How do we work through symptoms arising from trauma? Which is more effective, the talking cure, or bodywork?

I’ll give it away at once, my dear reader: traumas cannot be worked through, we simply cannot get at them. This is structural. Traumas, in fact, are not experiences. One does not experience a trauma, for the very reason that a trauma is the tipping point at which experience turns into the unexperienceable. This means that a trauma is the point at which reality breaks down. A trauma cannot be registered; something happens that we cannot grasp as an experience. A trauma does not merely occur because something unexperienceable happens, it is this unexperience itself.

To flesh out this claim, I will set the talking cure and bodywork against one another. By the talking cure I mean the speaking-out of the unexperience; bodywork attempts to relive the unexperience. Therefore, both are impossible. They complement each other’s failure.

The impossibility of the talking cure must be lived out in the body, that is, to be embodied. Conversely, the impossibility of bodywork must be spoken out with the talking cure.

Such a stance short-circuits the discussion of which of the two is more effective: the wavering question of whether we must get out of our heads in order to be embodied, or whether we ought to deploy our intellect by speaking from uncertainty (in order to think through the causes and consequences of the trauma). Put this way, it should come as no surprise that the inclination toward the body is preferred over working-through by way of abstract thought.

This inclination remains stuck in our inherent disembodiment, or more precisely: it does not know what to do with the core of the subject, its inextricable un-incorporatedness. This, we are to understand in the etymological sense of “making into a body”, from the Latin incorporo. Incorporation means including the subject into the larger whole of embodied reality.

The order into which, according to this inclination, we are to incorporate ourselves is the spontaneous, self-returned and balanced body. A promise that becomes ever more burdensome the more we hold ourselves to it, precisely because un-incorporatedness is framed as a confession of guilt, an individual deficiency that a full incorporation would sweep away. The subject will never succeed to keep this promise.

Hence, the promise of embodiment fails us, and not the other way around. The subject escapes its procrustean bed, its incorporation. The hysteria of the body, in the old-fashioned Freudian sense, is the result of an overwhelming event that cannot be registered as an ordinary experience. This impossibility leads to hysterical symptoms that repeatedly bring forth, in the body, this ‘remaining stuck in impossibility.’ The form taken by this unconscious compulsion to repeat is called the symptom.

Since this impossibility is unregistered — that is, unconscious — the subject cannot formulate an adequate response to either the trauma or the hysterical symptoms. Out of this muteness, the body abreacts. This bodily symptom, the abreaction, repeats itself until it is traced back to the actual response to the trauma, and this response is undone. Because this response has never taken place, the hysteric falls back on abreaction. The cathartic method reproduces the abreaction in order to trace the cause and undo the symptom. This means that the cause of the symptom must be put into words with the full weight of its distressing emotional charge. Indifferently speaking about the trauma without the false memory producing distress is not effective. The hysteric will return to the impossible memory in order to abreact it. The early Freud, in the foundational work of psychoanalysis, Studies on Hysteria (1895), is modest enough to note that this treatment is symptomatic and does not remove all the pathological effects of the trauma. It does, however, in his view, bring about new conditions for the healing process. During these formative years of psychoanalysis, Freud claimed that only the symptoms he had analyzed in their entirety could be permanently resolved, never the trauma itself.

Bodywork, with its promise, can indeed reduce the symptoms, and that is precisely what we do not want if the aim is to remedy the trauma. Depending on circumstances, it may be necessary to blunt the symptoms, but this takes us further from home — that is, from the trauma — and is not sustainable. The hysterical symptoms are mute, but they do say something and they are not deaf. Hence, there are also forms of bodywork that channel the libido (erotically charged anxiety) of the symptoms in a contained way, so that within that frame it can freely take its course and bring about a renewed incorporation.

The climax of this type of bodywork is reached in the most disembodied limit-experiences. However ecstatic these may be, they feed the promise of embodiment just the same — the dream that sustains the remaining stuck in impossibility.¹

The abreaction of the body, whether we diminish or intensify it through bodywork; the subject’s powerlessness over her body; the distance she experiences with herself; the strangeness of her own selfhood — this is where the talking cure comes in. As long as the impossible experience of bodywork sustains its own promise by repeating itself, we miss the transition to the talking cure and are rendered mute.

