represented even in fantasy, can correspond to the foregoing mechanism.

On the contrary, we should avoid qualifying, “the outbreak of the real” which is slightly easily attributed to some events which the common-sense qualifies as horrible nowadays. The violence, even the extreme one, does not always correspond to the outbreak of the real in the new radical sense, but fairly often, it corresponds to the fulfilment of an untold fantasy up to then. Slavoj Zizek reminds us of the tragedy of the 11th September 2001[7]. This terrorist violence did not burst-open into us the reality as an outbreak of an absolutely unmentionable and unexpected real. Nonetheless, on the contrary, we can think that the outbreak of this image as symbolised by the media coverage of the event, brutally gave a difficult interpretation to admit. The performane of the already existing and reparable fantasy through the numerous Hollywood fictions and films which brought such attacks into picture, etc.

Qualitative, Energetic and Spatial Conceptions’ Insufficiencies (the theories of the outbreak of the hidden)

The preceding developments avoid resorting to the energetic and spatial metaphors. The trauma is considered as an outbreak of a real which the psychological apparatus straggles to integrate into the network of the pre-existing significance. Therefore, it has a potential value of a signifier. Nonetheless, it can be realised that there is no relationship of proportionality between the objective intensity of a trauma (what can be measured from the sensory stage) and its subjective consequences. Moreover, this conception does not necessitate resorting to the metaphors which presuppose a closed unit of the self under the form of an envelope or an imaginary framework. The traumatic event does not open a hole on a closed and homogenous unit which will be the self. On the contrary, the traumatic event affects an already hollow and divided structure and it just reactivates the conflict and the defence mechanisms which are put in place to remedy the inherent division. The notion of tampering, which is very important to Freud, finds its limitations such as the undue extensions of the concept of traumatism which some apply to any experience of rupture or loss in terms of exile and especially to cultural shifts.

2) Traumatism and Collective’s Psychology: Traumatism and the Other

The problem in the traumatic process is neither the function containing the envelope nor the real’s support fuction. It is through this concept of the ideal that we can understand how the traumatic process causes a rupture in the link to the Other and the Collective. In his book, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” [8] Freud draws a distinction between two very early modalities of relationship between a child and the parents, that is, the libidinal investment and the identification. The libidinal investment corresponds to the erotic investment, to the love that the child has for his parents or one of the two, while the identification is the process through which the child is going to adopt the parents’ ideals. These two modalities are independent. According to Freud, it is on the basis of the father that the ideal of the ego is going to develop. One can say that the ideal of the ego is an intermediary instance between the subjective and the collective which depends on the identification of the father or the parents, but beyond that, it refers to the identification of the collective ideals in which the father himself is identified. It is this collective link which transcends the family stage which authorises the transmission between generations. The speeches which are going to transmit the parental desire are going to be expressed in the name of the superior ideal which transcends the individualities, which may include belonging to a certain group, respect for certain traditions, attachment to a language, etc. The construction of the subjectivity is only possible through assembling these two stages, that is, the familial and the collective stages. The traumatic process of traumatic neuroses or war-neuroses precisely affects these constructions. In other words, the construction of the subjectivity requires putting in place an instance that we can call the Big Other, that is the Other, who constitutes the guarantee of existence of some kind. All the subjectivity is appended to this supposition of existence. For all the subjectivity and desiring mechanisms to work, firstly it is necessary that the subject be supposed to exist in the eyes of the Other. At this stage, we can refer to Lacan’s elaborations and his mirror stage [9].

And yet, in the traumatism, several dimensions of this relationship with the Other are attacked. The clinic realises them in different manners. So, while it reflects the sentiment of disaffiliation of some subjects, the traumatised man feels as if abandoned not only by the group to which he belongs, but also often excluded from the humanity itself. It is this sentiment of being dead-alive or this instant question of the survivors of the extermination camp, which is so often brought about by the significance of belonging to the human species. It is necessary to think about Primo Lévi’s book, “Si c’est un home” [10] or Robert Antelme’s, “L’espèce humaine” [11]. The traumatism which destructs the symbolic attachment and the collective ideals which support the subject up to then, destructs even the conditions of a possible subjective transmission.

