The powerpoint presentation of my paper titled "Trauma Theory and Its Implications in Humanities and Social Sciences". I would like to have your feedbacks at shourabh.pothobashi@gmail.com. Thank you.

1. Trauma Theory and Its
Implications in Humanities and
Social Sciences
Khan Touseef Osman

2. Why trauma? Why now?
Why should trauma attract
such attention all on a sudden
and become a pivotal subject
connecting so many
disciplines? The answer is all
too obvious to us today who
have the historical knowledge
of violence of the twentieth
century and the experience of
the ominous start of twenty-
first century.

3. A Century of Traumas
The new millennium awakened
to bloodshed of an
unprecedented scale on 9/11,
two subsequent wars followed
in Afghanistan and Iraq and
the Arab world was shaken
with enormous loss of life and
property in Libya and Syria.
The legacy of violence we
inherited from the twentieth
century, “a century of
traumas,” as Shoshana
Felman calls it, has posed new
existential and epistemological
questions to human
civilization, questions that
trauma theory is trying to make
sense of and answer

4. Interdisciplinarity of trauma studies:
Thus is the
pervasiveness of
trauma theory across
numerous disciplines
including literature,
critical theory, history
and historiography,
social sciences, legal
studies, psychology
and psychiatry, etc.,
since trauma has
impacted almost all—if
not all—the spheres of
life.

5. Felman attributes the contemporary enthusiasm in
theorizing about trauma to “three interrelated
twentieth-century occurrences”:
(1) the discovery of
psychoanalysis and, with it, the
discovery of trauma as a new
conceptual center, an essential
dimension of human and
historical experience and a
new type of understanding of
historical causality and of
historic temporality;

6. Three interrelated twentieth-century occurrences:
(2) the unprecedented number
of disastrous events on a mass
scale that wreaked havoc on
the twentieth century and
whose massively traumatic
ravages were rendered
possible by the development of
weapons of mass destruction
and technologies of death that
allowed for unprecedented
assaults on the human body;

7. Three interrelated twentieth-century occurrences
(3) the unprecedented and
repeated use of the
instruments of law to cope with
the traumatic legacies and the
collective injuries left by these
events. (Felman, 2002, 2)

8. The term trauma theory and PTSD:
The term “trauma theory” first
appears in Cathy Caruth’s
Unclaimed Experience. The
theory, arguably, stems from
her insightful interpretation and
elaboration of Freud’s
deliberations on traumatic
experiences in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle and Moses
and Monotheism. What Freud
once called “traumatic
neurosis,” the American
Psychiatric Association in 1980
officially acknowledged and
termed as “Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder” (PTSD), a
concept central to trauma
theory.

9. Cathy Caruth defines PTSD as
a response, sometimes
delayed, to an overwhelming
event or events, which takes
the form of repeated, intrusive
hallucinations, dreams,
thoughts or behaviors
stemming from the event…. …
[T]he event is not assimilated
or experienced fully at the
time, but only belatedly…. To
be traumatized is precisely to
be possessed by an image or
event. (Caruth, 1995. 3-5)

10. Traumatic recollection:
A traumatic event occurs too
immediately for the
consciousness to record, but
its images come back to the
survivor belatedly and
repeatedly. What seems,
therefore, to be missing in
memory in effect repeats itself
in the forms of dreams,
flashbacks, hallucinations and
other intrusive elements at a
later time with all its exactness
and literality.

11. Traumatic dreams Vs. Freudian dreams:
The images do not reappear
distortedly or symbolically, but
with a literality that perplexed
Freud while he was treating
the World War I veterans
plagued with PTSD, because
the literal images they
encountered in dreams could
not be explained in terms of
the dream theory he devised
earlier in The Interpretation of
Dreams.

12. Freudian dreams:
Dreams Freud referred to as
“the royal road to a knowledge
of the unconscious activities of
the mind.” Dreaming gives an
outlet to the dark desires
repressed in the unconscious
or Id, so that sleep is not
disturbed by primitive sexual
and aggressive impulses (Jane
Milton et al, 2004, 22, 23).

