Conceptions of Trauma

Okay so I'm going to stop posting, but I'll offer some parting words by quoting something I found last night. Don't worry, quoting a part of it counts as 'fair use' so it is all fine and dandy:

'Freud and Janet make an interesting contrast. During the 1890's each man was fascinated by trauma, but the traumas they chose to emphasise were profoundly different in character. Janet castigated Freud for emphasising sex, and instead insisted that a great many of his hysterical patients were afflicted by nonsexual trauma. Yet what I consider the crucial difference between the two men had little directly to do with sex. Janet's early examples of traumatic experiences include being immersed in freezing water at the time of menstruating, or sleeping beside a child with a gross skin disease of the face. The trauma itself is not a human action. It is not somebody doing something, to you or to another. It is an event, or a state. Of course the young woman got into the tub of freezing water; the girl was made to sleep beside a sick child. But the actual trauma was the cold water, or the skin of an infected face. Human action, what philosophers call action under a description, enters Janet's tales of trauma extraordinarily infrequently. Freud's traumas almost always involved somebody doing something, an intentional action. People and their deeds were central to Freud's traumas; the world at large was the stuff of Janet's. It was as if Janet painted Dutch landscapes of trauma, in which people appear at most on the horizon, while Freud painted Dutch interiors filled with people in action, bickering, bartering, seducing.

Because Janet's trauas were impersonal they did not invite reinterpretation, especially when it came to memory work. Because Freud's traumas involved human actions they invited reinterpretation in memory. I argue in chapter 17 that the possibility of redescribing human action, of making it action under a new description, is central to our problems about memory today. They were automatically present to Freud, and excluded from Janet's studies, by the very choice of the traumas to be remembered...

I see Freud as driven by a terrible Will to Truth, illustrated by a second contrast with Janet... His early theory on the specific etiologies of the neuroses would have delighted seventeenth-century intellects; Leibniz would have loved it. Freud aspired after such theories all his life and, like many a dedicated theoretician, probably fudged the evidence in favor of theory. Freud had a passionate committment to Truth, deep underlying Truth, as a value. That ideological committment is fully compatible with - may even demand - lying through one's teeth. The emotionally felt aim is to get at the Truth by whatever means.

Janet had no such Will to Truth. He was an honourable man, and (we might say hence) he had no inflated sense of the Truth. He dealt with traumatically caused neuroses by convincing the patient that the trauma had never happened. he would do this by suggestion and hypnosis whenever he could. Take, for example, his early patient who at the age of 6 had been made to sleep beside a girl terribly suffering from impertigo on one side of the face. His patient would break out in hysterical marks, and would experience loss of sensibility, even blindness, on that side of her face. So Janet used hypnosis to suggest to his patient that she was caressing the soft beautiful face of the girl she had lain beside at age 6. All symptoms, including the partial blindness, disappeared. Janet cured his patient by telling her a lie, and getting her to believe it. He did this over and over again with his patients - got them to believe what he himself knew was a lie...

Freud was the exact opposite of Janet. His patients had to face up to the truth - as he saw it. We can have no doubt, in retrospect, that Freud very often deluded himself, thanks to his resolute dedication to theory. Half a century of Freud scholarship has taught that Freud got patients to believe things about themselves that were false, things that were often so bizarre that only the most devout theoriser could propose them in the first place. But there is no evidence that Freud systematically, as a method of therapy, got his patients to believe what Freud himself knew to be lies. Janet fooled his patients; Freud fooled himself.

Ian Hacking:

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5673.html

Alexandra,

Thank you for sharing this-- it's very interesting.
I especially like the last line: "Janet fooled his patients; Freud fooled himself."

I hope it isn't so-- that you are going to stop posting?? I find your posts thought provoking and so appreciate you sharing your insights and those that you have found from other people.

alexandra-

mandy

i don't want you to quit posting, either. xoxox pat

Don't you dare stop posting. You make us think....even when our brains won't comply to the extent required!

Emmy

ugh.

sorry peoples...

dunno what i'm gonna do... not get so attached to boards and moderating 'styles' methinks lol.

hrm.

i'll probably stick around for a bit and see how things go... i stick around a few places... i guess the idea is to stay away from a place for a time when events / people start to get to you. inform the relevant people and wait and see, i guess. i do have trouble sometimes... but oh well. i've been trying to track this computer game down for a while and now i've found it.

:-)

so bit of a holiday right now (conference went ok phew!) then i'm going to work for one week and then i'm going to collapse into a crumpled heap and instead of POSTING i'm going to PLAY GAMES. sound like a plan?

:-)

((((guys))))

(((((guys guys guys)))))

good plan.......take care of yourself, xoxoxo pat

glad you decided not to stop posting alexandra_k. i like your posts.
biiv

Interestingly, Freud began by trying to get patients to forget their traumas. His earliest case studies involve attempts to erase memories of traumatic events.

Eventually, he found that this wasn't a satisfactory method.

But I believe this method was at least partially successful when he used it.

Vautrin