Here, bodywork touches upon the talking cure; in the incongruity of both.

Touch

Through bodywork the body comes into contact with the impossible. This touch is also at once not a touch. Bodywork does not embrace the wound but is the re-cutting of its scar.

Trauma comes from the Greek τραῦμα, meaning wound. This is derived from τιτρώσκω, which — poetically enough — means to pierce. This etymological connection is reflected in Richard Wagner’s Parsifal:

“[D]ie Wunde schließt der Speer nur, der sie schlug.”

[“Only the spear that struck the wound can close it.”]

The piercing makes the wound, is the wound itself, and is the only thing that closes that wound.²

The unexperience brought about by bodywork is that spear. It carves into the damaged tissue, so that the closing leaves behind a different scar, without erasing the traces of the old one, though these do take on a different meaning. The surface is not smoothed over or made even. We cannot un-live our traumas. The tissue nonetheless heals. Traumas get re-traumatized.

And what of the talking cure, the speaking-out of impossibility? Trauma is unspeakable; it speaks of its own accord in symptoms that are roundabout riddles. Because the trauma cannot be interpreted as though it were part of reality, it falls outside of it. The constitution of reality, however, is constituted by that which falls outside it: fantasy. Fantasy is beyond the limit of reality. There is nothing outside reality. This limit is not a fence over which we can step to see what it encloses. The fence merely makes it seem as though something falls outside. The function of fantasy is to support the coherence of reality from without. An example: language fails to fully map reality. There is always a remainder that slips away from linguistic mapping. Not because we have not yet mapped everything, but because the making-linguistic, the translating into language, is itself a symptom of the impossible. Language, then, does not fail formlessly; it fails in a particular way, in how it translates the non-linguistic. This form of translation is phantasmatic and is what makes reality cohere.

Fantasy gives reality shape as an order within which desire does its work. Desire is not out to attain fantasy. Fantasy, rather, is what gives shape to desire. Desire keeps the trauma at a distance by repeating its effects.

The subject’s speech approaching fantasy does not merely bring about resistance as a side effect. The very aim of the talking cure is to arouse this resistance, the resistance that makes the talking cure impossible. The unconscious resists being enclosed, resists incorporation into the register of consciousness. This means that the unconscious is the reverse side of conscious speech, its unspoken truth. The coherence of speech operates on the basis of repression.

Naming or exposing resistance is endless. Laying bare that it occurs, and that it is deceptive, is pointless. The judgment that, from the outside, claims that another subject is concealing her negativity does not know its own concealment of negativity, because it keeps at a distance the very manner in which this concealment takes place. But it is precisely this form of concealment in which the secret of the trauma lies.

The hysterical abreaction of the body and the resistance of speech stem from the same trauma. The roundabout riddles, the symptoms formed by fantasy, cannot be reduced to psychology because they revolve around an ontological impossibility. The unconscious is not mine; it is not my subjective interiority that I must live through or speak out in order to lay bare my symptoms and rid them of their grip. I must relive and re-speak the impossibility from which they originate, so as to let the relation that reality has to me be overturned through its traumatic reshaping.

Disavowal

Trauma is concealed in various ways. None of them can be distinguished from the trauma itself. In more technical terms, this concealment is called repression. Here we should not think of the suppression of emotions, but rather of the repression of the thinking of the irreconcilable idea, this impossibility that shapes our life-experience. The repressed returns as and in symptoms.

One can simply deny it: “I am not traumatized at all.” Through the talking cure, and above all through the unconscious slips of the tongue that occur within it, this denial is undermined, which produces resistance. The denial, its undermining, and the resistance are all effects of trauma.

Disavowal is a form of repression that does not deny the trauma and its consequences. Rather, it claims to have taken account of them. Disavowal assumes that the unknowable Other side exerts its influence. It presents itself as indifferent and consequently need not deny anything. The formula of disavowal is: “I know that I am traumatized and that I live in the wake of trauma, but because I accept this, I do not need to work on it, and I let it simply run its course through me. I know better than I need to know what leads me.”

