Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory

Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory Ruth Leys Shell Shockand Medical Catharsisin WorldWarI When soldiers began to break down in large numbers during the First World War and when it became evident to some physicians that, in the absence of physical lesions, their wounds were psychological rather than organic in nature, hypnotic suggestion proved to be a remarkably effective treatment. The use of hypnosis to deal with the war neuroses marked a return to a therapy that, since the time of its flourishing under Charcot's leadership more than twenty years earlier, had been largely abandoned by the medical profession. More precisely, practitioners returned to Breuer and Freud's early method of treatment of hysteria by hypnotic catharsis, a method whose relinquishment by Freud around 1896 had been the decisive gesture by which he had sought to differentiate the "discipline" of psychoanalysis from the "enigma" of suggestion. The revival of hypnosis to cure what was understood as a virtual epidemic of male hysteria during the war was attended by a revival of the many Versions of this paper were presented to Ian Hacking's seminar on dissociation at the University of Toronto, March 1993; the history of the human sciences section of the Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the University of Chicago, April 1993; and the women's studies seminar at Johns Hopkins University, November 1993. I thank Lorraine Daston, Ian Hacking, Kirstie McClure, Mary Poovey, Robert Richards, and the other participants of those seminars for their observations. I am also grateful to Walter Benn Michaels for his input at an early stage of the project, to Frances Ferguson for stimulating discussion of the issue of memory and narration explored here, and to Michael Fried for helpful comments on various drafts. CriticalInquiry20 (Summer 1994) ? 1994 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/94/2004-0003$01.00. 623 All rights reserved. 624 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures doubts and objections that have repeatedly accompanied the use of hypnosis as a technology of the subject in the West. The nature of those doubts and objections is complex, but I believe they can all be seen to revolve around a single question: How does hypnosis cure?' In London in the spring of 1920 that question was the topic of a brief but, I will argue, highly significant debate among three well-known doctors who had played important roles as psychotherapists during the war.2 The discussion was led by William Brown, who had seen nearly three thousand cases of war neuroses in France and Britain. Following Breuer and Freud, Brown argued that the characteristic signs of "shellshock"-stupor, confusion, mutism, loss of sight or hearing, spasmodic convulsions or trembling of the limbs, anesthesia, exhaustion, sleeplessness, depression, and terrifying, repetitive nightmares, all symptoms hitherto associated chiefly (although not exclusively) with female hysteria-were bodily expressions of obstructed or "repressed" emotions. Brown reasoned that when a soldier was confronted with the need to 1. For the history of the concept and treatment of shell shock, see especially Paul Fussell, The Great Warand Modern Memory(New York, 1975); Esther Fischer-Homberger, Die traumatischeNeurose: Vomsomatischenzur sozialenLeiden (Bern, 1975); Eric J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combatand Identityin WorldWar I (Cambridge, 1979); P Lefebvre and S. Barbes, "L'Hysterie de guerre: itude comparative de ses manifestations au cours des deux derniers conflits mondiaux," Annales midico-psychologiques142 (Feb. 1984): 262-66; Martin Stone, "Shellshock and the Psychologists," in TheAnatomyof Madness:Essaysin theHistoryof Psychiatry, ed. W. F. Bynum, Roy Porter, Michael Shepherd, 2 vols. (London, 1985), 2:242-71; Ted Bogacz, "War Neurosis and Cultural Change in England, 1914-22: The Work of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into 'Shell-Shock,"' Journal of Contemporary History 24 (Apr. 1989): 227-56; Sue Thomas, "Virginia Woolf's Septimus Smith and Contemporary Perceptions of Shell Shock," English LanguageNotes 25 (Dec. 1987): 49-57; Harold Merskey, "ShellShock," in 150 Yearsof BritishPsychiatry,1841-1991, ed. German E. Berrios and Hugh Freeman (London, 1991), pp. 245-67; and Chris Fendtner, "'Minds the Dead Have Ravished': Shell Shock, History, and the Ecology of Disease-Systems," History of Science 31 (Dec. 1993): 377-420. 