Abstract
From seemingly juxtaposed disciplines, Clara Mucci and Thomas Trezise assess an established canon in trauma theory and Holocaust studies that has influenced our thinking since the 1990s. Mucci, professor of literature and psychology at the University of Chieti (Italy), reviews psychoanalytic, neurological, and literary approaches to questions of trauma, mourning, and subjectivity. Trezise, an historian and scholar of French and Italian literature at Princeton, argues that theories of trauma and the Holocaust can obfuscate survivors’ stories and limit both our ability to understand their experience and our knowledge of the subject. Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, these books present some of the most important interdisciplinary scholarship being done today on trauma and witnessing. At once discerning and scholarly, they ask us to reconsider the relationship between trauma, collective memory, and subjectivity.
Mucci’s comprehensive study is a must for anyone seeking an introduction to trauma studies, but it is also incredibly useful to those who have long been reading and practicing in the field. It is not exclusively about Holocaust trauma, though it begins and ends with the literature and theory of the Holocaust as a way of understanding the complexities of trauma more generally. Reflecting her advanced training in both literature and psychoanalysis, Mucci’s text is rich in close readings of the nuances of both testimonial and theoretical texts, but also comprehensive in its references to infant research, attachment theory, neuroscience, and comparative psychoanalysis. For Mucci, simultaneous attention to the traumatized individual and the social world is essential to the restoration of self and community in the aftermath of atrocity.
Trezise may be familiar to psychoanalysts from his much discussed challenge to the work of Dori Laub that appeared in History and Memory in 2008 (reprinted in the book as chapter 1). He credits Laub for alerting readers to the role of the listener in the witnessing process, to the witnessing of witnessing that has become a prevalent theme in Holocaust and trauma studies. But he also criticizes Laub for misrepresenting the survivor, trying to persuade his audience with rhetorical flourishes that embellish the survivor’s story and, most important, with casting the survivor as a victim who is rescued by a listener. Trezise particularly opposes Laub’s idea that any survivor “is ‘breaking out of Auschwitz by . . . talking’” (p. 15). He attributes Laub’s errors to psychoanalytic training, which trapped him into imagining survivor testimony as a recovery of agency.
If Laub is impaired by his psychoanalytic lens, Mucci’s extensive citation of his work in her account of working with trauma certainly does not show us that. Beginning with attachment research in chapter 1, she describes how a constellation of damaging early life experiences can affect later responses to stress. Her aim is to place individual theories of trauma in a wider social frame. She uses Laub and other authors to show how individual responses to trauma depend on the quality of attachment, the resiliency of the self, the cultural and personal meanings attached to the event, the presence of support, and the degree of subsequent repetition of the trauma.
Mucci’s second chapter, which ends with a beautiful summary of Laub’s work on testimony, is the most comprehensive approach to the subject of psychoanalysis and treating trauma that I have read. She first reminds us that trauma does not form unconscious representations to be accessed; it thus must be worked through in analysis as repetition, but with a difference. She then underlines the analyst’s empathic role in the reconstruction and working through of trauma, noting that the authoritarian, purportedly neutral stance is inherently hostile to the suffering survivor. Turning to the psychic and neurological symptoms of trauma, including memory distortion and dissociation, Mucci explains the various roles clinicians must play. They must at once maintain an empathic and cautious stance, provide information to the survivor, and resist falling into a role that might repeat the trauma and lead to further suffering. Here she emphasizes the necessity of a particularly attentive form of listening to Holocaust testimony, and offers an overview of what that kind of listening might look like.
Trezise nearly echoes Mucci’s account of the listener’s importance in the witnessing process when he announces a sobering fact: we face “a future in which the fate of Holocaust survivor testimony will depend entirely on its reception by those who were not there” (p. 1). Insisting that the reception of Holocaust testimony is as important as its transmission, he urges us to recognize the ways in which our own “listening impairments” stand between us and the realities of survivor experience. Here Trezise challenges the approaches of Dori Laub and Cathy Caruth that Mucci finds most convincing. He adds Berel Lang, Giorgio Agamben, and Emmanuel Levinas to the list of those whose “act[s] or practice[s] of reception” can become infused with biases that cloud perception. Trezise identifies two major aspects of what he calls a profound listening impairment or an “unjustifiable appropriation of survivors’ experiences or both” when listeners to Holocaust testimony fail to attend to the frames through which they receive their accounts (p. 3). First, he questions the popular assumption that Holocaust experience “is intrinsically unspeakable.” Second, he identifies what he terms the “sacralization of the Holocaust,” in which the actual historical events and individual survivors’ experiences are obscured by a reverential treatment of the subject (p. 2).
