The Repressed Returns in the Trauma of Humanity -- Part One: Humanity Traumatized

Prelude to This Two-Part Post 

            We could understand the entire theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle not simply as the explanation of trauma from the distance of theoretical speculation but as the passage of the story of the child in a theoretical act of transformation. For what is the story of the mind’s attempt to master the event retrospectively if not the story of a failed return: the attempt, and failure, of the mind to return to the moment of the event? The theory of repetition compulsion as the unexpected encounter with an event that the mind misses and then repeatedly attempts to grasp is the story of a failure of the mind to return to an experience it has never quite grasped, the repetition or an originary departure from the moment that constitutes the very experience of trauma. And this story appears again as the beginning of life in the death drive, as life’s attempt to return to inanimate matter that ultimately fails and departs into a human history. Freud’s own theory, then, does not simply describe the death drive and its enigmatic move to the drive for life but enacts this drive for life as the very language of the child that encounters, and attempts [in the “fort-da” (”gone-returned”) game, as Freud dubs it] to grasp, the catastrophes of a traumatic history. 

             — Cathy Caruth, “Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival,” 

In reading those words from Cathy Caruth’s opening chapter of her book Literature and the Ashes of History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013) I myself experienced the return of a call of thought that I had not managed to grasp with any clarity before that moment. This two-part post will eventually explain that experience, at least to those given ears to hear.

My purpose in writing this two-part post is the same in spirit as the purpose Adam Phillips attributes to psychoanalysts in general and Freud in particular in the following passage from Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, pp. 7-8):

The psychoanalyst is a historian who shows us that our histories are also the way we conceal the past from ourselves[,] the way we both acknowledge it and disavow it at the same time (to disavow it is, one way or another, to simplify it; to acknowledge it is to allow complication). After “the great Darwin,” as Freud called him, another of Freud’s heroes, we are creatures of an appetite to survive and reproduce; and because we are desiring creatures in an uncomfortable world we are, like all animals, endangered by our desire and therefore self-protective. But unlike other animals, who because they have no language have no cultural history, we also feel endangered by our histories. There is nothing we want to protect ourselves more from, in Freud’s view, than our personal and family histories. For many people the past had become a phobic object, concealed in sentimental nostalgia and myths of race and national history. Through psychoanalysis — which was clearly a response to these increasingly insistent contemporary questions — Freud tried to work out the ways in which we are unduly self-protective; the senses in which modern people suffer from their self-protectiveness.

*     *     *

The phrase “the trauma of humanity,” which makes up the second half of my title for this two-part blog post, can be understood in two different ways, depending on how one takes the preposition of. One can take “of” in the phrase at issue to mean “happening to or befalling” but one can also take it to mean “which is.”

Taken in the first way, the phrase “the trauma of humanity” would mean the trauma which befalls humanity, within which phenomenon would be included such symptomatic out-breaks of what humanity has repressed as last century’s two World Wars or this century’s current war in Gaza. That is how I will take my title “The Repressed Returns in the Trauma of Humanity’ in “Part One,” today’s first part of my two-part post.

Thus, in today’s post following this three-part “Prologue” (such repetition being appropriate, given the content of the unified whole of both parts plus this prologue) I will take that phrase to mean the symptomatic return belonging to the repressed trauma that strikes collective humanity as such. That symptomatic return has been striking humanity over the ages, occurring in such events the 30-Years War, to add a third example to the two I’ve already given — of the World Wars and the war in Gaza. At issue is the trauma which repeatedly besets humanity, in all such symptomatic recurrences.

Battle of the Somme, which took place July-November 1916, during World War I

*     *     *

Then in “Part Two” of this two-part post — the part I will put up in two weeks, on November 11 of this year — I will address, not the trauma that recurrently besets humanity, but the trauma that humanity itself is.

Toward the close of that second part of this two-part post, I will consider how the two, humanity traumatized, and humanity traumatizing fit together in one whole.  

*     *     *

Part One: Humanity Traumatized

Trauma compulsively repeats itself, as Freud taught. It continues compulsively to repeat itself until it is finally faced as the trauma it is, that is, until the repression that is the flip-side of the coin of trauma, is brought to a close, and the traumatic event is at last acknowledged as the trauma it is.

Indeed, to bring the one traumatized finally to face and acknowledge that one’s trauma is the very thing at which such repetition aims. As I wrote myself at one point in “Civilization, Empire, and the Holy,” a short essay of mine published a few years ago in After Empire, the 2020 edition of A Beautiful Resistance, the annual journal of Gods & Radicals Press (Salem, Oregon: p. 103), “the last compulsive repetition of a trauma is the one that finally brings the whole traumatic series of repetitions to its goal, so that at last the traumatized can cease compulsively avoiding the trauma, and, in finally facing it, recover health and wholeness (to be redundant, since those two words, heard to their roots, say the same).”