2. The three doctors were William Brown, Charles S. Myers, and William McDougall. Brown delivered a paper-"The Revival of Emotional Memories and Its Therapeutic Value"-at a meeting of the medical section of the British Psychological Society on 18 Feb. 1920, Myers and McDougall responded, and Brown's rejoinder closed the meeting. The proceedings were published under the title of Brown's paper in TheBritishJournalof Medical Psychology1 (Oct. 1920): 16-33; hereafter abbreviated "R." Ruth Leys is associate professor in the Humanities Center at The Johns Hopkins University. She is the editor, with Rand B. Evans, of DefinbetweenAdolf Meyerand Edward ing AmericanPsychology:The Correspondence Bradford Titchener(1990) and author of FromSympathyto Reflex:Marshall Hall and His Critics(1991), and is currently working on the history of discourses of trauma, dissociation, repetition, and memory from 1875 to the present. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 625 maintain self-control and army discipline in front-line conditions of unremitting physical and psychological stress, he was likely to respond to any significant trauma by breaking down. Unable to discharge his powerful emotions directly, through action or speech, he unconsciously "materialized" them by converting them into physical or bodily symptoms. Most striking of all, the patient would not remember anything about the horrifying events that lay at the origin of his pitiable state. Dissociation, or amnesia, was therefore the hallmark of the war neuroses.3 "Hystericssuffer The famous Breuer-Freud formula, according mainlyfrom reminiscences."4 to which hysterics suffered from repressed traumatic memories, served Brown as the basis for a hypnotic therapy designed to restore the victim's dissociated memory through the trancelike repetition and abreaction of the shattering event. Brown reported: It has been found again and again in the case of shell-shock patients, especially those seen in the field, that they suffer from loss of memory of the incidents immediately following upon the shell-shock, and that, if [through the use of light hypnosis] these memories are brought back again afterwards with emotional vividness-hallucinatory vividness, I might say-the other symptoms which they were showing tend to disappear.... The facts seem to indicate that emotion has been pent up in these patients, under strain of attempted self-control, and that liberation of such pent-up emotion (known as 'abreaction') produces a resolution of the functional symptoms. Another obvious factor, of course, is the re-synthesis of the mind of the patient-the amnesia has been abolished, and the patient has once more full sway over his recent memories. ["R," pp. 16-17] For Brown the efficacy of hypnosis depended crucially--though as we shall see, not exclusively-on the emotional catharsis involved. What appeared to him to be fundamental was that in the hypnotic or trance state the traumatic event was "reproduced" or "relived" with all the affective intensity of the original experience. Only in this way, he thought, could the pent-up emotion be successfully abreacted: "The essential thing seems to be the revival of the emotion accompanying the memory" ("R," p. 16). Breuer and Freud had also emphasized the importance of emotional discharge in the cathartic treatment. "Recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result," they had observed. "The psychical process which originally took place must be repeated as vividly as possible; it must be brought back to its statusnascendi and then given verbal 3. See William Brown, "The Treatment of Cases of Shell Shock in an Advanced Neurological Centre," Lancet, 17 Aug. 1918, p. 197; hereafter abbreviated "TC." 4. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studieson Hysteria(1893-95), The StandardEdition of the CompletePsychologicalWorksof Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 2:7; hereafter abbreviated SH; StandardEdition hereafter abbreviated SE. 626 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures utterance" (SH, p. 6). At military centers just behind the French front line, Brown had obtained such emotional relivings without difficulty. But in cases of longer standing back home in Britain, where the symptoms had had a chance to become more "fixed," he had found it much less easy to obtain the same results. Brown stated that one of his patients, who had suffered from hysterical deafness and loss of speech, had recovered his memories under hypnosis on several occasions but had not regained his voice and hearing until, one night, he had experienced an extremely intense dream and had suddenly tumbled out of bed with his speech and hearing restored. "In the case of deaf-mutes treated in the field such failure never occurred," he observed. "The explanation seems to be that, in this case, I did not produce the emotional revival with sufficient vividness" ("R," p. 16). But C. S. Myers and William McDougall, the other participants in the debate, rejected Brown's emphasis on the emotions in hypnotic abreaction. They maintained that what produced the relief of symptoms was not the affective catharsis but the cognitive dimensions of the cure. Implicitly embracing the traditional distinction between the lower emotional appetites and the higher functions of