The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Nine: The Equivocity of Reparation: From Elasticity to Resilience

171 n i n e The Equivocity of Reparation: From Elasticity to Resilience The problem is quite simple. All we need to do to make it complicated is pose the question clearly. To this effect I shall ask: What is an event? What is this traumatic violence that rips the protective bubble around a person? How does a trauma become integrated into the memory? What is the nature of the scaffolding that must surround the person after the uproar to enable him to resume life despite the wounding and the memory of it? — b o r i s c y r u l n i k , The Whispering of Ghosts Freudian Definitions of Plasticity life and death, construction and destruction The Freudian concept of plasticity, we must recall, essentially designates the imperishable character of psychic life. This character is profoundly ambiguous because it corresponds to two contradictory significations of the term “plasticity”: it refers both to the reception and donation of form and to the annihilation of form. On one hand, indeed, the imperishable character of psychic life entails the persistence of the form of memory and its potential reactivation. On the other hand, Freud understands this same character as the paradoxical work of the death drive, a retrograde force that tends to restore a state anterior to life. The imperishable character of psychic life then becomes the paradoxical synonym of a return to the nonliving that annuls any form or any inscription within the neutrality of the inorganic. 172 On the Beyond of the Pleasure Principle One can thus postulate that, for Freud, there are two plasticities within plasticity: constructive plasticity and destructive or mortiferous plasticity. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud writes, citing the biologist Ewald Hering: “According to E. Hering’s theory, two kinds of processes are constantly at work in living substance, operating in contrary directions [entgegengesetze Richtung], one constructive or assimilatory [die einen aufbauen—assimilatorisch ] and the other destructive or dissimilatory [die anderen abbauend— dissimilatorisch].”1 He affirms that these two directions allow us to recognize “both of our instinctual impulses, the life drives and the death drives.”2 Each drive would be assigned its own physiological process: either construction (Aufbau) or decomposition (Zerfall). Construction is formative in the sense that it forges bonds: Eros is a drive of synthesis that consists in always multiplying relations between existing units. Death, on the contrary, is fragmentation, the deconstitution of form, analysis. In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud writes: The aim of [Eros] is to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus [erhalten]—in short, to bind together [Binding]; the aim of the [destructive drive] is, on the contrary, to undo connections [auflösen] and so to destroy [zerstören] things. In this case of the destructive drive we may suppose that its final aim is to lead what is living into an inorganic state [anorganischen Zustand]. For this reason we also call it the death drive.3 The same idea is developed in Civilization and Its Discontents: Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that, besides the drive to preserve [erhalten] living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary drive seeking to dissolve [auflösen] those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic [anorganisch] state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was a drive of death. The phenomena of life could be explained from the concurrent or mutually opposing actions of these two drives.4 The erotic tendency to bind and to form is present within every living unity, within each cell. Likewise, unicellular beings tend to unite with one another in the course of evolution in order to form complex organisms: “It appears that, as a result of the combination of unicellular organisms into multicellular forms of life, the death drive of the single cell can successfully be neutralized and the destructive impulses be diverted on to the external world through the instrumentality of a special organ.”5 This same plastic The Equivocity of Reparation 173 movement of union and unity is at work within human societies and marks the origin of civilization. The latter, in fact, “is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity...