Ellie Ragland

English Department
University of Missouri
ellie.ragland@prodigy.net

 

In recent literary studies of trauma, many critics postulate trauma as itself a limit on representation. In Shoshana Felman’s words, working with trauma in the literary classroom, whether through fiction, historical fiction, or poetry, has the pedagogical effect of “break[ing] the very framework of the class” (50). Yet what makes the study of trauma particularly germane to literary critique and analysis is not, as one might assume, some extra-linguistic component which would seem to belong to the field of History. Rather, what appears in narrative accounts of trauma are the pathetic, suffering, passionate and affective dimensions that literary language and genres have always sought to embody and recount.

 

Relating the descriptive words used by her students on the occasion of their having viewed a videotaped session of Holocaust testimony, Felman finds commonality between the students’ words and those of various poets, such as Paul Célan and Mallarmé. Célan recalls “A strange lostness/Was palpably present,” while Mallarmé speaks of “the testimony of an accident.” But the larger point to come out of trauma studies is that art cannot be seen as separate from life, or as separable from a certain normal affectivity which is the very domain of literary language.

 

The goal of this essay is to link the relation of trauma to memory (and forgetting) in terms of its speech, displaced in symptoms, passion, and affect; to unveil the nature of traumatic catastrophe as a concrete, historical event; to argue that the limits of representation in trauma tell us something new about the affects (as opposed to cognition) which Lacan tried to explain by his category of the real. Further on, I shall relate my argument to Freud’s Dora case, his “Fragment of a Little Hysteria” (1905), his study of “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), and his comments regarding the trauma undergone by his young nephew in the Fort! Da! paradigm. I shall reconsider these in light of Lacan’s interpretation of Freud’s theory of the object in reference to his Seminar IV: The Object Relation.

 

Critics working in this new mode of literary study have isolated certain features marking a clear set of responses that arise from trauma material. Dori Laub, for example, speaks of the temporal delay that carries one beyond the shock of a first moment of trauma to what inevitably follows: a repeated suffering of the event. Traumatic memories–whether recounted by Holocaust survivors, incest victims, or survivors of rape or other abuse–have the characteristic of reappearing with a literal repetitiveness that reminds one of Freud’s arguments in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): at the point where one would expect the pleasure principle to function, one discovers, instead, a repetition whose fixities are on the side of the death drive.¹ Lacan put forth the theory that what is repressed in the real–the order of trauma, of the unsayable, unspeakable, the impossible–will return in the symbolic order of language. A trauma, in other words, will not just disappear. It cannot simply be forgotten. Not only will it remain recorded in the real as a limit point to memory; it will reappear as a symptomatic enigma which opens onto a certain anxiety. In his Seminar X (1962-1963): L’angoisse, Lacan stresses that the anxiety accompanying a trauma is not doubt. Rather, its effects have remained inscribed as an unconscious system of knowledge which appears in conscious life as a concrete insistence, whose characteristic modes are repetition, passion, strong affect, or a suffering that one cannot simply and easily talk away or talk through. Trauma, in Lacan’s estimation, is not only not doubt; it is, rather, the cause of doubt.

 

Lacan stresses an unfamiliar picture of the causality of trauma, then: it is a kind of certainty that can be known insofar as it is acted out. Put another way, behind an affect caused by trauma, one finds the movement of cause itself as a return of the real into the symbolic. Precise knowledge regarding the trauma’s cause can, therefore, be ascertained at the point of the return; the name Lacan gave this particular kind of meaning was the symptom.

 

Yet, the symptom of a trauma seems not to be exactly the same as the symptom of a neurosis–as trauma studies show–nor of some biologically induced pathology. Not surprisingly, one learns that characteristic features of trauma are the secrecy and silence which surround it. And, insofar as secrecy and silence are symptomatic of an event whose core meaning has been permanently displaced–is not known directly–or until such time as the truth of the unbearable can be spoken by the person traumatized and, subsequently, heard by others, the trauma can only enunciate itself as an enigma. It can only spawn the kind of symptoms which speak of what is not there, what is not sayable.

 

Without specifying any psychoanalytic category of neurosis, psychosis, phobia, and so on, Lacan, in his later teaching, evolved a theory of the symptom that may well be fruitful for trauma studies. His work here is of a piece with his theory of what knowledge is; of how the mental is structured. Having spent decades elaborating three interlinked categories–the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real–which compose the base unit of meaning which he called the Borromean knot, Lacan added a fourth: the symptom.² Lacan argues that the symptom knots together each individual unit of real/symbolic/imaginary material into a vast, elaborate signifying necklace of associated images, words and affects that produce the meanings we live by. Thus the knot would be central to any interpretation of trauma, insofar as it ultimately resides in the real, while retaining properties of each of the other orders of meaning. Topologist and Lacanian analyst Jeanne Granon-Lafont writes that Lacan centered the order of the knot on the presence of a space where the object a is to be found. That is, the object a is locatable at the center of the Borromean unit. The imaginary, real and symbolic are placed one on the other such that the fourth exigency which knots them–what Lacan called the order of the symptom–represents the Freudian concept of psychic reality. Insofar as this reality rests on an unconscious fantasy, it remains invisible (Granon-Lafont 112).³

 

Lacan, in other words, describes the symptom as constituting the order of meaning that ties together the microstructures of each Borromean triadic unit: the symbolic order of language, the body interpreted as an imaginary consistency, and the affective real of discontinuities and cuts. Each person is a symptom, in a general sense, of his or her kind of desire–neurotic, normative or phobic, for example. But more importantly for Lacan, this fourth order of meaning marks the particularity of the concrete and literal events that give rise to trauma in an individual life. In 1987 Jacques-Alain Miller described the Lacanian concept of the symptom in Joyce avec Lacan as an enigma written in secret characters which in and of themselves say nothing to anyone. They are a message to be deciphered (11).

 

In his concern to stress this particularity in each person’s language, Lacan took recourse to the Medieval French spelling of the word–sinthome–to describe an enigmatic meaning that appears in any person’s behavior or thought like a knot. While the symptom has the structure of a knot, its unique meanings arise out of the memories that have been blocked at some limit point–a point we recognize as trauma. By calling the knot real, Lacan means that it is extrinsic to the units of meaning it ties together. It is put into language and identifications, as if from outside them. And the knot refers to the signifier for sexual difference (F)–the signifier without a signified that Lacan denoted as a third term or the signifier for a Father’s Name–which also has the properties of alienating the real of experience by the language that represents it. The more primordial experience of the cut belongs to a logic of the real as it marks the loss of objects-cause-of-desire as the first and most important traumatizing experience an infant must undergo as he or she assumes language and, later, sexual identity.

