Reviews
The most thought-provoking book I have read this year is probably Cathy Caruth's anthology Trauma: Explorations in Memory. It's a 1995 collection of essays by a range of authors from the fields of psychoanalysis and literary and cultural criticism, including the film-maker Claude Lanzmann (Shoah). The frequently mechanical and lifeless nature of traumatised discourse, the question of how you listen and communicate, and the possible moral obligation to resist understanding the perpetrators are some of the themes, but there are others, too, as relevant today as they were then.
An unusually informative, as well as sensitive, series of essays with important ramifications for interdisciplinary theory and both social and literary thought. Caruth and her contributors work at the very intersection of contemporary life and scholarship.
These essays offer fresh approaches on the subject of trauma from both a psychoanalytic and contemporary theoretical point of view. The combination of theoretical articles about trauma with interviews about its ongoing effects is a particular strength—and a particularly appropriate approach when the topic itself is silence or testimony about trauma. The book will be of great interest to those in the psychoanalytic community interested in this kind of interdisciplinary work.
Book Details
Preface
Part I: Trauma and Experience
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching
Chapter 3. Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle
Chapter 4
Preface
Part I: Trauma and Experience
Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 2. Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching
Chapter 3. Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle
Chapter 4. Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow-Up
Chapter 5. Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma
Chapter 6. Freud: Frontier Concepts, Jewishness, and Interpretation
Chapter 7. An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton
Part II: Recapturing the Past
Chapter 8. Introduction
Chapter 9. The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma
Chapter 10. Notes on Trauma and Community
Chapter 11. The Obscenity of Understanding: An Evening With Claude Lanzmann
Chapter 12. Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima
Chapter 13. Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter
Chapter 14. "The AIDS Crisis is Not Over": A Conversation with Gregg Bordowitz, Douglass Crimp, and Laura Pinsky
Contributors