Disavowal is the ‘reasonable’ form of repression, ‘conscious’ of traumas, symptoms, the subject’s fundamental powerlessness, and the un-incorporatedness of her existence. In the words of disavowal:

“I am fully aware of the negative consequences of my symptoms, that they conceal a trauma, and yet I do not let that awareness have any real impact. It’s all the same to me.”

Disavowal ‘takes account of’ all the facts, precisely so as not to have to grant them any meaning. For disavowal, there is no difference that makes a difference. In her unpublished dissertation manuscript titled Sexual Subjectivity: The Politics of Desire, Dutch philosopher Veerle van Wijngaarden puts it concisely as follows:

“A fact is disavowed when it is acknowledged and simultaneously rendered meaningless for the subject’s actions and self-understanding.”³

Repression can be disrupted by letting speech, through the talking cure, run up against slips that break up what speaks for itself, where this speech goes beyond itself and runs into a contradiction that it keeps repeating all the way to the unexperienceable. There, despair takes the upper hand. The I loses itself in non-being, in fantasy. The Other takes over. The repression that kept reality managable and bearable ceases to function. Repression guards the subject against approaching boundless loss of self. On the relation between anxiety and repression, Alenka Zupančič writes the following in her book Disavowal:

“Unlike some psychological theories which associate anxiety with uncertainty, the Lacanian perspective conceives of anxiety not as a reaction or a defence against (unpleasant) uncertainty but as a form of ‘awful certainty’, a ‘signal’ of the real, a feeling ‘that does not deceive’; anxiety is the outside of doubt, le hors de doute. The certainty at stake here, however, is not the certainty of being but, rather, the certainty of thinking that goes on out there, where I am not, and in this sense the certainty of non-being. One might say that anxiety — which is different from fear — is the closest we can get to the experience of the lack-of-being without repression or disavowal. Anxiety-as-certainty could be called an affect of the lack-of-being. This is why anxiety plays an important role in psychoanalysis: it can be used to orient us in analysis, and it needs to be administered in the right dosages, as Lacan puts it.”⁴

Anxiety is the only emotion that does not deceive; it is an awful certainty. The forced decision to call a halt to this unconscious thought-process (the certainty of non-being) closes off this dissolved, timeless and spaceless beinglessness, and casts the trauma in a different light.

Disavowal, however, already presupposes in advance that there is a fundamental self-alienation, that the subject is not identical to herself, that we are traumatized beings who unconsciously exhibit pathological symptoms. Here is Zupančič on the distinction between repression and disavowal:

“So, disavowal doesn’t make something disappear; rather, it changes, affects the nature and meaning of this something. We could say that it derealizes it. It affects its character of the real, as real — that is, as an extra-ordinary, surprising, shattering bit of our reality. When you perceive or learn about something and disavow it, it is because this something has the capacity to change reality for you; it is not just ‘any stupid thing’ from this reality. The same could be said for repression, of course. But whereas repression preserves the extra-ordinary character of that thing by pushing it out of our ordinary reality, disavowal keeps it as part of reality, yet changes its character. We could thus say that disavowal consists in making — what is for me, and perhaps not only for me — an extraordinary, ‘game-changing’ fact, an ordinary fact — but still a fact. What is disavowed is its shattering, game-changing dimension and not simply its fact, or its occurring. Perhaps it is this that we like to refer to as a post-factual world: not that there are no more facts — on the contrary, there are only facts around — yet they are ‘just facts’ and no longer carry any weight of the real.”⁵

Disavowal sustains a belief by proclaiming knowledge of its opposite. Disavowal is a form of repression that thus lets the repressed in, reduces it to ‘just a fact,’ and thereby manages to render it harmless. In ordinary repression, the repressed no longer forms part of reality, that is, until anxiety annihilates the I in the enjoyment of fantasy.

The consequence of disavowal is that even the most drastic changes are not registered as such. They are equated with insignificant facts, part of the unbudging and ordinary run of things.

The two main forms of disavowal are neurotic and perverse. Perverse disavowal has externalized its fetish into objectivity, and therefore need only state ‘I know very well,’ without the ‘but still I don’t do it.’ For neurotics, the knot lies in the second part. Their whole lives, they believe, against their better judgment, what is not true, and this ‘but still I don’t do it’ is what they repeatedly reinterpret, translate, and justify.