 

One might argue that all psychoanalytic resistance has the structure of a knot–an enigma or impasse–which proves that some limit point of blockage lies in a person’s thinking about his or her life at a point which makes the first two traumas of life structural ones: infant loss of the partial objects that metonymically represent the symbolic mother as real (Le séminaire IV 269), and Oedipal loss of an identification of Oneness with the mother as a difference that structures sexuation as a split between the object a and the law of interdiction to being One with the mother.

 

Lacan offers, I shall maintain, a theory that is not incompatible with contemporary trauma studies in the United States in his theory of the symptom/sinthome. It may even add another dimension to understanding the limit points in memory as themselves having a certain structure and logic. Cathy Caruth suggests that one exits from a trauma through a speaking of the truth, and a listening to that truth, from the site of the trauma (11). Put in other words, the Other–the social order–must hear what is actually being said: a relation of transference must be engaged such that a representative listener from the social order believes the truth that seeps through the imaginary dimensions of a narrative. The history of a trauma becomes not so much an accurate rendering of an event, then, as the actual belief of hearers that certain events can–and, indeed, have–produced unthinkable, unsayable, unspeakable, buried memories. Lacan called these the sinthomes, or opaque disturbances, whose limit is that of representation itself. The Other–whether the analyst as witness or some other–must, in some way, cease defending his or her (unified) concept of reality, and attend to the picture given by the traumatized person. Likewise, in literary texts, certain symbolic insistences on the truths caused by a trauma–whether known consciously or unconsciously by the author–will remain buried in the density of language.

 

Freud made the point, again and again, that a traumatic event does not entirely disappear. It insists. A literal piece of it–a bit of the real, Lacan will say–continues to return into language and conscious life, beyond the law of the signifier which ordinarily states a recognizable (local universal) language reality. At the level of the traumatic real, something from primary-process thought enters the narrative realm of secondary-process conscious thought and language. Something that is discordant with a commonly held view of reality is heard by listeners who will assume that a certain set of conventions convey all the knowledge (or information) they need for the purpose of deciphering an enigma. Lacan argued that most subjects are constituted as a One-minus, placed between the dialectic of wanting and getting, a dialectic first experienced in terms of the objects that are known as desirable when they are lost. This early experience makes lack a structure in being, the inverse face of desire. And these early losses are experienced by infants as traumatic. The Lacanian concept of the real is of an order of meanings constituted by the inscription of unary traits that wind themselves around the edges of holes in the dialectic of the loss and refinding of the object a–the object(s)-cause-of-desire–whose referent is the limit point of symbolic language and imaginary identifications. This early dialectic constitutes an Ur-lining of the subject as unconscious subject of desire ($). The object a will be, forever after, irretrievable in any pure form, although it will serve as the cause that marks limit points in memory as the real of the symptoms that speak the language of trauma, traversing the smooth grain of consistent discourse units.

 

In “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies,” Geoffrey Hartman describes this feature of the symptom as the kind of perpetual troping of a memory that “is inscribed with a force proportional to the mediations punctured or evaded” (537). Not only is it noteworthy that trauma enunciates itself continually in literary art, as well as in museums–not to mention the analyst’s couch–this phenomenon also offers a paradox: When real elements of a trauma appear as artifacts in a museum, or as literary or artistic representations, they dramatize the paradox. Distance from the real–from its traumatic properties of loss, suffering and anxiety–enables the looker or hearer to not see or not hear. Distance enables the looker or hearer to discount, or, even romanticize, a visible, palpable trauma. Indeed, an artifact, archive, painting, narrative or poem often gives the lie to a trauma by covering over the real of its suffering with images and words which seem to tame it, giving it the quality of mere art. In Lacanian terms, one could say that the passion of ignorance reveals its roots in the desire for homeostatic constancy–a drive which Freud and Lacan placed on the slope of Thanatos–that pushes individuals to avoid terror, horror and pain at all costs. Any lie or deception becomes preferable, as long as it keeps subjects or societies believing their actions are consistent, unified and stable. This same propensity to avoid the real–which Lacan equated with the sinthome of sublimation–also keeps artists concerned that their productions appear seamless and convincing (Ragland, “The Passion of Ignorance” 152-53). Social unity works, then, by denial, thereby speaking what Lacan called a master discourse which represses fantasy, desire or any lack-in-being:

 

S₁ –> S₂
$ <– a

 

In this way, social unity works against the truth of the real of trauma, which brings discontinuity and chaos in its wake (cf. Seminar XX, ch. 2, “To Jakobson”).

 

I shall argue, here, using the three textual examples I have chosen, that trauma appears to the one traumatized–or is grasped by the witness–at the point where unconscious fantasy objects can no longer suture the structural lack-in-being and thereby repair a breach between the individual and the symbolic by the constant taking in of such objects (cf. Hartman 543). At such a moment, the (Lacanian) real becomes knowable as anxiety produced by the existence of a void place in being and in knowledge. Anxiety has an object, Lacan taught; the void rendered palpable. Lacan argued, further, that the void can itself be reduced to a kind of object (a) which appears when the imaginary order ceases to fill up the concrete holes in signifying chains with the semblances–illusions of wholeness–that ordinarily keep individuals from having to fight or flee an unwanted truth. When the real does appear in a stark encounter with anxiety, it is knowable; but not as a historical fact or empirical event.