We often forget that discrediting the ideal itself is a traumatising factor. The military psychiatrists have always observed that this is what takes into account the greatest frequency of the war-neuroses in case of a lost and shameful war as well as in case of a glorious and victorious war. This was the case with the Algerian War, which even designation as a war was only recently recognised. In the past, this was only talked about as euphemism of events in France. The Indo-China War also produced its own kind of traumatic neurotics who remained fixed, for some decades, to their pain and demand for recognition which did not fructify. Now it is a known fact that the Vietnam War produced more suicides among the veterans who came back from the War than among the soldiers during the War. It is this search for restoring the lost or discredited ideal which explains the often frequent prejudice sentiment and demand for compensation by the traumatised. Already soon after the First World War, Freud and his students had to vigorously fight against cowardice accusations of simulation which targeted the traumatised soldiers. These accusations confused their search for symbolic repairs with a trivial search for financial benefits. This gives some hints on the first step to consider in tackling the traumatism, that is, the search for symbolic recognition by the Other. In this particular case, the recognition cannot obtain if the psychoanalyst or the therapist focuses on the caricature models of non-reacting mirrors or absolute neutrality and cold silence which some believe to be acceptable. The Lacanian metaphor of the mirror stage enables realising another frequently observed aspect in our clinic of refugees and asylum seekers who are victims of atrocities. This is the so-called imaginary aspect in the Lacanian sense, that is, the one which will concern the body image. Some of our patients found themselves exposed to the unbearable spectacle of destruction, dismemberment, atrocious killing of their fellow men. Sometimes, they were even forced to take part in this destruction by being forced to join the malice as the Bosnian refugee told me a few years ago. This is a particular kind of traumatism which directly affects the narcissist-base of the composition of the subjectivity. This is a very archaic stage of the body image formation into a similar image which finds itself mal-placed with all possible consequences in terms of depersonalisation and anguish of division. This example makes us to realise how far we are from the erotic and sexual sphere of transference neuroses for which the traumatism always has more or less the same significance as the threat of being castrated. It is not the loss of an object which makes up the threat here, but the destruction of one’s own image and of the unit of his own body. The clinical result which could be observed is that of identifying the subject waste,i.e. an excluded object which is thrown away. The tone of these clinical situations rather forms melancholy than anguish. The subject finds itself twice excluded from the field of the Other by this attack of the imaginary composition of its ego and the destitution of this symbolic attachment to the ideals at the same time. Olivier Douville gave some very informative observations on this phenomenon as well as in what concerns the so-called society aliens, that is, people with special needs [12] such as the children involved in the War in Africa for which he is working, who are at the same time excluded from any social link and removed from their imaginary bases because of the violence to which they took part as young soldiers. Douville shows the cases of mental anorexia among the young African girls who correspond to this humiliation of the image of their desexualised bodies [13].

For the people who suffered this action of torture, rape and other forms of ill-treatment, it is quite often the link of confidence in humanity in general which is destroyed. All these actions and these experiences change all what the subject believes in up to then, that is, the manner in which he made himself the representation of the Other who enabled him to experience the sentiment of a common belonging, a relationship and a possible comprehension. It is this supposition of the common good or the common place which collapses in the traumatism i.e. the sentiment of common humanity. The traumatism, therefore, affects the deepest ends of the human being both in the construction of his image as human and in the symbolic significance of his belonging to humanity.

3) The Collective’s Trauma-Causing Influences

We have just seen how the consequences of some traumatisms could be explained in terms of the attack of the link to the collective ideals. Inversely, it is important to understand how some socio-political situations which constitute the regression or the perversions of the collective ideals in themselves can make up the appropriate field of the formation of symptomatology which is closer to the traumatic symptomatology which we have just talked about.

The different dictatorships which use the threat and the institutionalised lie are the causes of the total discredit of the institutions which are expected to represent the collective ideals of a nation [14]. The civil wars which radically dismiss the paternal figure of being able to avoid the fraternal bloody conflicts end up with this same dismissal of this symbolic figure which can support the ideal [15].

