Traumatic Knowing/Unknowing and the Return of the Disavowed in The Tale

Abstract

ABSTRACT This speculative essay focuses on the defensive disavowal of childhood sexual abuse that is effected through the recursive intrapsychic and interpersonal operations of identification with and introjection of the aggressor that act in tandem to prohibit traumatic knowing. In the film The Tale, these operate cinematically at diegetic and metadiegetic levels, and are present in both symbolized and enacted forms. The deconstruction and reconstruction of traumatic reality is examined through the film’s oneiric interpolations of past and present time, reality and fantasy, and use of semiologic elements. The traumatic injury is remembered, repeated, and worked through, undergirded by the operations of nachträglichkeit and repetition compulsion.