Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature and Psychoanalysis by David Aberbach (review)

118 LFITERS IN CANADA 1990 Kingston, and E.L. Doctorow may seem conventional as narratives, but they challenge racial or gender or historiographic stereotypes in a fashion that registers as postmodernfor Hutcheon.This takes postmodernism outofthe white, male, formalistically avant-garde preserve that it occupies in other definitions, and fruitfully links works that have been seen as belonging to different impulses within the culture. If Shklovsky's art makes us see the stoniness of a stone, Hutcheon's postmodernart makes us see the mearis by which we attach to that stoniness, and consider what we mean by placing that representation in a museum, a shrine of economic and cultural power. (KATHRYN HUME) David Aberbach. Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature and Psychoanalysis. Foreword by John Bowlby Yale University PreSs 1989. xi, 192. US $22.50 Jonathan Swift lost his father before birth and was kidnapped from his mother at the age of one. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's mother died when he was nine days old. When he was still a child, he and his father would spend entire nights reading her novels.John Lennon was neglected by both of his parents. These and numerous other examples of early loss or neglect in the lives of writers, thinkers, and public figures form the basis of David Aberbach's book, which he calls 'the first full-length thematic study of loss in literature.' Generally consonant with the work on loss and creativity by Anthony Storr and on attachment and loss by John Bowlby (whose brief foreword to the book is disappointing), the study is valuable for its discernment ofsimilarities in the effort to master delayed grief among such diverse areas as literature, dreams, memories, mysticism, philosophical ideas, and charisma. As Aberbach delves into the lives of his selected subjects, however, the connecting thread becomes frayed, as the very breadth of his investigation brings him on occasion close to the kind of reductive analysis he declares himself at pains to avoid. With a few exceptions, such as the reduction of Gulliver's Travels to an infant's response to loss, Aberbach seems to be on safe ground when focusing on literary texts. His study helps us to understand that the fetishistic attachment to objects in such works as Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, and 'Ligeia' is comparable to the strong longing for reunion in mystical confession and that the association of inanimate objects with a dead loved one in poetry may be a stage in the mastering of grief. His method is equally useful in elucidating works such as John Donne's Anniversaries orTennyson's In Memoriam, where the emotion 'appears to be in excess of the facts.' Furthermore, Aberbach has some interesting thoughts on charisma. Using Max Weber's definition of the phenomenon as 'the interconnection HUMANITIES 119 of the personal and the public need: he examines the lives of various public figures who suffered early loss or neglect. The description of how Hitler was able to project both his inner wound and the possibility of a strengthened selfonto a prostrate German nation is particularly suggestive if lacking in depth. Reference to Alice Miller's examination of Hitler's childhood in her 1980 work For Your Own Good (English translation, 1983) would have been useful. However, it is in his chapter on loss and dreams and, even more, in the chapter entitled 'Loss and Philosophical Ideas: where (as in the case of Spinoza) the evidence seems too obviously cooked to fit the theory, that Aberbach's method lets him and the reader seriously down. In discussing an account ofa Descartes dream, Aberbach suggests that the philosopher's loss of his mother as an infant may have caused the insecurity which led to his philosophical distrust of the evidence of the senses and his relentless search for truth. The analysis is simply too brief to be convincing, the conclusion hopelessly hedged by qualifiers. By contrast, the suggestion in the same chapter that Thomas De Quincey's exaggerated grief at the death ofKate Wordsworth is explicablein terms ofearlier unresolved losses rings true, but equating the case of Descartes with those of De Quincey and others begs some basic questions. The investigation of the two great psychological theories...