Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival [The Limits of Medical Knowledge and Historical Memory in France]

Figure 6: Conclusion: Prosthesis

201 In her 2000 book on trauma, Ruth Leys had stressed the profound and unresolved oscillation between mimetic and antimimetic theoretical explanations of traumatic experience. In the first instance, because of the extremity of the shock, the trauma victim experiences a post-hypnotic forgetting that invalidates the reliability of her or his memories. In the second, the trauma is a purely external event that befalls a fully constituted subject, and as such makes recovery and testimony unproblematic (298–99). Leys added that antimimetic explanations of trauma have tended to be favored by “positivistic and scientistic understandings,” whereas mimetic explanations drew upon rhetorical and psychoanalytic understandings. At the core of this debate lies the notion of mimesis or imitation as classically developed by Erich Auerbach in his 1944 essay “Figura” and in his most famous book, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western fi g u r e 6 “placing before or in public” richard a. lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. An empty thing, that is a phantom, [can] not take on a figure. tertullian, quoted in Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature Prosthesis Conclusion C a d a v e r l a n d 202 Literature (1946).1 Both studies drew upon the long rhetorical tradition to demonstrate that what Edward Said called the “shadowy [rhetorical] figure ” of figura provided “the intellectual and spiritual energy that does the actual connecting between past and present” (Auerbach 2003, xxi–xxii). Each of the chapters in this volume frames its analysis of the material presented within a dominant figura, or form of figuration.2 These range from the Lacanian concept of the Real and the impossibility of grasping it, and so the resulting shifts, or attempted strategies of displacement (both inward and outward), condensation, inversion, and dilemmas, to other more graspable, manageable, and expandable terrains of association. For example, camp survival was said often to have produced certain kinds of physical and mental disease. Given that causal framing, the resulting tendency was to move inward to the problems within specific understandings of psychiatry or medicine in various comparative contexts. Throughout, however, we also saw that these were not empty “theoretical” issues, but complex discursive formulations to explain the nature of “mental illness” (not to mention war and the affects of trauma), its causes, and how, if possible , to “cure” it. As well, within these formulations, we encountered further forms of figuration—figures of suffering, of classification, and of the transformation of the survivors themselves from victims into exemplars of heroism appropriate to the murderous conditions of modernity at war. Additional possible figurations were not discussed.3 François Abalan’s 1987 Diplôme d’études supérieures (des) in psychiatry was the first French attempt at a systematic review and analysis of the neuropsychiatric literature of the previous forty years on the consequences of deportation.4 Here, he pointed out (finally!) that there were qualitative differences in the findings whether the group being studied was made up of non-Jews or Jews, and noted that despite the “stereotypical” traits of each, considerable concordance was found between the two (Abalan 1987, 268). Abalan even attempted a figure that represented a model of each (272–76). In the case of non-Jews, psychic trauma with anxiety, depression in the camps, malnutrition, and age produced a core of persistent anxietydepression reinforced over time by invalidity and malnutrition on the one hand, and intellectual deterioration on the other. The possibility of a form of senile dementia of the Alzheimer type could not be excluded. Among Jews, the cerebral-organic component presented less frequently; moreover , on the psychic level, one was dealing with a different type of neuro- P r o sth e sis 203 F i g u r e 6 sis—call it “persecution” or “survivor” syndrome—that did not figure in traditional psychiatric nosology, but showed greater similarity to reactional schizophrenia (274), rated higher scores of emotional distress, and strong psychic reactions to external events, such as the Eichmann trial.5 In other words, the differences were two-fold: much more intense psychic trauma among Jews, and a greater prevalence of age-related intellectual deterioration among non-Jews (because they had not been subjected to “selections” that weeded out the aged and the sick). While Abalan did not go explicitly down the road to the dangerous stereotype of psychic differences between Jews and non...