 

In “L’hallucination: le rêve traumatique du psychotique,” the Lacanian scholar Yves Vanderveken maintains that trauma is created by an encounter with the real that pierces the fantasy, confronting head-on an emptiness or hole in meaning (53). Indeed, such an encounter with the void causes a reliving of the trauma itself precisely because unconscious meaning ceases to produce a signifying chain of unknowable–but ever-functioning–fantasy interpretations of “reality.” Lacan addressed this question as early as Seminar I when he described “History [as] not [being] the past. History is the past in so far as it is historicised in the present” (12). Lacan’s statement recalls Freud’s doubt that screen memories were actually original memories, continuous with the events they recorded. Rather, Freud opined, screen memories are reworked and revived memories that emerge only later in life (Collins 9). Further clarifying his point here, Freud writes:

 

It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: Memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves. (“Screen Memories” 322)

 

What emerges, in Daniel Collins’s estimation, is the primary repressed, the trauma (9). Lacan’s later topological teaching that dovetails with what he calls his science of the real demonstrates how pieces of the real return continually as the sinthomes surrounding the Ur-objects that first caused desire. In this purview, all returned memories would not be traumatic. A trauma would distinguish its return into the present from the past–bringing the present into the symbolic from the radically repressed real–by the specific characteristics noted by scholars in trauma studies: testimony of an accident; breaking of a frame of the seemingly normal; the catastrophic qualities of an actual historical event; temporal delay; a repeated suffering of the event; the insistence of certain images; secrecy; silence. Such “breakthroughs” place either the victim or a witness in a position to recognize the traumatic inscription of an affective knowledge which has dug its marks into the flesh.⁴ The fact that such witnessing encounters the imaginary–the narcissistic domain of narrative–to a greater or lesser degree, is only of secondary importance here. In Lacan’s view, a trauma distinguishes itself from its narrative, identificatory qualities, thereby becoming susceptible of treatment in analysis, literary interpretation, or social praxis. Praxis is, for Lacan, that which “places man in a position to treat the real by the symbolic” (Seminar XI 6).

 

There are, for Lacan, traumas at the base of being that the social itself is constructed to protect against. These are the structural underpinnings of being, not the catastrophic trauma encountered in abuse situations. Nonetheless, catastrophic trauma can make an impact partially because its subject is not an inherently whole, unified being. For example, the trauma of the pre-mirror stage fragmented infant is that of progressively putting together an imaginary consistency of body. The mirror-stage infant builds a seemingly unified identity by linking images to words and its own proper name, as well as joining words and images to affect. In later life, when this unity is threatened–as in war experiences or an act of violence perpetrated–the fragility of the prior structuring is relived in the daily present if one encounters a hole rather than a symbol, a gap rather than an object a filling the gap (Pyle, “Lacan’s Theory”). Or, if one encounters the enigmata produced by a symptom or an affect in one’s own thought, or in another’s narrative, rather than that which is recognizable in terms of some would-be “corresponding” symbol–if this symbol is lacking–Vanderveken argues that this limit experience of memory is inseparable from anxiety. He describes the affect of angst as the non-symbolizability of the hole, at which point one encounters the horror of an unknown jouissance (53). The hole functions, then, as a living piece of the real, bringing symptoms of trauma into conscious thought, the most recognizable one being anxiety.

 

Lacan, following Freud, describes trauma as knowable in conscious life by the markings we have mentioned. Hartmann suggests that literary examples reveal the same thing as Freud’s narrative cases (544). The enigmatic meaning of suffering or passion in a story, play, poem, or case study is not an allegory or a myth that is disassociated from memory or affective life. An experience of trauma may be radically repressed in the real–attested to only by opaque symptoms–but this is not the repression of some base symbol, nor of a secondary reflective meaning. It is the repression of an actual event, doubled in an imaginary story, fleeting image, or vague affect. In other words, the symbol is realistic. One could even speak of the real dimension of symbols as that which gives poems, plays, or narratives the characteristic of “every truth [having] the structure of fiction,” as Lacan writes in Seminar VII (12).

 

In the same Seminar, Lacan makes a point he develops further in his Seminar on L’angoisse: “The structure [of fiction is] embodied in the imaginary [mirror-stage rapport of ego to ego] relation as such, by reason of the fact that narcissistic man enters as a double into the dialectic of fiction” (Seminar VII 14). “The passage of the specular image to this double which escapes me [one]–that is the point where something happens by whose articulation, I believe, we can give to this function of a… its generality… its presence, in the whole phenomenal field and show that the function goes well beyond what appears in this strange moment” (Le séminaire, livre X 9 January 1963).

 

Lacan operates a conceptual subversion on the long familiar idea that the ego develops by growth stages. Rather, he argues, the mirror-stage specular double is transformed into the fantasy object a which, in turn, supports the subject as a subject of the real by a binding of unary traits to an actual hole created by the collected, associated traits one might describe as an accretion of responses to the continual loss of the object of satisfaction Lacan calls the object a. Lacan’s topology is a practice of the hole and of its edge, as Jeanne Granon-Lafont points out, stressing that Lacan’s use of topology is not an additional knowledge which elaborates itself in a series of concepts or fundamental texts (13).

 

Effecting a similar conceptual subversion on the distinction long made between morals and ethics, Lacan maintains in Seminar VII that psychoanalytic thought defines itself in very different terms from moral thought, with which ethics is generally confused. While morals are concerned with good behavior, and the rules of conduct that beget a socially desirable comportment, psychoanalysis is concerned with “traumas and their persistence.” Lacan continues:

 

We have obviously learned to decompose a given trauma, impression, or mark, but the very essence of the unconscious is defined in a different register from the one which Aristotle emphasized in the Ethics in a play on words [meaning ‘to repeat’]. There are extremely subtle distinctions that may be centered on the notion of character. Ethics for Aristotle is a science of character: The building of character, the dynamics of habits and, even more, action with relation to habits, training, education. (10)

 

The Freudian experience teaches a different view of ethics, one related to trauma, rather than a bildungs aesthetik. Just as the mirror double (of self/other relations) is perpetually transformed into the escaping, fading material of elusive fantasy, psychoanalysis pursues the cause of a suffering whose remnants bear little resemblance to a well-made story, or to a secondary-process product.

 

That a literary work can carry traumatic effects in its weave, as can a real-life experience, makes sense insofar as the symbolic, according to Lacan, has the structure of a fiction. But such a logic only becomes available when one grasps that “‘fictitious’ does not mean illusory or deceptive as such…. Bentham’s effort is located in the dialectic of the relationship of language to the real so as to situate the good… on the side of the real…. Once the separation between the fictitious and the real has been effected, things are no longer situated where one might expect” (Seminar VII 12). If, as Lacan teaches, the fictitious is a function of the symbolic, the exposure of trauma in art, then the moment when the good turns from pleasure to displeasure would unveil a truth, not a fiction. A given reality, an identity crisis, a concern for bodily integrity–these bind textual realities to the reader’s imaginary reconstructions. But by functioning as literal, repeated–thus, objective–pieces of the text, traumatic elements, paradoxically, resist the subjective particularity of the reader’s imaginary interpretations. In this sense, knowledge of trauma is not a premature knowledge, nor a radically absent one, but that which “stays longer in the negative and allows disturbances of language and mind the quality of time we give to literature” (Hartman 547). Not only does traumatic material push imaginary reconstructions away, it unveils itself as a limit point to representation insofar as its insistences as textual realities have a certain objectifiable, formal quality.