rational control, they emphasized not the affective reliving but the conscious reintegration of the dissociated or repressed memory into the patient's history. "It is the recall of the repressed scene, not the 'working out' of the 'bottled up emotional energy' . . . which is responsible for the cure," argued Myers ("R," p. 21). "The essential therapeutic step is the relief of the dissociation," McDougall agreed. "The emotional discharge is not necessary to this, though it may play some part" ("R," p. 25). McDougall pointed out that in an earlier discussion of his procedure, Brown had insisted to the patient, while the latter was still under hypnosis, that on waking he would remember the scenes that he had just relived. Without such a precaution, the patient on being roused from the trance state characteristically forgot again everything that had just occurred. "In this procedure [Brown] seems to have recognised practically that the emotional excitement was not in itself the curative process," McDougall noted, "but that at the most it was contributory only to the essential step in the process of cure, namely the relief of amnesia or dissociation" ("R," p. 25). (As will become clear, this did not wholly misrepresent Brown's ideas.) McDougall conceded that the revival of emotion was important as an aid to securing the complete relief of the traumatic experience, both directly, by giving force and vivacity to the recollection, and indirectly, by overcoming the continued tendency to repress or forget the unpleasant memories. But the essential thing in treatment was the reappearance of the traumatic memory in the clear light of consciousness. Indeed, McDougall claimed that it was possible to obtain the recovery of the repressed traumatic event without emotional excitement of any appreciable kind (see "R," pp. 25-26). What is the significance of the debate between Brown and his col- CriticalInquiry Summer1994 627 leagues? I submit that theirs was not simply a disagreement about a minor point of therapeutic technique. Nor, in spite of McDougall's interest in the topic, was theirs essentially a dispute about the cerebral mechanisms that might underlie the symptoms of the war neuroses. Far more basic issues were at stake. For the force of Myers's and McDougall's denial of the importance of emotional abreaction was to insist that what mattered in the hypnotic cure was to enable the traumatized soldier to win a certain knowledge of, or relation to, himself by recovering the memory of the traumatic experience. The idea was to help the subject achieve an intellectual reintegration or resynthesis of the forgotten memory so that he could overcome his dissociated, fractured state and accede to a coherent narrative of his past life. For this a certain degree of the patient's participation was required. Put more generally, it is as if two competing accounts of the role or position of the subject in medicine opposed one another in the debate. One account imagined that the collaboration of the subject was an inseparable part of the cure, while the other account imagined that, as in the case of drug therapy or surgery--dominant modes of medical therapy in the West-the collaboration of the subject was irrelevant to treatment. For psychotherapists of the war neuroses the key question was this: Did hypnosis heal the patient by soliciting the subject's participation? Or did a suggestive therapeutics achieve its effects by encouraging the patient's docile subjection to the coercive or authoritative command of the hypnotist that bypassed the consent and as it were the collaboration of the self?5 If we rephrase those positions in the light of Foucault's work on discipline and knowledge, we might say that the first account emphasized the active role of a subject understood as constituted through categories of consent and refusal, while the second imagined a subject-but does the term make sense in this context?-who somehow escapes both alternatives.6 5. Although Myers, McDougall, Brown, and many others believed that hypnosis involved the imposition of the physician's coercive will onto an essentially passive subject, I would argue that the hypnotic rapport involves rather an inmixing of "activity"and "passivity" or a mimetic "invention" of the subject that tends to exceed the dual relationship between the hypnotist-analyst and the patient. 6. If for Foucault power, discipline, and knowledge line up together, they do so by presupposing the production of a subject capable of consent and resistance. In a key text he writes: What defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead it acts upon their actions. ... A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things.... On the other hand a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that the "other" (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts. ... Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. [Michel Foucault, "Afterword:The Subject and Power," in Herbert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralismand Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1982), pp. 220-21] 628 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures Now a revealing feature of the 1920 debate in this regard was the fear that, in the absence of cognitive insight, the hypnotic reliving of the trauma might be positively harmful to the patient by reinforcing an emotional dependence on the physician that was incompatible with psychic autonomy and self-control (see "R," pp. 24-25). This was also the message of psychotherapist Paul Dubois, whose influential attacks on hypnosis, starting in 1905, had helped precipitate the rapid decline of hypnotic therapy in the prewar years. Eerily anticipating the equation between the therapeutic value of self-control and the requirement of military discipline that was characteristic of medical discourse in World War I, Dubois had written: The object of treatment ought to be to make the patient masterof himself;the means to this end is the educationof the will, or, more exactly, of thereason. . . . There exists between neurotic patients of every stamp and delinquents and criminals more connection than one would think. The neurotics, like the delinquents, are antisocial.... The delinquents are, in our eyes, the unworthy soldiers who must be punished with discipline, even shot down. Neurotic people are stragglers from the army. We are a little less severe with them. They show more or less their inability to march; they are lame, that is plain. But we do not like them much; we are ready to throw in their faces reproaches of laziness, of simulation, or lack of energy. We do not know whether to believe in their hurts and put them in the infirmary, or to handle them roughly and send them back to the ranks. We are already involved in a problem of liberty and of responsibility, and it is the absence of a clear solution which makes us hesitate which course to follow.7 Dubois's widely heeded response to that uncertainty had been to demand the abandonment of hypnotic "manipulation" in favor of a moral rehabilitation of the patient based on "rational persuasion." Rejecting For Foucault, power and freedom are thus mutually constitutive, as has been emphasized by Mark Maslan, "Foucault and Pragmatism," Raritan 7 (Winter 1988): 94-114. 7. Paul Dubois, The Psychic Treatmentof Nervous Disorders:The Psychoneurosesand Their Moral Treatment,trans. Smith Ely Jelliffe and William A. White (New York, 1909), pp. 35, 45-46. The extent to which those in charge of shell-shock patients in Austrian military hospitals were guilty of abusive deployment of "disciplinary" techniques was the subject of hearings in 1920 at which Freud gave testimony. See K. R. Eissler, Freudas an ExpertWitness: The Discussion of WarNeuroses betweenFreud and Wagner-Jauregg,trans. Christine Trollope (New York, 1986). For recent treatments of the conflation between the requirements of military discipline and medical therapy in the treatment of the traumatic neuroses in World War I, see Stone, "Shellshock and the Psychologists"; Pat Barker, Regeneration(New York, 1991), for a discussion of the treatment of the poet Siegfried Sassoon; and Elaine Showalter, "Male Hysteria: W. H. R. Rivers and the Lessons of Shell Shock," TheFemaleMalady: Women, Madness,and English Culture,1830-1980 (New York, 1985), pp. 167-94. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 629 what he defined as the hypnotist's exploitation of the patient's childish and "effeminate" passivity and automatic obedience, he had urged physicians instead to increase his virile self-discipline and autonomy by strengthening his rational and critical powers. "It is our moral stamina which gives us strength to resist these debilitating influences [or suggestions]," he had maintained.8 Even Pierre Janet's scathing condemnation of Dubois's position-Janet's proposal that hypnosis should be considered no different from medical technologies such as drug therapy or surgery, the efficacy of which did not depend on the patient's insight or awareness-could not prevent the reorientation of psychotherapy towards moralization and "rational" analysis that occurred at this time.9 8. Dubois, The PsychicTreatmentof Nervous Disorders,p. 116. For objections to hypnosis similar to those expressed by Dubois, see Alfred Binet, LesIdies modernessur les enfants (Paris, 1910), p. 193, and J. Dejerine and E. Gauckler, The Psychoneurosesand Their Treatmentby Psychotherapy,trans. Jelliffe (Philadelphia, 1913). Suggestion was characteristically defined as "the process by which ideas are introduced into the mind of a subject without being submitted to his critical judgment. The effect of any suggestion depends on its evading the critical judgement of reason" (J. A. Hadfield, "Treatment by Suggestion and Persuasion," in FunctionalNerve Disease, ed. H. Crichton Miller [London, 