Let it be clear that an increase in knowledge is powerless against disavowal, because no fact needs to be denied.

So, back to our question: the talking cure or bodywork? Both forms of working-through disavow the belief they sustain, the promise that trauma as such can be worked through.

“I know very well that the talking cure and bodywork will not resolve my trauma once and for all, but still I must do my best to get as close as possible, with as much self-insight as possible, in order to grow.”

The Self-Evident Man and the Ambiguous Woman

Both bodywork and the talking cure are futile. Is that my conclusion? Why would we not prefer personal growth over melancholic despondency? We would deny the truth of both if we claimed that their impossibility is simply fruitless.

The crux lies in the far-reaching nature of the fantasy aroused by both, fanned by the anxiety that leads us toward their impossibility. Take, for example, personal growth, which is generally understood as an increase in consciousness. Things I would not have seen before, the symptoms of others, are now transparent. So, one has become more conscious. Can that be denied? Yet, in this stance that proclaims progress, aimed at a fully-grown state, lurks once again the being-affirmation of the I. This is grasped as mastery, power, or the illusion that self-understanding is what leads our lives. Here, then, we also find a form-effect inseparable from the trauma, where beinglessness is the rule without exception.

We are self-conscious to the extent that there is a form of knowledge that does not know itself — the unconscious, where thinking is because we are not. I am self-conscious because the blind spot that guarantees it is ineradicable, detectable only when glanced at obliquely, at the point where reality breaks down and in how I avoid that break. Take curiosity for instance: this ‘will to know’ is secondary, since it stems from the will not to know something, the trauma.

This break-down is experienced as an objective fate that runs counter to the affirmation of one’s being. At the same time, we derive our identity from it. Our own share in it is disavowed, if not denied outright. This form of fatalism sees the reconciling of impossibility with itself as something that comes at the cost of a flawless being-affirmation. The subject owes this fate a penance. She surrenders and attempts to submit herself. At this, she fails too.

Trauma disrupts the natural course of life and diverts it. The name for the repetition that forms itself out of this is the death drive, the compulsive return to lifelessness that produces its own disruption. The primacy thus lies with the lifeless, faltering repetition, not with the resistance to it in the name of a meaningful life. The natural course of life turns out to be a fantasy of neutrality that presupposes a trauma-free life. The choice of repression ascribes a meaning to lifelessness in order to preserve the consistency of one’s being-affirmation. The repression of beinglessness enables a stance one takes up in reality, the relation of the I to the Other.

This relation is split, that is, sexuated between masculine and feminine subjectivity. Jacques Lacan holds that woman is the symptom of man. Here, man stands for the being-affirmation that refers to itself (that speaks for itself), and woman for that which both supports and disrupts his being-affirmation. Woman throws man out of joint.

In sexuation, life loses its self-conscious, self-evident and neutral character. This split within relational reality, and its disruption, is ambiguous. Meaning is not identical to itself but is unstable. Insofar as the man (res cogitans) speaks self-evidently, says what speaks for itself, he denies himself his non-being by repressing the woman’s ambiguity within his definite being-affirmation.

According to Wijngaarden, that the man cannot recognize woman without allowing himself (his being-affirmation) to be undermined is structural. He deploys disavowal to sustain his fantasy at her expense:

“[The woman’s] ability to inhabit the ambiguity of being both subject and object is precisely what [the man] disavows, because recognising it would destabilise the fantasy of sovereignty that structures his sexual subjectivity.”⁶

The woman’s ambiguity dislocates the being-affirmation of the masculine I, not in order to flee his sovereign speaks-for-itselfness, which reduces her to an object, but — and here I paraphrase Wijngaarden — in order to articulate, within that very structure, a space for being-affirmation.⁷

The necessity of resolving the trauma (itself an effect of trauma), the ‘conscious’ choice of repression, presents itself as neutral, often as human, or even as life-affirming. Because this choice is supposedly neutral, its meaning becomes undeniably objective and rational. Consciousness sustains its neutrality by way of repression, until it shows itself, in anxiety that is absolutely certain, in its groundless bias. At that tipping point, the I collapses in the nullity of the Other. The Other — this symbolic entity that guarantees meaning — falters in the ambiguity of woman.