 

In trauma theory, one is not dealing only with distortions of reality, then, nor with one catastrophe for all. Trauma, Freud said in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), is more like war “neurosis”–a constant return to the scene of an accident. Although Freud notes what he called a fixation to a trauma in accidents, war frights, and hysteria–remarking that certain fear dreams bear this same traumatic, repetitive quality, he adds: “I am not aware, however, that patients suffering from traumatic neurosis are much occupied in their waking lives with memories of their accident. Perhaps they are more concerned with not thinking of it” (BPP 13). This is borne out in the memories of Holocaust survivors who prefer not to talk about that time.

 

In her introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth defines trauma as a literality and its return (5). In other words, the trauma is its own history insofar as it has remained unassimilable. As a historical enigma, trauma connects itself to a crisis of truth, revealing, in Caruth’s words, not a trace on the psyche, but a hole in meaning (5).

 

Dora, The Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm

 

When Freud set up his clinic in Vienna in order to treat nervous diseases, he was in consultation with Dr. Josef Breuer, a friend several years older than he, who insisted that one could treat nervous disorders by an entirely new set of assumptions about a condition, assumptions which, off and on over the centuries, had been called “hysteria,” a typically female suffering. Although many medical doctors thought of “hysteria” as the product of a psychical trauma, an “acting out” of some memory that had been forgotten (i.e., repressed) by the subject, such a view of hysteria often led to the kind of error Freud made in The Aetiology of Hysteria (1896). Geoffrey Hartman has pointed out in “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies” that Freud’s theory here could readily lead one to confuse traumatic hysteria with fantasy, particularly if one makes the error of equating fantasy with the repressed. Neither Freud nor Lacan made this error. In the late 1890s Freud thought he had discovered the element of trauma at the base of hysteria. He wrote: “At the bottom of every case of hysteria, there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience… which belong to the earliest years of childhood” (Aetiology 203, qtd. in Hartman 539). Yet, Freud’s thinking about hysteria changed to the point that he split from Breuer, in large part, over their different explanations of the cause of hysteria. Freud’s early opinion was that the cause of hysteria always had to do with sexual impulses (Strachey xxv). Drawing on Charcot’s use of hypnosis to prove that hysteria could be caused by verbal suggestion, Freud evolved a treatment which consisted of inducing in the hysteric a kind of state, not focused on external stimuli, that would enable the overly excited, overly affected woman to recall the supposedly forgotten trauma at the base of her suffering. Breuer advanced a different idea. Remembering–i.e., naming–the emotions appropriate to the nervous crisis was the key to the cure. “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” Breuer contributes to his joint text with Freud (On the Psychical Mechanism 6-7).

 

This aspect of Breuer’s theory seems to have more in common with contemporary work on trauma theory than does Freud’s early theory of trauma. Breuer’s stress on remembering–among a myriad other key concepts he advanced, although they are often attributed to Freud–was to change Freud’s medical orientation, indeed, his entire system of thinking, culminating finally in what Freud called psychoanalysis, or the “talking cure.” In Lacanian theory, however, the theory of reminiscences undergoes a reconceptualization. Reminiscences are not proximate to conscious thought and memory. They are, indeed, radically repressed in the real and can only be re-remembered in the enigmatic displacement of symptoms–physical or psychological. That is, they will not usually be found in the conscious memories of childhood events that make up an imaginary narrative.

 

But, insofar as the concept of trauma marked Freud’s work from the beginning to the end, from his first encounters with hysteria to Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud maintained in his early work, particularly in his study of Dora, that in the case of hysteria, there were always three psychological determinant causes: “A psychical trauma, a conflict of affects, and–an additional factor which I have brought forward in later publications–a disturbance in the sphere of sexuality” (24). Some Lacanian scholars, such as Vanderveken, maintain that the hysteric only dramatizes the experience every subject has of its initial assumption of “sexuality and its non-sense, which is traumatic in the measure where the signifier of a sexual rapport in the symbolic is lacking” (Vanderveken 56).

 

While Lacan does not drop the idea of a traumatic cause of hysteria, he argues that the encounter with sexuality–and the assumption of sexuation–is traumatic for every subject. In other words, one defines oneself as masculine or feminine in reference to the mother’s unconscious desire, the symbolic interdiction of a Oneness between mother and child given by the real father, and in terms of other realities which are equally as enigmatic for the child who encounters confusions at the point that he or she seeks the consistency and wholeness of a unified identity that will link together his or her being, gender, and sexuality. In stressing that sexual difference is not an innate knowledge, but rather is learned in bits and pieces from the Other, in reference to a signifier without a signified–the phallic signifier being the abstract signifier for difference itself–Lacan gave a reason why the encounter with sexual difference is traumatic for children. In any traumatism, Vanderveken writes, one finds a giving away of one’s power to the Other (53). That is, the Other takes a certain portion of the subject’s real–which Lacan describes in Seminar XX as a space opened up between the appearance and the reality–thereby creating the suffering (81). This can occur because bits of the real lie outside the subject–as sinthomes which “ex-sist” or sit outside any particular ensemble of a seeming whole–such that the Other can see or hear them. When pieces of the object a that define one’s jouissance in a condensed form, serving as a limit point to language and representations and, thereby, marking one’s knowledge in the real, are touched by the Other–whether through insult, exclusion, or maltreatment of any kind–the Other traumatizes a subject by quite literally opening up a hole between the objects that usually suture any encounter with the lack-in-being and a concrete brush with the palpability of the hole (Vanderveken 54).

 

Insofar as the Lacanian concept of the real–defined here as the knowledge one cannot bear to know and which, for that reason, is radically repressed from conscious memory–concerns a knowledge that returns into conscious language via symptoms, passion, suffering or affect, one can study its traumatic effects upon language at points where the image (imaginary ego identifications) ends and anxiety arises, or where consistencies and appearances are cut into by affect, and so on. Both Dora and the young homosexual woman, as well as Freud’s little nephew, manifest anxiety at the moment of an encounter with the real that emanates from what Lacan designated as a void place (Ø) in the Other. Furthermore, the appearance of anxiety in these three texts functions, I would argue, as a limit to memory and representation that bespeaks a meaning beyond signification that Lacan called the sense of a meaning.