Such repetitions of trauma constitute, as it were, “after-shocks” of the original shock of trauma, as I put the matter in my own 2020 book The Irrelevance of Power (available in the “Bookstore” at the top of this blog-site). Those after-shocks of repetition will continue to occur until the one traumatized at last stops repressing the memory of being shocked in the first place by the original traumatic occurrence.

In short, trauma always returns.

Atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States at the end of World War II in August 1944

*     *     *

                        Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. 

                                                       --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Perhaps the gods have long been out to destroy us. Perhaps it is for that purpose that they sent us empire, in order to drive us mad first.

Seen in that light, empire, along with the civilization to which it belongs, appears as our collective historical insanity—humanity gone mad. In turn, seen in the same light, that madness itself is sent in order to set us up for ultimate destruction. It is sent to lead us eventually to the Apocalypse, in at least one meaning of that term, according to which it signifies a world- and time-ending catastrophe. 

Other lights than Longfellow’s can be cast, however.

Seen in one such alternative light, empire still appears as madness, but the ultimate purpose of that madness is no longer to prepare us for destruction. Its ultimate purpose is, instead, to bring us to salvation.

Seen in that different light, empire still appears as our collective historical insanity. Yet now it appears as an insanity, a madness, sent us—or, rather, into which we have been sent—in order to bring us eventually, at the end of a long an arduous journey along a meandering path that often ends in thickets and requires us to retrace our steps, back home again to true and final sanity. Perhaps our insanity is ultimately sent us by the gods so that we can at last, after such a long journey, come back again to the very same place where we began, only to know it now for the very first time (to adapt a line from T. S. Eliot).

That is how I begin my essay “Civilization, Empire, and the Holy,” already cited above. In the above passage I am addressing the trauma upon collective humanity that has kept on compulsively repeating itself for millennia in the forms of war, conquest, genocide, racism, and all the other disasters that have struck “the human race,” to borrow the English translation of the French title Robert Antelme gave his account of being arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau — a book still very much worth reading with care, by anyone who cares at all about anything at all worth caring about.

In the above passage from my own essay I am suggesting that the first bead, as it were, on the long string of beads making up by all the long and still ongoing history of repetitions in the form of wars and the rest — I am suggesting that the bead that begins that so far unending string of beads is the emergence of “civilization” itself, that very form of human gathering that took place in what are called cities, a word that derives from the Latin civitas, to give that Latin term its nominative form.

*     *     *

All of that certainly is worth serious thought, at any rate.

A child caught in the Gaza Strip War in October 1923

The Choice to Choose

Authentic reality only becomes visible when one is finally left with no other choice but to choose, at last and for the very first time, truly to have a choice. That is the point of breakdown of all duplicity, most especially duplicity toward oneself, not just toward others.

Only when one finally arrives at such a crossroads — such a turning point, such a jumping off place — where one is truly faced for the first time ever with genuinely and fully making the choice to choose, and not just to remain the plaything of all the forces that try to force one to go one way or another, does one at last find true freedom.

Søren Kierkegaard saw and said that very thing in the 19th century.  Then in the 20th century, heeding the call he heard Kierkegaard issue to follow him down the same path of thought, Martin Heidegger said the same. Early in the 20th century, Alain Badiou followed that same call down that same path.

In a lecture Badiou gave to, and at the request of, a psychoanalytic society in Mexico in March of 2006, he characterizes Kierkegaard’s own thought-path as follows — in my own quite freely chosen translation of some lines in French from that lecture, the fourth, last, and shortest of four Voyages mentaux philosophique, “mental philosophical journeys,”   published just last year (2023) in France by Éditions Stilus:  

For Kierkegaard […] the essence of choice is the choice to choose, not the choice of this or of that. [. . .] Simply put, one can be brought to the crossroads in such as way that there will be no other way out for one except one choice. So one will make the right choice.

Alain Badiou

*     *     * 

At one point in The Irrelevance of Power (San Jose, CA: Juxtapositions Publishing, 2020, p. 183) — which is available to buy through the “Shop” at the top of this blog site — I wrote the following:  

            Whatever the expectations others may lay upon us, we all have a natural tendency, to which we are ourselves mostly blind, to fulfill those expectations. Drawing upon this tendency, expectation itself tends to engender the very thing it expects.

            We have a tendency to try to live up to whatever high expectations of us we experience others as having, but we have no less of a tendency to try to live down to whatever low expectation we experience them as having of us as well.

