Trauma's Two Times: Japanese Wars and Postwars

What is it about the notion of trauma that continues to compel, after so many years of psychoanalytic attention? Can "trauma" still exercise any critical force today, after the rise of an entire specialized field of inquiry devoted to its effectivity (so much so that there are journals devoted to the topic, including Journal of Loss and Trauma, Journal of Psychological Trauma, and Journal of Trauma and Dissociation)?

"Trauma" continues to insist, and this very repetition discloses its continuing force. Its insistence marks what could be called the "trauma of trauma," to describe how trauma forces itself on us when we try to make sense of the violent, unassimilable experiences it designates. Trauma keeps reemerging to remark the difficulty of forgoing it. It seems we cannot do without trauma, and certainly trauma cannot do without us, or at least without the symbolic activity that would keep repeating its movements.¹

The range of trauma's meaning, however, has threatened to render it powerless. Moving in meaning from its originally physical rendering of a piercing from the outside (and the wound it entails), trauma has come to indicate, by metaphorical transposition, almost any form of psychological wounding and its attendant effects, ranging from and through dissociation and amnesia in multiple personality, to melancholia, to hysteria, to forms of neurosis. Rather than try to define trauma in a therapeutic sense, I would like to note here two crucial diacritical dimensions of trauma disclosed by Freud. First, trauma appears through its initial nonappearance, its emergence between two temporally distant moments, its character as an event never punctual but found only on repetition. It was in this dimension of nachträglichkeit, or "deferred action," that Freud found trauma to subsist. The classic scenario of original trauma stipulates a prepubertal seduction of a child, sexualized advances that are not absorbed as such by the child at that time. After the crucial transition to puberty, a second scene (and that is Freud's term), perhaps remarkably innocent, triggers a memory of the first scene that then occasions a catastrophic wave of recollection and sexual feeling that can overwhelm the ego's defenses. As such, trauma always pre-supposes (at least) two scenes, two events. The recognition of an event as traumatic occurs only after the fact, only as a memory. Indeed, the second time is the first time; the "first" never really occurs. This particular understanding of trauma, then, holds all kinds of implication for an understanding of catastrophe and the time(s) of its occurrence.²

Second, trauma (again, in its classic and arguably most powerful formulation: Freud's) undoes everyday understandings of inside and outside, of topologies of interiority and exteriority. In its use as a category of psychic wounding, trauma is expressly modeled on the surgical term for a catastrophic breaking into the body from the outside, a piercing. Yet according to Freud's considerations, there always has to be a certain "predisposition" (empfanglichkeit) of the subject that interacts with an exterior wounding to produce trauma in the psychoanalytic sense. On this understanding, trauma brings into play a relationship of interior to exterior that Freud further developed with his formulations of the uncanny and theorizations of the pleasure principle. What is remarkable about trauma as it emerges from the Freudian analytic, then, is that which would seem to be the most piercingly punctual, the most undeniably eventful in all its catastrophic contingency, the most rigorously exterior in how it exceeds all possible interiority, becomes precisely that which escapes all punctuality and all unambiguous location. Trauma is approached only across an interpretative gap, from the future; it occurs only when the inside (bodily or psychic) with its predispositions encounters an irruption from the outside in a particular way, which is only retrospectively open to remembrance (if at all). Trauma is thus one of those limit conceptions—not unlike the uncanny, not unlike the pleasure principle, not unlike the fetish—whose unplaceability gives it force. It teaches us as much about the limits of representation as it does about the unspeakable violence that describes a catastrophic event.

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