 

Trauma experiences, as well as literary language, show that there are two different kinds of logic in knowledge: conscious (secondary-process) and unconscious (primary-process) (these are Breuer’s terms). Lacan made the innovation of bringing together Freud’s concept of condensation and displacement as typical of primary process functioning with Roman Jakobson’s discovery that metaphor and metonymy are the two rhetorical tropes that govern language (Ragland-Sullivan 242).⁵ Metaphor–this is like that–produces a condensation as it allows one to make equivalency relations, to substitute one thing for another in a secondary-process way, because the substitute element already has a referent. It has already been inscribed in a primary moment as a “unary trait,” which is Lacan’s translation of Freud’s Einzige Zugen of identification. Metonymy–this stands for that–produces a displacement and allows symptoms to move in language and thought as signs of a repressed knowledge that evokes enigmas and interpretations, rather than yielding transparent knowledge. Based on this bringing together of Freud and Jakobson, Lacan was able to elaborate a unique view of memory; as an unconscious writing that represents its own signifying chain.

 

More precisely, Lacan’s view of a traumatic cause at the base of hysteria offers a paradigmatic way to study primary-process or unconscious functions within conscious thought and language, giving us a way to grasp his concept of the unconscious as a present/absent knowledge. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud identified hysteria as the primordial mode of identification to which any being can be reduced through the effects of a traumatic event.⁶ He makes it clear, however, that such functioning is a breaking down from the seemingly unified and consistent functioning of ego to ego within a group, and the even higher level of identification of collective egos with a leader of the group. What I would like to stress in Freud’s theory is that in primary identification, any subject is susceptible of being hystericized by trauma, of being traumatized. Here, hysteria and trauma are near equivalents.

 

In his Seminar IV (1956-1957): The Object Relation, Lacan introduces hysteria by giving full play to the unconscious meaning in the narrative text. Having agreed with Freud’s theory that the hysteric is troubled by her identity as a woman, a thesis Lacan announced as a rule in the Dora case, Lacan stressed Dora’s aversion to Herr K. when he described the young woman’s “conversion symptoms” as a physiological translation of a psychic response to the sexual advances Herr K. had made to her when she was fourteen years old. At that moment, Herr K., having dismissed everyone so they could be alone, tried to embrace Dora in his store. Assuming that Herr K. excited her sexually, Freud maintained that the fundamental rule of the hysteric is to deny the sexual excitation she feels for a man. The hysteric’s question, as described by Lacan, is quite different. It has little to do with sexual excitation, or even fear of male sexuality. The hysteric is troubled, Lacan argued, by an identity question: What is a woman? Lacan exits from Freud’s impasse in thought, which ends up in Freud’s suggesting that the traumatizing element in Dora’s case–and in other cases of hysteria as well–is the visual or tactile impact of anatomical sexual difference.

 

Describing the scene in the store, Freud says Herr K. had ostensibly arranged to meet Dora and his wife at his place of business so as to view the church festival together. Meanwhile, he had persuaded his wife to stay at home, had sent away his clerks, and had “set up a scene” where Dora could be surprised by him on a back staircase. When Dora arrived, he threw himself upon her and kissed her. She, in turn, fled in disgust (28). Freud implies that Herr K. wanted something more from Dora than a kiss. He wanted retribution. She had denied him a kiss at the famous scene beside the lake. Now, she has run away from him a second time, with no explanations to him. She, nonetheless, talks about these episodes to Freud. Some days later, the K.’s had planned an expedition which was to last for some days and on which Dora was to have gone. Not surprisingly, Dora refused to go along on the expedition.

 

But Freud was surprised and interpreted this as a reversal of affect, as well as a displacement of a symptom of sexual excitement from the genital area to the mucous membrane of the alimentary or digestive canal (29). Dora’s trauma was attributable, in Freud’s view in 1901, to her sexual excitement that had been replaced by disgust (29). On the prior page, he had written: “I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable; and I should do so whether or not the person were capable of producing somatic symptoms” (28).

 

Freud’s theory of physiological conversion symptoms would not be tenable in light of Lacan’s theory of the libido or jouissance. For Lacan, one is sexually excited by the myriad aspects of objects that first caused desire; moreover these build into meaning constellations of image/word/affect that surround each primordial object: the breast, the faeces, the urninary flow, the (imaginary) phallus, the voice, the gaze, the phoneme and the nothing (Lacan, “The subversion” 315). Lacan teaches, furthermore, that at least three kinds of jouissance produce a formalizable logic of meaning: in reference to the Father’s Name signifier–located between the symbolic and the real–which one might equate with the superego or language (F); in reference to the identificatory material that enters the unconscious space–between the symbolic order of language and the imaginary order of ego and narcissistic relations–as unconscious meaning (-F); in reference to memories buried in the radically unconscious Other, which are situated, topologically speaking, between the imaginary (body) and the real (of the flesh) (Lacan, “La troisième”).

 

Freud’s thesis appears as biologically reductionist alongside Lacan’s more finely honed picture of jouissance. The interest Freud’s text sustains lies, I would maintain, in his sensing that sexual effects have the potential for producing trauma. But Freud does not come up with a theory to explain why Dora is disgusted by Herr K. until 1926 in “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” when he speaks of a link between anxiety and sexual inhibitions arising out of repressed libido. I am more convinced, however, by his comments in the “Addenda” to that essay where he calls anxiety an affect which “has an unmistakable relation to expectation: it is anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object (“Inhibitions” 164-65).⁷ Yet, as the Frankfurt School, among others, has taught by example: if there are no inhibitions, there can be no law. In Lacan’s conceptualization of this principle, there can be no law of language that enunciates a reality principle that signifies a difference between pleasure and reality unless that law is based on the paradoxical premise of there being an exception to the law on which law can be based (cf. his theory of sexuation in “A Love Letter,” Seminar XX).

 

When Freud wrote up the Dora case in 1905, he spoke of the formation of symptoms. But his description remains at the level of positivistic descriptions of conversion or somatizing symptoms. He interprets Dora’s disgust as an actual rejection of the sensation of pressure she felt on the upper part of her body when Herr K. pinioned her against the stairwell and tried to kiss her (30). Not only was the kiss disgusting, Freud opined, Dora also felt the pressure of Herr K.’s erect member against her body and was revolted by it. Her symptomatic response–a persistent cough and a complete loss of voice–was to displace sexual excitement from her lower body onto her thorax. In a footnote, Freud defends the logic of such displacements.