The I originates in trauma, is the repeated bearing-out of its effects, and loses itself therein. Every meaning we derive from this fact is its repression, and thus an effect of trauma. The choice, then, is not neutral, even though the fact presents itself as such. It is itself a one-sided effect of what it represses. Bodywork and the talking cure are creative forms for entering into a relation with fantasies of this kind, for developing them creatively to their completion.

“Creativity does not, of course, resolve traumas, but it is a way of dealing with them.” Since I assume you are a sharp reader, I know you will see that these quotation marks are there to show that this sentence has the structure of the formula of disavowal. And what if we cannot be creative at all? Then we would not even need to reject creativity.

Suppose, for instance, that our creative potential were held back by not yet having reached the right stage, a stage that, deferred to the future, is inaccessible. Whichever way we choose to argue for creativity as such, a being-affirmation is here posited as a final stage. A not-yet-attained state of fullness expresses itself in the being-affirmation of the I. Is every being-affirmation, then, to be rejected? Is the I’s deception thereby exposed? Of course not! As if that choice had not always already been made necessary on the basis of the reality we share! For the not-yet-attained fullness has, in fact, already been accomplished in how it repeatedly bears itself out in being-affirmation. It does not merely drive us on but sustains itself through its own disruptions, at least, so long as the compulsive re-enactment of the impossible is repressed. Put differently, the truth of potential creativity lies in its obstacle, not in whatever would supposedly become possible if the way were cleared from it.

Partial Drives, Death Drive

Obstacles sustain the being-affirmation by disrupting it. The partial drives circle around these obstacles and, in their escalation, are traced back to their origin: the death drive. Put differently, the partial drives are one and the same simple faltering rotation. Being faithful to this repetition — and not to any one particular partial drive — neutralizes the neutrality of the partial drives clinging to their respective obstacles. Nevertheless, each obstacle is an ineradicable stain, the subject itself, which falls out of reality in order to ground it, making total submission to reality, that is, incorporation into it, impossible.

The death drive brings about an irrevocable change of course that does not let the past be the past. It draws precisely on the past in order to rewrite it (through that which remains unwritten, namely she, the real subject herself).

A life without inward self-killing is indistinguishable from lifelessness. Therein, the death drive does not change course; the same trauma keeps repeating itself in the same effects. The temptation to set life against lifelessness rests on the dream, the presupposition, that consciousness and the unconscious will coincide in a total openness: the fantasy of a lifelong flow-state, constant creative change. To sustain this fantasy, one immediately adds that this ultimate final stage is impossible. This clears the way for taking it as the starting point of desire — so as to live, as often as possible, as close as possible to this state of flow. The being-affirmation thus continues to repeat itself, faltering.

Having rewritten a mode of repression is experienced as liberating because the unconscious is cut off and discarded for the sake of the certainty of a difference-making being-affirmation.

The Ethics of Trauma

Life is a game that plays us, until the weight grows so great that we can do nothing but raise an objection that we refuse to keep playing along. This withdrawing objection expresses itself as depression — the refusal to be played, because being-played is omnipresent. Then let it be my own game instead: an allusion to what I desire most of all, that which I have lost for good and will therefore never let go of.

Between the body’s screaming pain and the heaviness of the mind lies the cogito; it is what we are aiming at as we keep circling endlessly around it, until it exposes itself in the choice of repression that discards it.

The revolution of this whirlpool converts itself into a resolute anxiety that externalizes itself. It is like picking up a knife and turning the thick, meaningless fog of being-played back on itself, the disembodiment turned outward. Bodywork is the unspeakability that expresses itself in self-mortification, all the way to non-being, the traumatic zero-point. The talking cure is the summoning-up of the most stubborn, most deeply entrenched weakness, a slip that is not even mine, a failed promise of what should have been. Speaking runs up against mis-speaking, speaking beyond yourself, beyond what you say and mean.⁸ This mis-speaking is the proof of a thinking that has no agency, the non-I. That is despair spoken out in absolute certainty, provided the illusion of a listener is present who welcomes this exposure. The certainty of anxiety is an indubitable state aimed at the total erasure of self-consciousness, all the way into its neutralization, the fantasy in which the I is no longer present. The death drive neutralizes the meaning of the forced choice that results from it. The disruption forces a new decision from a nonsensical nullification that has no objective cause of its own, except the cause that is retroactively attributed to it by the decision.