On the other stage, there is a kind of discredit of parental ideals which affects the immigrants’ populations in the Western Societies. The racists’ ideologies and speeches, concrete discriminations, the difficulties to integrate and the quite generalised refusal to recognise and to consider the particularities of the immigrants’ home culture are the causes of situations of precarious equilibrium on the psychological side, based on the cleavage which is susceptible to collapse into a minor incident or an existential accident. This results into a clinical picture which is quite stereotyped for the immigrant worker who falls sick or who is a victim of an accident at work. This is a brutal and profound narcissist down-fall which affects all the points of reference which support the migrant’s existence. He losses all desire, all working strength and all confidence in himself which often manifests itself in the form of drowsiness and the generalised phobias. He feels brutally and totally excluded from all his links of belonging, that is, being unable to exercise his role in the family. He lives in prison. He avoids all social contacts. These patients describe the daily conversations with friends or their children’s games as the real aggressions and they live them under a traumatic mode which sometimes causes violence. Nonetheless, they are totally battered from their community and their home-culture of which they feel excluded and abandoned to a cold solitude. The most frequent factor causing these well known states, which you may have realised, is this moment when children reach the adolescent stage, beginning to enter into a crisis of conflict with their parents. And yet in the particular situation of exile, this call to children includes the need to face the existing differences between the collective ideals of the home-culture and those of the host-country where the children grew-up or between the different generations. Nonetheless, in these pathological situations, it is as if the parents and often the fathers encounter a difficulty elaborating this conflict positively. They can only mourn and make sacrifices which are inevitable to create the new compatible compromises with the existing lifestyle and they find themselves frozen and blocked in a position that can be qualified as just traumatic. Once again, I refer to Olivier Douville who first described this psychopathology with precision [16].

The shame is the common result of all these traumatic situations rather than the anguish or quilt. The shame, in contrast with anguish, does not refer to the sexual oedipal scene but to the formation stage of the much earlier subject which should then again rather be situated at the formation of the ego in the eyes of the Other. It is rather a matter of striping down a man as described by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his, “Nicked Life” concept [17], a destruction of the humanity sentiment in the human being which refers him to an almost biological existence, that is, being battered from the symbolic affiliations which make up a real man. The diminished immigrants, big men fired from our societies, the children who are soldiers and other children involved in the war, the torture-survivors and others dehumanising ill-treatments, the despised war combatants, children of exterminated societies, share this fundamental shame in many ways.

The transmission of the traumatism can only be understood from the effects of this shame.

4) General Reflection on the Transmission of the Traumatism: Silence and Shame

The shame of the traumatised great men has a little to do with the modesty and its sexual origins. It rather corresponds to this archaic moment of the formation of the ego in the mirror to a stage where the I is not yet distinguished from the Other. Thus, this is why in these situations we observe the complex and reciprocal passages between the shame of the ego, the shame of the Other and the shame for the Other. This shame, for example in the transference, and also generally, could constitute an ultimate signal of humanity, an ultimate signal made to the Other as a call to reintegrate the social link. The shame would be the signal of the humanity nostalgia in some way.

What is it that traumatism will transmit when a traumatized person himself is in this position of exclusion from the social and genealogical link? When he is cut off, disappointed and abandoned by the ideal? In contrast with the situations in which libido, the life-drive and the principle of pleasure dominate the scene, where the transmission is firstly a matter of desire through their always indirect multiple manifestations and expressions, in case of the traumatism affair we have, under the influence of death-drive and to what can be called Subjective Impediment according to Cherk [18], what will be transmitted are therefore not the results of the desire, but the effects of the silence and shame.

The silence corresponds to this impossibility of transmitting a lived and symbolised experience, and the events which make a history for the subject who was victim of traumatism. Nonetheless, it is as much heavier for this subject and his relatives and the collective itself is going to take part as it is the case for these silences of the collective history which follows the colonial and genocidal enterprises. Here we see the very direct and concrete link between the possibility for a subject to symbolise his trauma and the existence of the collective fictions, speeches in public which serve as the places of metaphorization [19]. When the politics form part of the history of silences, there is no possibility of symbolising the foreignness in oneself, access to repression and oblivion is blocked.

The effect of this type of transmission was described in what concerns, for example, family secrets from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s elaborations [20]. It is not the signifiers of the unconscious desire which transmit themselves in this particular situation, but the phantom of a foreign body whose structure was connected to a crypt’s structure by these authors i.e. of an isolated and closed place, a separated enclave from the psychic space by the sealed partition. It is a grave which transmits itself, of the living-dead and the sign of the impossible pain of the traumatised.