 

Lacan supplied what Freud’s argument lacks: a logic and a means. Because he lived in the milieu of the intellectual revolutions brought about by linguistics and cultural anthropology, starting in the 1930s, Lacan understood that a symptom displacement may well occur as a signifier substituting for some other thing, some image or effect, or some knowledge repressed from consciousness. Lacan emphasized, as Freud had before him, that anxiety is an affect that is not repressed. It wanders, inverts itself, takes myriad forms. But an affect is not repressed. What is repressed are the signifiers that anchor it (Le séminaire X 14 November 1962). In anxiety, Lacan teaches, the subject makes the most radical movements of trying to ascertain what the Other wants of him or her: Che vuoi? For, it is only by knowing the Other’s desire that one can validate oneself in the scopic field of the gaze of others.

 

I would suggest that Lacan could offer a logical explanation for the way in which anxiety responds to trauma, where Freud failed, because he had access to Saussure’s and Jakobson’s discoveries regarding the laws that govern language, where Freud had only an affective symbology. An object-cause-of-desire has the structure of metonymy, Lacan argued. It serves first as a radically repressed cause and, subsequently, as a limit point to memory and conscious knowledge. But insofar as its displacement has a referential cause–one of the eight (corporal) objects-cause-of-desire which Lacan describes as constituting a real Ur-lining of the subject–it will always remain pre-specular (“The Subversion” 314-15). Such material can, nonetheless, function by substituting one thing for another. But the substitutions themselves are made up of imaginary, symbolic and real material–remnants and remainders of unary identificatory traits. Following this logic, Lacan argued that the (re)found object a will always have the structure of metaphor; that is, its original traits can only be known in terms of its secondary traits in a dialectical movement around the object that brings both presence and absence into play in knowledge.

 

Freud proposed a logical series of relations at the level of meaning on which he based his biological conclusions regarding Dora’s being traumatized by Herr K.:

 

We have here three symptoms–the disgust, the sensation of pressure on the upper part of the body, and the avoidance of men engaged in affectionate conversation–, all of them derived from a single experience. It is only by taking into account the interrelation of these three phenomena that we can understand the way in which the formation of the symptoms came about. The disgust is the symptom of repression in the erotogenic oral zone…. The pressure of the erect member probably led to an analogous change in the corresponding female organ, the clitoris; and the excitation of this second erotogenic zone was referred by a process of displacement to the simultaneous pressure against the thorax and became fixed there. (30)

 

But what would it mean to say a pressure became “fixed there?” Freud’s concern is not to reduce a complex phenomenon to a simplistic notion of a biological, natural sexual knowledge:

 

I took the greatest pains with this patient not to introduce her to any fresh facts in the region of sexual knowledge; and I did this, not from any conscientious motives, but because I was anxious to subject my assumptions to a rigorous test in this case. Accordingly, I did not call a thing by its name until her allusions to it had become so unambiguous that there seemed very slight risk in translating them into direct speech. Her answer was always prompt and frank: she knew about it already. But the question of where her knowledge came from was a riddle which her memories were unable to solve. She had forgotten the source of all her information on this subject. (31)

 

Freud is so perplexed by Dora’s forgetfulness that he goes to the most far-fetched lengths to explain her reaction, saying that the taste of a kiss reminds one of genital functions, even to the point of the smell of micturition (31).

 

Lacan depicts Freud as trying, rather, to figure out how the original object–the first memory–has always already, by definition, been lost or become absent. Freud knew the object could only be (re-)experienced as (re-)found. In his topological work, Lacan had equated the body with the imaginary–as that which has mutable, variable, plastic properties insofar as words, images and events can substitute themselves for other meanings, thereby creating a seeming consistency. This would mean that the illusion one has of having a whole body can be cut into–marked by affect–by the discontinuities and ragged, traumatic edges of the real. Once Lacan has made topological sense of the imaginary as an identificatory consistency–at least a logical one, if not an experiential one–commensurate with bodily identifications, Freud’s biological interpretations of trauma and anxiety sound less far-fetched.

 

That Dora’s sexual curiosity has been stimulated by the relations between her father and Frau K. is doubtless. Not only had they taken bed suites separated only by a hall, but Dora also surprised them in a forest together. The two families had, as if by chance, moved together to Vienna at the same time. When Freud said to Dora that she had been complicit in the liaison between her father and Frau K. because she had acted amorously towards Herr K., she admitted the possibility right up to the scene at the edge of the lake.

 

More important for purposes of a study of trauma, however, is Freud’s argument that some particular historical event is recorded and repressed, but remains concretely alive, even insisting on presenting itself in conscious life as an enigma. The particular character of hysteria distinguishes it from all the other psychoneuroses, Freud wrote, in that its psychic somatic complicity, whether offered by some normal or pathological process, is connected with one of the bodily organs (40).

 

I am prepared to be told at this point that there is no very great advantage in having been taught by psycho-analysis that the clue to the problem of hysteria is to be found not in ‘a peculiar instability of the molecules of the nerves’ or in a liability to ‘hypnoid states’–but in a ‘somatic compliance.’ But in reply to the objection I may remark that this new view has not only to some extent pushed the problem further back, but has also to some extent diminished it. We no longer have to deal with the whole problem, but only with the portion of it involving that particular characteristic of hysteria which differentiates it from other psychoneuroses. (41)

 

At one level, Lacan makes a certain advance in enabling us to understand the logical interconnection of conscious and unconscious knowledge as a doubleness in meaning that can keep a trauma secret while enunciating it elsewhere. His theory of the object a serves as a connector, a limit point to memory and representation which can, nonetheless, be studied. The object a is a denotation for what remains of an object lost in the first place, constituting the desire for its return in terms of its earlier properties. Given that the desire for some object seems to emanate directly from the thing, or from an organ or body part–which makes it seem to Freud that the organs are direct causes of their own effects–Lacan’s logical advance, here, depends on his topological grasp of how lines, points and holes relate to structure meaning at the surface of an object.

 

The object is not das-Ding-an-sich, then, but the distance one must reach in space and time–in the time it takes–to place a substitute image, sound, event, etc., in an empty place. Moreover, a person’s only knowledge of a lost object will be of some unary trait, some memory wisp, some stark image, which may bring trauma with it insofar as the memory is concretely bound to a hole created by a trauma experienced at the moment an object of pleasure or satisfaction was lost. Particular traits will have been repeated and linked associatively in memory–in reference to sound, image and affect–thereby creating a literal piece of the real of unary traits that bind themselves to a hole. Indeed, these traits create the hole. Limit memories bring both things into play–the unary detail and the affect produced by the hole–offering a certain proof that a trauma has been recorded.