13. Latency:
Dreaming involves
symbolization, distortion and
displacement of images which
do not occur in the veterans’
dreams. The literality of their
dreams evidences that they
are not the consequence of
any repression and their
dreams do not creep in
through any secret tunnel from
the unconscious. In explaining
the war veterans’ and other
traumatized patients’ dreams,
Freud introduces the concept
of “latency,” a concept that
accounts for the belatedness
as well as the literality of the
dreams (Freud, 1939, 84).

14. Collapse of comprehensibility:
Because images of the actual
events come back to them not
in the form of usual
recollection but in flashbacks,
for example, which they cannot
pinpoint to have happened in
any temporal or spatial frame,
these images elude their
understanding. Collapse of
comprehensibility or
understanding occurs
precisely for the survivors’
bafflement about the intrusive
elements they encounter, and
with it comes a doubt of these
elements’ objective reality or
referentialily outside their
mind.

15. Collapse of witnessing:
The truth of the traumatic
experiences, therefore,
becomes doubtful.
Incomprehensibility, doubt and
the collapse of truth invalidate
all possibility of witnessing,
whether in a trial or more
informal circumstances.

16. Crisis of truth and history:
Witnesses of traumatic events
often find themselves in a
position where the demand to
them is to articulate the
inarticulable. They are asked
to tell the truth of which they
are doubtful, about an event of
which they have no
comprehensibility. Collapses of
comprehensibility, truth and
witnessing interrogate the act
of recording of traumatic
events—private or collective,
and have radicalized the way
private history or memory and
collective history are seen.

17. Narrative memory:
Testimony is, therefore, a
distortion of truth, an endeavor
to fill in the blank space of
consciousness with
reconstruction of images
encountered in flashbacks.
Some have even refused to
make any attempt at
understanding and denied to
express trauma in the form of
“narrative memory” which is
essentially the memory that
tries to make sense of what
has no sense at all, articulate
the blank space with
imperfections and pretend to
have comprehensibility of the
incomprehensible

18. Why is literature so important in trauma theory?
Truth for anyone is a very complex It is precisely for the same
thing. For a writer, what you leave out reason that trauma theorists
says as much as those things you deem literature so important,
include. What lies beyond the margin
of the text? ...When we tell a story we because of its ability to
exercise control, but in such a way as accommodate both the
to leave a gap, an opening. It is a comprehensible and the
version, but never the final one. And incomprehensible. Literary
perhaps we hope that the silences will
be heard by someone else, and the language simultaneously
story can continue, can be retold. defies as well as claims
When we write we offer the silence as understanding, and all the
much as the story. Words are the part pioneer trauma theorists—
of silence that can be spoken. …Do
you remember the story of Philomel beginning with Freud and
who is raped and then has her tongue including Cathy Caruth,
ripped out by the rapist so that she can Shoshana Felman, Dominick
never tell? I believe in fiction and the LaCapra, etc.—turned to
power of stories because that way we
speak in tongues. literature for theoretical
support.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy
When You Could Be Normal?

19. Literature accommodates the known and the
unknown:
`Kurtz got the tribe to follow Literature, they find, can
him, did he?' I suggested. He contain knowing and not
fidgeted a little. `They adored knowing, the known and
him,' he said. The tone of unknown, the knowable and
these words was so unknowable all at once in
extraordinary that I looked at language, a medium that itself
him searchingly. It was curious oscillates between the
to see his mingled eagerness expressible and inexpressible,
and reluctance to speak of the possible and impossible.
Kurtz. Psychoanalysis, in its
extension to trauma theory,
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad makes use of this strange
nature of literature and its
medium.

20. Unlike trials, literature does not aim at “closure” of
Trauma
Felman, also, in theorizing
about the link between trial
and trauma, argues that
“justice” could only be attained
in literature, not in
conventional legal trials,
insofar as trials aim at a
“closure” of trauma, an
impossibility that literature
appreciates, and in literature
traumatic experiences remain
open with all its horror,
nightmares, silence and
cognitive and linguistic
breakdowns. (Felman, 2002,
8)