Supposing Bleak House

3. Psychoanalysis


 3 PSYCHOANALYSIS The approach that I have adopted thus far to reading Esther Woodcourt’s narrative and to understanding some of the illustrations that I take to be focalized by her relies to a great extent implicitly on terms and concepts derived from psychoanalysis. It is time to make some of these concepts more explicit and to explore what I regard as the proto-psychoanalytic mythic structure that underlies the stories of Esther and her mother. One important set of psychoanalytic ideas that informs my reading of Esther comes from trauma studies. The study of trauma and its effects on individual and collective memory has been a rich field of investigation since Freud and especially since his case study of the Wolf Man (written originally in 1914–15 and published in 1918) and his metapsychological paper Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Freud’s interest in trauma dates from his earliest papers on hysteria, jointly authored with Breuer. One direction of his thinking, much debated by later critics , concerns the so-called seduction theory and the question of whether patients’ reports of early sexual abuse by parents or other adults were in fact real or merely fantasies. Freud’s most important contributions to trauma theory, however, date from after World War I and grow largely out of his awareness of the problems experienced by soldiers suffering from war neuroses or shell shock. From these studies, and in papers P S YC H O A N A LY S I S 45 such as “The Uncanny” (1919), he developed his important ideas about repetition compulsion and the return of the repressed. In footnotes added later to his Wolf Man case history, moreover, he returned to the question of whether traumatic memories (so-called primal scenes) were real or imagined. Unable finally to decide this question, he offered the concept of Nachträglichkeit, translated into English as “deferred action ” and into French as “après-coup,” in order to deal with the hermeneutic undecidability posed by his analysis of the Wolf Man’s famous dream. It does not matter, he concluded, whether the patient’s observation of parental intercourse was the source of his neurosis or whether his later observation of animal copulation, projected retroactively upon the parents, served as the basis for a fantasy about them that subsequently appeared in the dream and functioned as an event. In either case, the result, the analysand’s neurotic structure, is the same. In the latter case, however, normal temporal order would be reversed (the Nachtr äglichkeit effect), and a subsequent event could then be understood as the cause of a prior one. The concept of “deferred action” and of belatedness or “afterwardsness” more generally has greatly interested subsequent theorists in the fields of psychoanalysis, narratology, and epistemology. Important contributions to trauma studies have developed in the wake of other major historical catastrophes, notably the Holocaust, Hiroshima , and Vietnam, as well as in clinical treatment of patients suffering from the effects of childhood sexual abuse and other early emotional injuries . Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has become a widely recognized (andsomewouldsayoverused)diagnosticcategoryinthetreatment of such individuals. The hypothesis of cross-generational transmission of trauma has also been proposed, especially in regard to the children of Holocaust survivors, but for other populations as well. Another influential model for understanding trauma, one that offers an interesting parallel to Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit, has been developed by Robert Stolorow and his colleagues. Stolorow proposes a biphasic, relational model of trauma. According to this model, the original “traumatogenic” event is insufficient by itself to produce neurosis . “Pain is not pathology,” Stolorow writes. What produces pathology , he argues, is the lack of attuned responsiveness on the part of parents or other caregivers toward the child who suffers an unbearable affective 46 S U P P O S I N G B L E A K H O U S E injury. It is this later failure of response that “seals” the original injury and confers upon it a pathogenic power over the afflicted subject. In a sense, then, Stolorow’s biphasic model, like Nachträglichkeit, attributes causal force to a subsequent experience that activates pathological power latent in the original wound. Unlike Freud, however, Stolorow does not question the reality of the original event. Especially valuable for me in thinking about trauma in relation to Bleak House has been the work of Cathy Caruth. In Unclaimed Experience...