 

Freud maintained that the hysteric separates sexual feelings from bodily parts, disassociates them one from the other. Lacan argued that such a response would delineate a symptom and not a cause. We begin to see how traumatic memories can enter consciousness as pieces of the real. If an object that first caused desire can at a second remove–in substitute form–fulfill a lack-in-being at the level of second remove, such an object will reveal the structure of the most basic layer of human thought: the particularity of fantasy. From the start of life, one traumatically loses objects that satisfy both corporally and psychically. Indeed, loss and trauma could be used interchangeably. Each loss occasions an association–a memory–that implicitly promises to fill a lack-in-being, to make sure that no sense of emptiness registers itself in the body. By isolating parts of the body from the whole in hysteria, by showing the migration of symptoms as a traveling of symptomatic identifications, rather than medical maladies, Freud gave Lacan the basis by which to link his concept of reality as a One-minus to a dynamic structuration of inert fantasy, circling around a limit object.

 

Dora is confused in her desire. Her games are complicity games in the sexual world of grown-ups. She has yet to engage her passions and find her place in her desire and in response to the requests and expectations the Other has of her. She leaves us with questions, not answers. Where is she in her desire? Where is she within the field of the scopic gazes that attract, repulse and judge her? In Lacan’s presentation of a structure to the discourse of hysteria, he places the subject of desire engaged in questioning as the speaking agent:

 

$–>S1
a<–S₂ (Seminar XX 16)

 

Freud’s young homosexual woman, on the contrary, has found The Lady she wishes to court. She is not questioning her desire. Rather, she is seeking her father’s approval of her choice. And when she promenades her conquest in front of him, in an implicit question to him, and receives the answer of a scalding gaze, she throws herself over a railroad bridge. Although she only breaks some bones, she had risked suicide.

 

One could interpret the young homosexual’s act simplistically. She cannot bear her father’s rejection, so she throws herself over a bridge. But Lacan takes us further than this in understanding this act and, I would maintain, in understanding the nature of her trauma. Among his many statements about the cause of anxiety, Freud also noted that anxiety is always oriented towards the future and is one of the strongest manifestations of the kind of fear that can be engaged when one is unclear about what the future will be. Lacan argues in Seminar IV that each traumatic act resonates on the imaginary, real, and symbolic planes that come together in any production of consciousness. This theory of mind enables him, at the very least, to argue that trauma will always point to some aspect of the father’s power in the unconscious. The traumatizing father may be the real father of jouissance, the symbolic father of law and castration, or the imaginary father who functions as a kind of superego face of law, or some facet of one or more (cf. Le séminaire IV 269).

 

Lacan’s interpretation of the traumatic impact of the gaze, clearly enunciating itself as a limit to language and understanding in this case, concerns the young woman’s implicit question to her father regarding her place in his affections. Lacan stresses what Freud had emphasized: The mother has just given birth to a new child, a son. This event causes the young woman–whose sensibilities are heightened by her own self-questioning in what Lacan calls the third logical moment of Oedipal identifications–to doubt her privileged place in her father’s affections. At this time she begins to court The Lady. Having been traumatized regarding her position in her symbolic order–her value or worth–the young woman reduces her father to an equation of imaginary father = symbolic penis. In this way, Lacan says, she makes herself the equivalent of the new brother who has stolen her father’s affections (Le séminaire IV 133). Misreading her father’s rejection of her relation to The Lady as confirmation that she has been replaced in the symbolic order by the new baby boy, she throws herself over the bridge. She acts out her trauma by casting herself out of the symbolic, into the void, so to speak, literally acting out the trauma she is undergoing affectively.

 

Lacan’s interpretation of her “passing to the act” makes sense if one acknowledges that insofar as one is an object of desire, this act pierces the narcissistic identifications that make up the imaginary ego, cutting their illusions by the truth of the real. What the young homosexual woman seeks to learn from her father, I would suggest, is not so much whether her sexual object choice is acceptable to him, as it is a topological question about her ontological value. And one’s worth in the symbolic always concerns the position one occupies within the purview of the Other.

 

I shall conclude by referring to Lacan’s re-interpretation of Freud’s discussion of his little nephew’s game with the bobbin reel in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Lacan taught that a present-absent cause underlies the birth of language itself, a cause that bears on objects that are present only as lure objects, as stand-ins for an object that has been radically and traumatically lost. One might take Freud’s text on the Fort! Da! incident as proof of Lacan’s theory, even though Lacan disagrees with Freud’s interpretation of why the little boy cried when his mother left. The sixteen-month-old boy was at the age where separation, individuation, and loss of the other are noteworthy events. His mother has gone away, temporarily. Lacan depicts this event as opening up a ditch of absence around him. Freud was interested in the fact that his nephew replaced his mother’s presence by a repetitive game of rolling a bobbin spool back and forth, saying “Here! There!” (Fort! Da!). In that way, Freud says, he mixed pleasure and grief for the purpose of mastering the sorrow his mother’s departure has occasioned. Lacan will later explain such a dialectic as the possibility for objects of all kinds to suture a structural lack-in-being.

 

Lacan takes a different tack in the Fort! Da! game than Freud. Although, like Freud, he agrees that the little boy has been traumatized by a loss, in Lacan’s topological teaching, a ditch of absence is quite literally opened up in the scopic field that had anchored him as a solid subject within the sphere of his mother’s gaze. When this gaze disappears, the little boy encounters a palpable void or hole which marks a limit to the perimeters of perception which seeks continually to affirm who and where one is in the imaginary/symbolic. When a trauma causes loss of position in those orders, the trauma demonstrates that loss of position in the symbolic/imaginary is experienced as loss of being.

 

Freud thought such inexplicable acts of repetition denoted a biological reality, usually occasioned by instinct. He writes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “It seems, then, that an instinct is an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things which the living entity has been obliged to abandon under the pressure of external disturbing forces… the expression of the inertia inherent in organic life” (36). In other words, repetitions are performed at the behest of the id in order to provide pleasure, which Freud defined as the absence of tension or the maintenance of homeostasis. But Freud remained perplexed as to why there was also a “beyond pleasure” within repetition that was redolent of the death drive.