I.Wandering and Traumatism

Now I would like to wrap-up my intervention by an evaluation of a clinical case which illustrates a certain number of points which I raised. It is about a man whom I treated for a number of months and who was presented to me as a big psychological patient, who was totally helpless and disoriented. He seems to correspond to this situation which many authors tried to describe under the rubric of the Psychic Wandering. A wandering which was part of the physical space because since his arrival in France six years ago, this Algerian man found himself wandering from city to city of which he did not find a fixed place to stay. Nonetheless, this was a special psychic wandering in the sense that it was the notion of the place and travelling itself which seems to be abolished. As Alice Cherki indicates it, the notions of wandering should not be confused with nomadism, which can constitute a lifestyle which particularly includes travelling and the stages which take place in a coherent manner under the framework of an oriented project. I would like to add that we should not at all confuse wandering with vagabonding which is practiced by some subjects of which we are going to talk about later. This is why wandering can be equated to long distance travelling as well as staying in one place or a standstill in space which is reduced to a vague terrain between two bars of a block of flats.

While Olivier Douville raised these situations of Subjective Disorientation, Alice Cherki talks about Subjective Impediment and Suspense in Exile and Jean-Jacques Rassial talks about Subject Breakdown [23]. The notion of putting the Subjectivity in Suspense corresponds well with the clinical case that I am going to write about. It allows insisting on the dynamic process which is working in some of these situations and which has a function of resistance against the investment of the psychological work. It also insists on the manner in which this suspense is going to be interrupted in the transference. Someone whom we shall present as M.B. introduced himself straight away as lost and being in total rupture with others. Having totally lost confidence in himself and attacked by frequent fits of hysterics, i.e. critical restlessness which he told me that it tends to make him stay alone, apart, away from any noise and people whom he could no longer tolerate. He either slept in the street or at the charity homes among the hobos or the down-outs who gave him an animal picture, according to him. With time during the interviews, the image he has of himself is going to take a sharply melancholic tone. After four weeks of repeated appointments, then the transference being established, he explained that he always felt disgusting, undesirable, a burden for the people around him or even a prisoner. However, according to him, this was how his father often belittled and despised him.

Right from the beginning, I made the possibility to meet this patient very frequently, almost daily. His situation was terribly alarming. In France, we have an opportunity, thanks to the universal social security coverage, which applies even to patients with irregular situations, to receive them in private services, that is Medical Aide. He seemed to be lost and terrorised. He firstly expressed an intense perplexity as if nothing around him would neither make sense, nor guide his speeches and his actions. This offer for an opportunity to speak under extremely flexible conditions had an immediate positive effect because the appointments took place on almost daily basis. He could even come without making any appointment whenever he wanted. Indeed, this marked a recognition which was brutally lacking to the patient. Nonetheless, the way in which I introduced this offer of speech eminently triggered a sentiment of curiosity and incredulity which, I think, were the main driving forces of the psychotherapy which followed. In fact, despite the intensity of the symptoms and the legitimate fears of passing to the auto-destruction act, despite the near–confusion state which could challenge the psychoanalytical work, I, on the contrary, straightaway insisted to him on the importance of taking time to talk and understand what was happening to himself. The doubt as to whether we were taking his speeches in such confidence did indeed not come until the end of our interviews. And to this man who had half-mast his desire, it was a combination of the analyst’s will, his curiosity and his explicit investment in the psychoanalytical work and listening which gave him the desire to know. In other words, the analyst should know, in some cases, how to directly show his will to kindly offer services to the patient when the latter proves to be so negative that he is even unable to imagine that anybody can be interested in him. And this idea of no longer counting on the Other i.e. the Little Other and the Big Other alike, is not based on pride or an eroticised call to the Other, but it is a true conviction which is very close to the delirious one that we observe in melancholy. Moreover, this patient had the suicidal ideas. He had made suicides attempts even when he was still in Algeria. He was affected by some incidents which were linked to terrorism because the small business that he did was destroyed and one of his aunts was beaten when he refused or did not submit himself to the bullying that the Islamists wanted to impose to him. He directly came to France after this event without even trying to ask protection in his home-country. This episode was apparently not the most striking of his story and he practically no longer made allusion to what was said during the first interview.

Nonetheless, without being victimised by the catastrophic incident in the DSM IV sense, he had a traumatic story in the sense that it seemed that none of the violent incidents that he suffered could neither be repressed nor elaborated.