We cannot not choose meaning; the meaninglessness of the form-giving nothing is inaccessible. Only by neutralizing the I in fantasy, that is, by undermining meaning by siding with its neutrality, can we destroy this meaning through the partial drives. The completion of meaning, its destruction, is traumatic madness, the freedom of the subject.

Unleashed in the death drive, we kill our dreams which turn out to be nightmares that repeat the same terrifying deadlock in the guise of its solution.

The dream and the reality within which this dream was pursued are both destroyed. A relationship is over the moment we realize that the way we dreamed within it is a maddening nightmare that has had its day. What might still have been is no longer desirable. The shared fantasy comes to an end. This means that what made the relationship bearable ceases to exist. In turn, it then becomes apparent that there was, in the first place, no shared fantasy at all, only the fantasy that something like shared-ness existed. This realization demands a symbolic suicide to obliterate the melancholy sustained by mourning.

“There is no way to face the trauma directly,” writes Zupančič,

“and that is what makes it a trauma — something that consumes us and is indistinguishable from the effect it has on us. The more traumatic it is, the more numb we tend to become. We need to wake up — not to forget it and shore up our defences by ‘rational means’ but, rather, to pursue the trauma and its consequences in the threads and cracks of our normal, everyday reality.”⁹

Ruthlessly faithful to trauma — an absurd and bizarre prospect. To pursue the trauma while knowing that direct confrontation is ruled out. Shall we pursue it, then, as best we can… even though we cannot? That is how disavowal relates to it.

The compulsion to repeat of the partial drives ends in the unleashing of the certainty of non-being, which is then closed off in the forced choice of being where I stop thinking.

Silvia & Maria

“Selbstporträt mit Silvia / Silvia Goldsmith und ich” (Maria Lassnig, 1972)

The painter Maria Lassnig chose two titles for this painting. Before the slash, her own name is omitted; in the second title, she habitually places her friend’s name before her own. The self is merely a representation of the subject, here in the form of a self-portrait. It then shifts one place over, and the other comes first, before it attaches itself behind her.

This painting depicts Cartesian modernity on canvas. Or so it seems. The blue canvas is framed on a white surface, the actual canvas. The painting is thus an appearance within the painting. It merely appears to appear. The painting differs from itself; it is not what it is. The painting contains a single element, and that is the painting — the blue canvas, to which it is not equal — and the empty space, which does not let the painting be itself. It is barely noticeable that the frame has fallen into what it enframes.

Silvia’s eyes look straight at us. Her dark dress with its bright red patterns immediately catches the eye. It contrasts with her modest bearing, which radiates resignation. Her face is just as caring as her left hand. Something unnatural clings to both — the hand especially betrays that this care carries something cold and distant within it. It is not a warm, spontaneous embrace. She has clearly prepared herself for this moment. She is alert and composed. She is undisturbed by the strange object she is in contact with, and in which her best friend sits. She takes her friend into account as though she were her equal, though she can also subtly suggest that she is more conscious than her. Silvia is res cogitans.

Maria’s upper body is bare. So, we see that her body is an artificial suit, res extensa. She slumbers dreamily in the ether. Maria represents the cogito, the unconscious. Hence we feel the pull to turn toward Silvia, the little other who is partly in contact with the suit of the cogito. Silvia’s gaze is cast upon us, the big Other.

The little other’s touch upon the res extensa links the cogito to the big Other. Maria touches nothing; she herself is not even present. The two asymmetrical little books against her cheeks seal off her ears; between that difference is where she sits, the split subject. What is written in the books is irrelevant. What matters here is the contentless difference of form, the fleeting thought-determination between her pre- and post-history. The two friends — as can be seen from the difference in how the light falls on each of them — are not in the same world.

And all this while the fine-looking friend effortlessly draws our attention, so that the flighty Maria remains, numbed, outside of our sight.

Silvia is, Maria thinks.