 

Lacan questions Freud as to how a zero-degree tension could be life-giving or pleasurable. He reinterprets the inertia which Freud equated with pleasure as some meaning placed on the biological organism from the world outside, rather than being something inherent in the organism. Since Freud did not understand that what repeats is the signifier, for lack of having had access to linguistics, he could not advance in his logic of the unconscious beyond a biological theory in which the body causes its own effects. The repetition of Fort! Da! in the bobbin reel game manifests, in Lacan’s view, the passion of the signifier by which the little boy invests (cathects) the bobbin reel with a real piece of himself. In Lacan’s interpretation of this incident, the spool or reel is not a (dual) symbol that represents the mother. Rather, the fort! da! game raises the question of why children around approximately three to eighteen months of age should need to master the temporary loss of their mothers in their daily comings and goings. Lacan concludes that the aim of the repetition is thus to reconstitute oneself as a being of consistency, recognizability and unity; to reconstitute oneself as having a position or place within the symbolic and imaginary order of things and people. What the little boy must hide at all costs, Lacan will say, is the lack of the object (Le séminaire IV 166).

 

When the object a starts to lack, one confronts oneself as disunified, thereby encountering the catastrophe, chaos, and trauma that bespeak a limit to memory and representation to be found at the point where the real stops the ever-moving narrative of the symbolic/imaginary text. At this interface of lives and texts, I would propose that one can study trauma through the operation of the real on language; or language on the real.

 

Notes

 

1. See especially chapter 3, “Lacan’s Concept of the Death Drive,” in Ellie Ragland’s Essays on the Pleasures of Death.

 

2. See also Lacan’s Le séminaire, livre XXIII (1975-1976): Le sinthome.

 

3. See also Lacan’s Le séminaire, livre XXII (1974-1975): R.S.I. and his session of 14 January 1976, published in Ornicar? 3 (1976).

 

4. See Charles Pyle’s “On the Duplicity of Language.” In discussing the paradoxical logic of Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of duplicity, Pyle states: “As a function of the cut that engenders signs, all signs are duplicitous.” In “Lacan’s Theory of Language,” Pyle brings together Lacan’s three orders with Peirce’s trinary logic, equating the imaginary with the iconic; the real with the indexical, the symbolic with Peirce’s symbolic naming: “To cut indexically is to really cut, or interrupt, or shape, or otherwise impose some kind of extrinsic physical mark on some material thing.”

 

5. See also Charles Pyle, “Lacan’s Theory of Language.”

 

6. See especially chapter 7, “Identification,” in Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.

 

7. Freud’s theories regarding anxiety have largely been rejected by ego psychologists and analysts who emphasize the relation between ego wound and anxiety. Cf. Marvin Hurvich, “The Ego in Anxiety,” and Charles Brenner, “Symposium: Classics revisted, Max Schur, 1953 (An addendum to Freud’s theory of anxiety),” The Psychoanalytic Review 84 (Aug. 1997): 483-504.

 

 

Works Cited

 

• Caruth, Cathy. Introduction. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 3-12.
• Célan, Paul. “The Meridian.” Trans. Jerry Glenn. Chicago Review 29.3 (Winter 1978): 29-40.
• Collins, Daniel. “The Past is Real: Psychoanalysis and Historiography.” bien dire: a journal of Lacanian orientation 4-5, [1997-1998]. Forthcoming, 2001.
• Felman, Shoshana. “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 13-60.
• Freud, Sigmund. The Aetiology of Hysteria. 1896. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 3. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 189-221. 24 Vols.
• —-. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 18. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 3-64. 24 Vols.
• —. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.” 1905 (1901). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 7. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 3-122. 24 Vols.
• —. Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. 1921. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 18. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 67-143. 24 Vols.
• —. “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety.” 1926. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 20. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 77-124. 24 Vols.
• —. Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays. 1939. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 22. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 3-137. 24 Vols.
• —. The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman. 1920. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 17. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 146-172. 24 Vols.
• —. “Screen Memories.” 1899. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 3. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 301-22. 24 Vols.
• Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication. 1893. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 6-17. 24 Vols.
• Freud, Sigmund, and Josef Breuer. Studies on Hysteria. 1893-5. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. 1-151. 24 Vols.
• Granon-Lafont, Jeanne. Topologie lacanienne et clinique analytique. Cahors: Point Hors Ligne, 1990.
• Hartman, Geoffrey H. “On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies.” New Literary History 26.3 (Summer 1995): 537-563.
• Lacan, Jacques. Le séminaire, livre IV (1956-1957): La relation d’objet. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1994.
• —. Le séminaire, livre X (1962-1963): L’angoisse. Unedited Seminar.
• —. Le séminaire, livre XXII (1974-1975): R.S.I. Unedited Seminar.
• —. Le séminaire, livre XXIII (1975-1976): Le sinthome. Unedited Seminar.
• —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I (1953-1954): Freud’s Papers on Technique. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. John Forrester. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988.
• —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII (1959-1960): The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Dennis Porter. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.
• —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XI (1964): The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.
• —. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book XX (1972-1973): Encore. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
• —. Session 14 January 1976. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Ornicar? 3 (1976): 96-97.
• —. “The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious.” Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977. 292-325.
• —. “La troisième.” Lecture at the VIIth Congress of the Ecole freudienne de Paris (Rome, 1974). Le bulletin de l’Ecole 16 (1975): 178-203.
• Mallarmé, Stéphane. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1945.
• Miller, Jacques-Alain. Preface. Joyce avec Lacan. Ed. Jacques Aubert. Paris: Navarin, 1987.
• Pyle, Charles. “On the Duplicity of Language.” Proving Lacan. Forthcoming.
• —. “Lacan’s Theory of Language: The Symbolic Gap.” Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan. G. K. Hall World Author Series, forthcoming.
• —. Proving Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Evidentiary Force of Disciplinary Knowledge. Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, forthcoming.
• Ragland, Ellie. Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan. New York: Routledge, 1995.
• —. “The Passion of Ignorance in the Transference.” Freud and the Passions. Ed. John O’Neill. Univ. Park, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996. 151-65.
• Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Urbana, IL: The U of Illinois P, 1986.
• Strachey, James. “Editor’s Introduction.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, Angela Richards. Trans. James Strachey et. al. Vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, c. 1953-1974. ix-xxviii. 24 Vols.
• Vanderveken, Yves. “L’hallucination: le rêve traumatique du psychotique.” Quarto: Trauma et fantasme 63 (1988): 53-56.