All his family history was a chain of violent incidents. Being the first born with three sisters and a brother, he was always a victim of his father’s hatred and harassment. He never understood the reason for this violence. He even thought that maybe he was not planned and his mother’s fairly indifferent attitude comforted him, in this sense, though she was not able to protect him. All his life was marked by the fear of his father. Whenever it was the time to go home in the evening, he was always scared. He knew that even without a causal reason, he might be beaten. According to him, the only positive person who had never beaten him since when he was 11 years old was his paternal grand-father, who brought him to France for a kind of fantastical fixation. In fact, his grandfather had brought him to France to pass the summer holydays with an aunt as a way to congratulate him for the entry into the sixth year of schooling. This paralysing travel, as he remembers, turned into a constant pole of attraction which motivated him to escape from the family and Algeria. At 18 years old, before the metric examinations, he ran away to Paris to stay with his maternal aunt. They forced him back. His father rejected him again and he went to stay with his grandfather. He tried to escape from the region of his father’s home to stay with a sister in the Sahara. Nonetheless, still he lived in fear that his father might find him and threaten him. He finally left Algeria for France after the terrorist threats.H e expressed his shock, from the first week of this psychotherapy, concerning the interpretations that I proposed to him and the psychological work which worked in him. Thus, one good day when he recalled of his fear for his father and the fear which was associated to the family-house, he explained that he always felt at home when he was outside i.e. with no shelter. He straightaway accepted the link that I proposed him with his current situation of being without stay-permits in the street and definitely with no shelter. He answered that “yes it trapped me”.

The reinvestment of the psychological work, that is, thinking work and representation and speech, is quite quickly manifested itself by the appearance and stories of the numerous dreams. He was very astonished when he met his childhood places and people whom he believed that he had forgotten. Together with this psychological work reinvestment, gradually emerged the new affects. The resurgence of the images of the past or just remembering domestic-violence is the first cause of a paralysing anguish which is close to terror. This reappearance is accompanied by the sentiment of anger on me and it releases the vigorous reproaches which finally puts me in the transference, even taking the place of the torturing father. But already at this stage, the real which he related to me no longer frightened him, but it anguished him. Thanks to the link with the transference, the fear which was driven by the brutal aggression of the incomprehensible real gradually transformed itself into anguish against the Other’s enigmatic desire. From there, he was able to interrogate in the transference, the waste and useless image in which he identified himself in the form of a question which he asked me repeatedly, “Why do you make me to suffer like this?” What is it that I am to you that you compel me to speak and dream like this? I am just a subject of study to you, not a human being. I am just a formula. You don’t listen to me with your heart”, etc. Nonetheless, at the same time during my lessons, he thanks me wholeheartedly and hugging and kissing, assuring himself, incredulous that I accept to see him despite his infamy, that I am not going to reject him or call the police to deport him.

He became extremely receptive to the interpretations which I propose to him regarding some of his dreams. After some lessons, he did not sleep at night due to digesting my speeches and his dreams. An anguish, anger, perplexity and incredulity constantly mix up. What he tolerated the least were my exhortations to hope in any case, my interpretations when they target the manifestation of the desire to live in him and that they opposed the desperate defence mechanisms which he had put in place to prove or exhibit his decline and his permanently barred destiny. He told me that hearing this provoked headache in him.

To his surprise, within a few months, the sexual themes appeared in his dreams. By association of ideas, he remembered the sexual aggression which he never talked about to his parents. To his anguish, some aggressive desires and revenge towards some characters appeared, e.g. a particularly rejected grand-mother and his brother whom he killed in a dream. Nonetheless, the father continued to appear as a threatening and paralysing tyrant in a nightmare in which he revealed himself suffocating and making him to vomit. For several times, he had a nightmare in which the father appeared by urinating on him and molesting him at a very young age. He neither responded nor raised his voice in the presence of this violent and alcoholic father. Still at the age of 30, he did not defend himself against the punches. He wondered, “why this absolute domination?”

Six months after the beginning of this psychotherapy, the idea of castration appeared. In a dream, he saw a man who was cut his intimate parts. This took place in a courtyard, in the master’s house. There was a lot of blood and there were the police and the military. He steadily watched. Finally, there was something like an earth-quake i.e. the mountains which shook and got dislodged from their position. When he woke up, the following thought came up, “Do not make any move, you must stay in the shelter for the rest of your life, that’s all”. He accepted my interpretation, “if I move there is going to be an earth-quake and I risk being castrated”. Nonetheless, he is angered by the idea that maybe he pleased in his situation and he did not brave crossing to the stage which would free him from the fear. In the next two lessons, he was very angry and he accused me of wanting to reject him. To end his anguish he decided to surrender to the police, to go away from me. He forced me to hand him to the police to deport him, he also threatened to cut his neck in my presence in office using a cutter. He said, “I must choose death rather than live. It has to come to an end. I am tired of wandering. Although you do not want to believe me, this is my destiny”. The following dreams which will mark the end of the psychotherapy reveal a little bit of hope. In one of them (dreams), in trying to run away from danger, he found a house surrounded by a courtyard with trees, some air and some leaves, which make a shelter, in short. In the other case, he dreamed about his family which poisoned children. He was angry and he awakened the children. He chased away his sister and aunt. He saved four children but one of them died. In one of his last dreams he founds himself with me in a garden. I was him taking to the bar when a police cordon appeared all of sudden. I had a handbag. I took it then left and no longer returned. When he woke up, he was disappointed that I was not there. He uttered, “I believe that you do not like me”.

