Excerpts from a Presentation

Given at the Conference on History and Psychoanalysis

The role of empathic witness is extremely important in cases of trauma. For the last year and a half, I’ve had the privilege of being a case discussant in a clinical case conference for Ukrainian therapists, sponsored by the Freud Museum in Vienna. We see and hear about history in the making. We see how overwhelmingly painful experience leads to efforts to protectively dissociate oneself from it, a defense which plays into the enemy’s effort to obliterate history through false narratives. We hear about Ukrainian combat casualties – soldiers suffering the trauma of horrific experience, acute loss or moral injury – and we also hear about trauma in the broader society: bereaved spouses, children borne of rape, suicidal adolescents.

One part of the therapeutic effort, which comes from decades of experience within military psychiatry, is toward resisting this obliteration of history. It’s toward going to the front, so to speak, and recording whatever can be recorded. It’s toward bringing back the names of the deceased, the places where the disaster happened, the concrete objects that can be retrieved, and the stories, in whatever fragments, that can be told.

The psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, described what he called the Real – the register of raw, unmediated, overwhelming experience – as “that which never stops not being written.” Against this enormous repressive force – this unthinkable horror – is the task of inscription. This is what happens in these case conferences. The group and the Museum function as empathic witnesses with whom the testimony of what is happening can be given. Unspeakable experience becomes a story that has now been heard, and help has been given to the helpers. In a certain sense, the story can now be forgotten, in the service of moving on, because it has a place – the Freud Museum and its archives – and the bearer of the story always knows where to find it: the way that inscription on a tombstone marks the place of death and allows both leaving and return – Freud’s “fort” and “da” – in the service of mourning.

Francoise Davoine underlines the role of inscription in overcoming trauma. She notes that Cervantes survived his war injury and his time as a prisoner of war by writing. With her characteristic mix of wit and seriousness, she suggests that the designation PTSD should actually be PTSDQ – post-traumatic son, Don Quixote! After all, it was the latter’s adventures – what he faced, what he learned, and to be sure in the essential company of his sidekick – that were the cure for the trauma of their author.

The psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor, Dori Laub, elaborated on the therapist as witness and transcriber. Late in life, he visited the back wards of psychiatric hospitals in Israel, sat with psychotic patients who had been mute for years, and chatted with them about the weather or some other innocuous topic. Astonishingly, over time, patients who had literally not spoken for years told him the stories of what happened to their families during the Holocaust, none of which was in their records. This is cut-out history.

Dr. Laub’s work with psychotic patients in Israel’s hospitals builds on similar work done by the Parisian psychoanalyst, Jean-Max Gaudilliere. After months of regular visits and one-sided small talk with a patient who had been mute for years, she suddenly said to him: “Did you say yes?” Which, of course, he had by his faith in her troubled humanity. Most of the time we ground ourselves in the empiricism of “Seeing is believing.” But, sometimes, as both Drs. Laub and Gaudilliere show us, believing is the only pathway to seeing. For a profoundly traumatized society, as Ukraine is, this tenacity of faith is and will be enormously important.