#symbolisation — Public Fediverse posts

From The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk pg 51:

All trauma is preverbal. Shakespeare captures this state of speechless terror in Macbeth, after the murdered king’s body is discovered: ‘Oh horror! horror! horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee! Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!’ Under extreme conditions people may scream obscenities, call for their mothers, howl in terror, or simply shut down. Victims of assaults and accidents sit mute and frozen in emergency rooms; traumatized children ‘lose their tongues’ and refuse to speak. Photographs of combat soldiers show hollow-eyed men staring mutely into a void.

Even years later traumatized people often have enormous difficulty telling other people what has happened to them. Their bodies reexperience terror, rage, and helplessness, as well as the impulse to fight or flee, but these feelings are almost impossible to articulate. Trauma by nature drives us to the edge of comprehension, cutting us off from language based on common experience or an imaginable past.

This doesn’t mean that people can’t talk about a tragedy that has befallen them. Sooner or later most survivors, like the veterans in chapter 1, come up with what many of them call their ‘cover story’ that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behavior for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organize one’s experience into language.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/10/12/all-trauma-is-preverbal/

#articulation #discursiveGap #real #symbolisation #trauma

The emphasis placed in Lacanian psychoanalysis on symbolisation isn’t an open-ended matter of putting everything into words. It rests on an account of libidinal economy in which some inarticulate matters are stumbling blocks for the subject, whereas others are not. This is how Bruce Fink describes it in the Lacanian subject:

One of the faces of the real that we deal with in psychoanalysis is trauma. If we think of the real as everything that has yet to be symbolized, language no doubt never completely transforms the real, never drains all of the real into the symbolic order; a residuum is always left. In analysis, we are not interested in just any old residuum, but in that residual experience that has become a stumbling block to the patient. The goal of analysis is not to exhaustively symbolize every last drop of the real, for that would make of analysis a truly infinite process, but rather to focus on those scraps of the real which can be considered to have been traumatic. By getting an analysand to dream, daydream, and talk, however incoherently, about a traumatic “event,” we make him or her connect it up with words, bring it into relation with ever more signifiers.

Contrast this with what Roy Bhaskar once characterised as the ‘free-wheeling’ conception of freedom found in someone like Richard Rorty, for whom self-articulation is a perpetual project without centre or foundation. Or the articulation of Taylor’s subject for whom, as Margaret Archer once (critically) put it, the emotions act as a ‘moral direction finder’.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/20/the-libidinal-economy-of-symbolisation/

#charlesTaylor #Lacan #libidinalEconomy #margaretArcher #reflexivity #richardRorty #royBhaskar #symbolisation