None of us can arrive at the “crossroads” to which Badiou refers in the quotation from him with which I end the preceding section of this post unless we cease to be blind to the very “tendency” to which I myself refer in the above lines, the tendency we all have to fulfill what we experience as the expectations “others” place upon us. We can only arrive at such a turning point, such a jumping off place, where we are at last faced with having to choose at last to choose, or else just continuing on as we remain — lost not only to one another, but also and above all to ourselves.

In the same book a few pages later (on p. 217), I address what we need to do when we arrive at such an existential turning point:

Then we just have to make the choice that we have been at that moment given to make — and then to repeat that choice, which is really our choice to keep on having a choice. If we do not continue repeating that choice moment by moment thereafter, then we immediately lose it again, and return our will to its chains.

* * *

What is the right choice to make in a given situation?

Well, in any in any and every conceivable situation, to make the choice to choose is always, without any exception, to make the right choice. Only by making that choice do we set off along the path down which all free beings are called to walk.

Keeping Things Handy

Note to my readers: I am putting up this post today in honor and memory of my father, who was born three days from now in 1910, on the Fourteenth of March — or “the Mourteenth of Farch,” as he always liked jokingly to put it.

“A place for everything and everything in its place.”

That is an old saying. My father sometimes used it to encourage my brother and me to put his tools away where they belonged when we were done with them. Once we finished using any of those tools, we were to put them back in his toolbox, our garage, our closets, or other storage spaces he and my mother had built or designated for them. That way, they would be handy for the next person who might have occasion to lay hands on them, whomever that person might be, including especially my father himself.

Indeed, as I will discuss in one of the subsequent sections of this post, it is the proper usage of things that first lets them be in the space which is theirs, and then maintains them there.

My father, Charles James Seeburger, Sr.,  as a young man

 *     *     *

To use something is not to ab-use it. To say the same thing somewhat more expansively,  to handle something is not to mis-handle it.

Usage, handling, does not require that we adapt what we use to us. Rather, to use or handle something requires that we adapt ourselves to it.

            [. . .] If we handle a thing, for example, our hand must adapt to the thing. Proper accord lies in usage. Authentic using does not diminish what it uses; rather, using defines itself by being what first lets the used as such be. But such letting be is by no means unconcerned laxity, let alone neglect. On the contrary: authentic using lets the used loose into its own presence and protects it therein. [. . .] Using is letting loose into presence, is guarding in presence.

Those lines come from the published text of Martin Heidegger’s 1951-52 two-semester lecture course Was heißt Denken?[1] The book of that title was eventually published in an English translation as What is Called Thinking?[2] The passage I cite above is my own very freely interpretive translation of most of one paragraph of the lecture Heidegger delivered to his class during the seventh hour of the second semester of the course, the summer-semester of 1952.

What Heidegger says in the passage cited is of course true of all physical crafts — for example, the crafting by hand of pottery out of clay. However, Heidegger’s remarks are no less true of all mental crafts. 

Most especially, his remarks are true of that singular mental craft which constitutes the very basis of all genuine crafts, whether they involve any physical component in the ordinary sense at all or are entirely mental. That is, Heidegger’s remarks are true of thinking itself as such.    

Handcrafting potterz

*   *   *

We are trying here to learn thinking. Perhaps thinking is just the same as building a shrine. In any case, it is hand-work. The hand has its own meaning. According to the ordinary notion, the hand belongs to the organism of our body. However, the essence of the hand will never let itself be fixed or clarified as a bodily grasping-organ. Apes, for example, have grasping-organs, but they have no hands. The hand is infinitely, that is, by an essential abyss, distinct from all such grasping-organs as paws, claws, or fangs. Only a being that speaks, which means thinks, can have hands and in handling achieve the works of the hand.

That paragraph, once again in my own freely interpretive translation, also comes from Heidegger’s Was heißt Denken? Only this time it comes from early in that course, the second hour of the winter-semester of 1951-52, the first semester of the two-semester course. I will repeat the line that is most crucial for my purposes in this post: “In any case it [i.e., thinking as such] is hand-work.

Just a bit later, in the summarizing transition from the second hour of the entire course with which he opens its third hour, Heidegger writes a very brief paragraph consisting of no more than the following two lines, yet again in my own freely interpretive translation: “Thinking guides and bears every gesture of the hand. To bear means literally: to gesture.”

 That leaves nothing more to say or do. It puts everything back in its proper place, keeping it handy.

[1] The text of the course was first published in 1954 by Max Niemeyer Verlag in Tübingen and eventually became Band 8 of  Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main; Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), from p, 190 of which I have taken the lines cited above.  

[2] Translation by J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968).