Cultural, Collective, and Literary Trauma: Foundations for Analysis

History, roots and ancestors. Trauma, psychology and psychoanalysis. Apparently these two sets of concepts have little to do with each other, and certainly Cicero could have had no knowledge whatsoever of the latter when he talked about the former. So why are his words appropriate for the epigraph of a work that claims to deal with trauma? The key to understanding their relationship lies in the concept that another man, a much more recent one, had of history. When Walter Benjamin talked about history as “one single catastrophe” (2003: 392), he was not merely being pessimistic; he was— perhaps unknowingly— linking the concepts of trauma and history. If we accept that the past is but one single catastrophic event that spreads itself throughout the centuries, then ‘history’ automatically links with ‘trauma.’ Consequently, in order to keep ourselves from remaining children forever, we must delve into the folds of that past trauma in the hopes of understanding and overcoming it, thus approaching history in a comprehensive yet critical way. Moreover, if the past is inherently traumatic, trauma itself can be understood as inherently past (yet often influencing the present) if we take Caruth’s view of trauma as always experienced belatedly (Caruth 1995, 1996). Insomuch as, following Caruth, a traumatic event may only be experienced after a period of latency, and the psychological consequences that it triggers refer back to the event itself— an event always lurking in the past— trauma and history seem to be irrevocably coupled, and the study of one is always aided by the study