Some minutes later he teld me his decision to leave Strasbourg for Marseille, the only town in which he could make true affective relations for some years. He met an old man who protected him and a woman with whom he lived for several months. He took time to make this decisions and he managed not to take action as others who came before him did. He accepted a letter of recommendation to a colleague, and he decided to continue the psychotherapy work there. I currently do not have news about him.

I will not insist on the first lesson that one may learn from this clinical case, but it should be noted that the psychoanalytical lesson starts from the very first meetings with what we call the preliminary sessions which are part of the entire psychoanalyst’s work. And that this lesson can appear to be very efficient even for the cases that seem desperate, for people who appear to be excluded from the entire social link beyond the reach of our association.

What struck me in this patient as in all other exiled patients and especially Algerians is the traumatic tone of the entire speech. All the events of their past and current life, all their encounters seem to include brutal aggressions or the inconsolable violence. Telling out these events resembles living them with the same sentiment of fear which repeats itself as nothing else could be seen, as though no fantasy, no psychological elaboration could have enabled them to integrate them in a significant story. Here is what returns to the traumatic process that I have described above in the most classical case which we know. How can we reach there? I will make the following hypothesis using a factor which seems to have been triggered for this man, having known the terrorist’s threat which led him to take action and flee his country. What is it that happened to him at this time? He explained that he did not even think of going to report to the police to try to protect himself. In other words, he actually met the arbitrary and the decline of his country’s institutions which resonated in echoes with the arbitrary and the violence which always reigned in his family. Not only did he not find the sentiment of shelter at home, but also the state which is deemed to protect him as a citizen seemed to be incapable of giving him the minimum shelter. Probably for some vulnerable subjects, the downfall of the institutions of their country has an effect of projecting them in the world full of arbitrary within which all what happens is lived on a traumatic mode, that is, like the outbreak of the insane real , chaotic and arbitrary. This is what happens when the State is not worthy of confidence, when it takes part in assassination and the terror or when it encourages lying and denial as the State reality (we can think of the destruction which is produced by the famous law of amnesty in Algeria [24]). There is no collective ideal which remains. Suspicion in generalised and each person becomes an enemy and potential danger. This is the atmosphere that all the Algerians who arrived during the dark ages wrote to us. A society in which the social link itself seems to be so destructed that each neighbour or even a brother can seem to belong to the enemy or spy’s camp overnight. This kind of socio-political setting causes the trauma because it causes the disappearance of all the possibilities of the third-party reference of symbolisation or metaphorization which is worthy of confidence.

Nonetheless, this traumatic dimension is not expressed as in the traumatic neuroses because the Other to whom one can address himself is no longer available, even under the form of the commune’s complaint or of the repetition syndrome which necessitates at least an address. The only thing that remains is the psychological absenteeism, psychological wandering or even the direct psychosomatic translation at the body level. Therefore, this is what was witnessed by our Algerian medical colleagues who observed the high prevalence of psychosomatic diseases in the last decade.

The first stage of the treatment in these situations is therefore that of establishing a framework which includes the full presence of the analyst, which is likely to re-establish the sentiment whose existence is assumed in the eyes of the Other.

In essence, when the society is at the point of decay, and this was the case during the times of dictatorship in Latin America for example, it is still the case in many ravaged countries in Africa, the question is not that of explaining the appearance of the traumatic process than the one that has to do with knowing how some still manage to escape.