Taking a step back, Trezise notes that our ways of hearing testimony are based on assumptions about the nature of community, the genres in which survivors speak, how we handle the fact that survivor testimony may contain what we know to be historical inaccuracies, and our modes of interpreting the ethically or politically troubling material we hear. He is particularly interested in ways of framing knowledge that, out of our awareness, can turn interpretations of testimony away from the survivor’s own words and sentiments. He illustrates a point made long ago by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1840): “the field cannot be seen from within the field.”
Nonetheless, the Holocaust narrative does not precede the telling of the story, but is in fact produced by it. This is Laub’s argument to the historian, and Trezise agrees, taking to task historians who purport to know the one Right Story. Once Trezise grants Laub this point, his critique of psychoanalytic approaches to witnessing turns to his own discipline. History, like psychoanalysis, is for Trezise a matter of narrative performance. But whereas the historian is interested in the collective experience of the Holocaust, the psychoanalyst attends to the individual. If historians “devalue or dismiss” the individual story that Laub interprets, it is in part because their interests lie in documenting a collective story, ands in part because historians assume that historical truths are found and not made, that “facts speak for themselves” (p. 38).
Trezise juxtaposes history and psychoanalysis to draw attention to the impairment of listening that can happen to any theorist when “the listener [usurps] the place of the witness” (p. 25). But Trezise would do well to read Mucci and learn a bit more about psychoanalytic theories of the relationship between community and trauma. Mucci too believes that attention to trauma as a collective or public experience is essential to understanding and treating its effects. But where Trezise faults Caruth for misreading the “impossibility of knowing” the traumatic events of the Holocaust, Mucci shows how it is quite likely that a victim might remember and forget the trauma at the same time: remembering the details while forgetting the affect, for example. The listener must also understand that both forgetting and remembering take place within a larger cultural context in which the perspective of the observer plays a central role.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the social world’s role in the individual’s experience of trauma is the way its effects can be passed from one generation to the next: the transmission of trauma. Mucci devotes her third chapter to this phenomenon, citing Vietnam and the Shoah as cases in point. First she establishes the traumatic effects of such events on the human psyche; she then shows how likely it is that individuals, unable to contain the totality of their responses, will instead pass them on undigested to the next generation. Her discussion of work with the neurobiology and treatment of second and third generations of trauma survivors introduces an element of ethical responsibility on the part of the listening therapist. Like Trezise, who warns us against theorists like Berel Lang, who perpetuate a very literal interpretation of Adorno’s statement that there should be no poetry after Auschwitz, Mucci does not allow us to relegate Holocaust experience to another, unrepresentable world. This “other” world is precisely what Mucci attempts to help therapists enter with their patients.
What can we say about theory and ethics after Auschwitz? In her final chapter, “Going beyond Trauma: Mourning, Connectedness, Creativity, and the Practice of Forgiveness,” Mucci stresses the role of the restoration of community, emphasizing recovery from trauma as an intersubjective experience. “Surrendering to the rhythm of the other” is a way of generating thirdness in the human brain, moving the survivor from silence and anger into forgiveness and self-love (p. 202). Trezise challenges those who would argue that this is not possible, rejecting Agamben’s idea that theory has become murky and meaningless after what Primo Levi has called the “gray zone” of Auschwitz, in which victim and perpetrator became indistinguishable. Not only is this not true, Trezise asserts, but the conception of the impossibility of representation reduces the subjectivity of the survivor to that of the walking dead. And if Levinas adds anything to our conversation about ethics after the Holocaust, it is not because of his tendency to universalize and obfuscate, but because his discussions of Auschwitz leave him standing alone at the edge of a gaping abyss (p. 221). Mucci’s citations of psychoanalysts and writers like Elie Wiesel assemble a much more hopeful group of writers who articulate a road to community rather than a foggy or nihilistic chasm of theory. Trezise would add Charlotte Delbo to this list.
Thus, in a brief conclusion, Trezise underlines the role of the witness who “welcomes” the survivor back to the human community from which he or she was estranged (he suggests that we might soon need to welcome the children of survivors as the survivors pass away). But, we may ask, doesn’t this formulation contradict much of what he has established in the book, namely, that witnessing the Holocaust is heterogeneous in terms of transmission and reception? Mucci’s more nuanced exploration of subjectivity helps by complicating this final vision. Many survivors insist that they never ceased being human while in the camps; they simply ceased being treated as human by those who sought to imprison, torture, and exterminate them. Mucci’s work on the multifaceted relationship between guilt and forgiveness supports this understanding. Taken together, in their very different ways of approaching a vast topic, Trezise and Mucci offer us tools to acquire a new understanding of trauma, the human subject, and the social world. I benefited enormously while reading them, but I most appreciated them on a recent visit to Auschwitz. There, standing before a warehouse-sized pile of Hungarians’ shoes, I realized that these writers are one hundred percent correct when they emphasize silence as but one small part of bearing witness.