Conclusion

We conclude this work by insisting on the necessity of coming back to the fundamental questions which are asked by the psychopathology of traumatism to understand the most recent clinical facts. These include rehabilitation of the contrast between the death-drive and sex-drive like between the two opposed functions of the repetition, the one that symbolises the event and the one which maintains it at the state of a foreign body from the non-verbal real; the connection between the individual psychopathology and the multiple social and political determinants which contribute to create and maintain the traumatic state, the role of the historical memory blank on the traumatism transmission mode, the interest of returning to the psychopathology of traumatism and the symbolisation to establish the new clinics such as wandering.

Bertrand Piret, march 2007

Références bibliographiques

1. FERENCZI S, ABRAHAM K, SIMMEL E und JONES E (1919) Zur Psychoanalyse der Kriegsneurosen, (Einleitung von FREUD S.) Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Leipzig und Wien. Trad. Anglaise : FERENCZI S, ABRAHAM K , SIMMEL E and JONES E (1921) Psycho-analysis and the War Neuroses, (Introduction by Prof. Sigm. Freud), the International Psycho-Analytical Press, London, Vienna, New-York. Traductions françaises : ABRAHAM Karl (1918) Contribution à la psychanalyse des névroses de guerre, in œuvres complètes, T. 2, Payot, 1973, pp. 173-180 ; FERENCZI Sandor (1919) Psychanalyse des névroses de guerre, in œuvres complètes, T. 2, Payot, 1970, pp. 27-43 ; FREUD S (1919) Introduction à « La psychanalyse des névroses de guerre », in Résultats, idées, problèmes, p 245-247, P.U.F., 1984.

2. Voir notamment Simmel E (1919), in FERENCZI S, ABRAHAM K, SIMMEL E and JONES E (1921), op.cit.

3. Selon la distinction proposée par Adnan Houbballah, in HOUBBALLAH A (1998) Destin du traumatisme. Comment faire son deuil. Hachette, Paris.

4. FREUD S (1905) Fragment d’une analyse d’hystérie (Dora), in Cinq psychanalyses, PUF, Paris, 1954.

5. Cf. HASSOUN J (1987) Les Indes occidentales; à propos de la théorie des pulsions et de « au-delà du principe de plaisir », éditions de l’éclat, Montpellier.

6. DUPEREY Anny (1995) Le voile noir, Le Seuil, Paris, et l’analyse qu’en fait A. Houbballah (1998), op.cit.

7. ZIZEK S (2002) Bienvenue dans le désert du réel, Flammarion.

8. FREUD (1921) Psychologie des masses et analyse du moi, OCF, PUF

9. LACAN J (1966) Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, Écrits, Le Seuil, Paris.

10. LEVI Primo (1958) Si c’est un homme, Julliard, coll. Pocket, 1987.

11. ANTELME R (1947) L’espèce humaine, Gallimard, coll. Tel.

12. Par ex. : DOUVILLE O (1999) Notes d’un clinicien sur les incidences subjectives de la grande précarité, in « Exclusions, précarité : témoignages cliniques », Psychologique Clinique, n°7, 57-68, L’Harmattan.

13. Communication personnelle.

14. GOMEZ MANGO E (1987) La parole menacée, RFP n°3, p899-914.

15. HOUBBALLAH A (1996) Le virus de la violence, Albin Michel

16. DOUVILLE O. (1990) D’une position traumatique de l’étranger. Cahiers Intersignes n°1 : Entre psychanalyse et Islam.

17. AGAMBEN Giorgio (1997) Homo sacer. Le pouvoir souverain et la vie nue. Le Seuil.

18. CHERKI A (1997) Exclus de l’intérieur - empêchement d’exil, in Psychologie clinique n°3 «L’exil intérieur», Printemps 1997, L’Harmattan, Paris.

19. Cf. Cherki, ibid.

20. ABRAHAM Nicolas et TOROK Maria (1987) L’écorce et le noyau, Flammarion.

21. CHERKI A (1998) Figures de l’errance, in PTAH (Psychanalyse-Traversées- Anthropologie-Histoire) n°5/6, pp 67-72, ARAPS, Paris.

22. CHERKI A (1997) Exclus de l’intérieur - empêchement d’exil, in Psychologie clinique n°3 «L’exil intérieur», Printemps 1997, L’Harmattan, Paris.

23. RASSIAL Jean-Jacques (1999) Le sujet en état limite, Denoël.

24. Voir : Dr Abdelhak BENOUNICHE : De l’amnistie à l’amnésie, en ligne sur www.p-s-f.com (lien : http://www.p-s-f.com/psf/spip.php?article117)