1920], p. 63). By contrast, persuasion was defined as "the form of treatment which appeals to the conscious reason and enforces its claims on logical grounds." Ominously, however, for those who-like Duboiswanted to maintain an absolute distinction between these two processes, Hadfield went on to remark that "in actual practice the success of persuasion depends on suggestion, especially that derived from the authority of the physician and the expectancy of the patient" (ibid., p. 82). In effect, Hadfield-like Brown and so many others-attempted to distinguish between "good" suggestion, which helped strengthen the patient's will and freedom, and "bad" suggestion, which weakened psychic autonomy. Suggestion thus conformed to the structure of the pharmakon(or supplement)in Derrida's sense of those terms, as that which is simultaneously remedy and poison. It is worth noting in this regard that the term shell shock,introduced by Myers and others early in the war, was officially banned in 1917 on the grounds that it helped spread, by contagion or "suggestion," the very symptoms whose cure by suggestion was the goal of psychotherapeutic treatment. See Myers, Shell Shockin France, 1914-1918, Based on a War Diary Kept by CharlesS. Myers (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 12-13, 92-97. 9. For Janet's criticisms of Dubois and the turn to rational persuasion, see Pierre Janet, PsychologicalHealing: A Historical and Clinical Study, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, 2 vols. (1919; New York, 1976), 1:129ff; hereafter abbreviated PH. "Influenced by the prevailing fashion," Janet sarcastically remarks of a certain Dr. Levy who had converted to Dubois's rational therapeutics, "he now tells us that hypnotism has fallen into disfavour 'because it is regarded as a special nervous condition.' He, too, wants the patient to participate in the work of the cure, which is, of course, to be 'rational.' The patient must learn to discipline himself morally and physically. In a word, the whole of Levy's therapeutic system depends upon 'rational education and re-education"' (PH, 1:113). In response to this Janet quotes from an article by Max Eastman: "'It is difficult to see why it is any more a suspension of judgment to let a physician you have decided to trust lodge a helpful idea in your mind, than to let him lodge an ominous-looking capsule in your body"' (PH, 1:337). To Janet's conception of hypnotic treatment as a medical technology no different from drug therapy or surgery we might oppose Freud's conviction that hypnosis cannot function as a medical technology precisely because, unlike the effects of drug or surgical treatment, its effects are incalculable. "The chief deficiency of hypnotic therapy," he observes in 1891, "is that it cannot be dosed. The degree of hypnosis attainable does not depend on the physician's 630 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures All this suggests that for hypnosis to be installed successfully at the core of a medical therapeutics during the First World War it had to be retheorized as exemplifying not the hierarchical, "coercive" model but the consensual or participatory model of treatment. And in fact Brown himself interpreted hypnotic suggestion along these lines. If, for Brown, emotional catharsis had a legitimate place in the treatment of the war neuroses, this was precisely because it avoided the abjection and mechanical automaticity of "direct suggestion." In hypnotic catharsis, Brown had earlier explained, "the patient goes through his original terrifying experiences again, his memories recurring with hallucinatory vividness. It is this which brings about the return of his powers of speech, and not direct suggestion, as in the ordinary method of hypnosis." Catharsis was thus imagined as "free from the defects attaching to the ordinary use" of hypnotic suggestion ("TC," p. 198).10 As a means toward helping the patient achieve self-mastery and self-knowledge, Brown's treatment emphasized the recovery and resynthesis of the forgotten memory: Remembering that [the patient's] disability is due to a form of dissociation and that in some cases hypnotism accentuates this dissociation, I always suggest at the end of the hypnotic sleep that he will remember clearly all that has happened to him in this sleep. More than this, I wake him very gradually, talking to him all the time and getting him to answer, passing backwards and forwards from the events of his sleep to the events in the ward, the personalities of the sister, orderly, doctor, and patients-i.e., all the time re-associating or re-synthesising the train of his memories and interests. ["TC," pp. 198-99] Hypnotic catharsis was theorized not as an apparatus of behavioral manipulation but as a "supplementary aid" to a medical treatment designed to "discipline" the subject by getting him to accept a certain version of his history and identity. Brown conceded: procedure but on the chance reaction of the patient" (Freud, "Hypnosis," SE, 1:111). On this basis, Freud will come to regard psychoanalysis as more technological than hypnosis precisely because, in the form of the management of the transference and the lifting of resistances, its procedures can within limits be controlled by the physician. It is in this sense of technological control that psychoanalysis can be compared to surgery, Freud argues, even going so far as to acknowledge the role that the physician's "suggestions" may play in the success of the psychotherapeutic operation. See Freud, "The Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy" (1910), SE, 11:146; "Recommendations to Physicians Practising PsychoAnalysis" (1912), SE, 12:115; and IntroductoryLectureson Psycho-Analysis(1916-1917), SE, 16:446-52. 10. By the "ordinary" method of hypnosis Brown meant Hyppolite Bernheim's method of direction suggestion in which the physician verbally suggested to the hypnotized patient that the symptoms (or their cause) would vanish. See Brown, "Hypnosis, Suggestion, and Dissociation," BritishMedicalJournal, 14 June 1919, p. 735. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 631 Psychologically we are forced to recognise the great therapeutic effect produced by the intellect in the analytic review of past memories, especially in the analytic treatment of what have been called 'anxiety states,' where the patient is helped and encouraged to look at past events from a more impersonal point of view, and so to obtain a deeper insight into their mutual relations and intrinsic values. The method, which might be called the method of autognosis, does produce a readjustment of emotional values among the patient's past memories. These memories are all scrutinized from the point of view of the patient's developed personality-or rather of his ideal of personality so far as it becomes revealed in the course of the analysisand the relative autonomy that some of them had previously enjoyed by virtue of their emotional over-emphasis is withdrawn from them. The progress is one from a state of relative dissociation to a state of mental harmony and unity. The 'abreaction' of excessive emotion here is no merely mechanical process, but is controlled at every step by the principle of relativity and intellectual adjustment. ["R," p. 19]" In other words, the disagreement between Brown and the others, basic as it seemed at the time, emerges in retrospect as a matter of emphasis, not of fundamentally opposed viewpoints. It is significant in this regard that, in order to avoid the perceived dangers of hypnosis, Brown advocated limiting its use to a "very small minority of cases," namely the major hysterias, and preferably to only one treatment ("TC," p. 199).12 As he was the first to recognize, it was owing to the brevity of hypnotic treatment that there were no diagnoses of multiple personality in the war-a fact of considerable interest given that the dissociations so characteristic of shell shock had been associated with the multiple personality diagnosis that had enjoyed previous success in Europe and the United States.13 In 1926, the psychoanalytically oriented physician Bernard Hart, in a presidential address to the British Psychological Society on dissociation, commented on the "remarkable absence" of cases of double personality in the literature of psychoanalysis. In the discussion that followed, Ernest Jones, Freud's disciple, attributed such a lack to the Freudian rejection of hypnotic methods that he, Jones, 11. For similar descriptions of the task of hypnotic therapy, see Brown, Talkson Psychotherapy(London, 1923), p. 10; Myers, Shell Shockin France, p. 68; W. H. R. Rivers, "Freud's Psychology of the Unconscious," Lancet, 16 June 1917, p. 914; John T MacCurdy, War Neuroses (Cambridge, 1918), pp. x-ix, 93-94; and Ernst Simmel's discussion of catharsis in Sandor Ferenczi, Karl Abraham, and Simmel, "Symposium Held at the Fifth International Psycho-Analytical Congress at Budapest, September 1918," in Psycho-Analysisand the War Neuroses(London, 1921), pp. 30, 33. 12. See also Brown, Talkson Psychotherapy, pp. 34-35 and Suggestionand MentalAnalysis: An Outlineof the Theoryand Practiceof Mind Cure (London, 1923), p. 170. 13. For the vicissitudes of the multiple personality diagnosis, see Ian Hacking, "Multiple Personality Disorder and Its Hosts," Historyof the Human Sciences5 (May 1992): 3-31. 632 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures regarded as especially likely to produce the weakening and dissociation of the ego characteristic of multiple personality. Brown was inclined to agree, pointing out that although functional nervous diseases had been produced in the thousands during the war, "no well-marked cases of multiple personality were reported or observed." He ascribed this to the absence of prolonged hypnotic treatment: Cases of extensive amnesia, fugues, etc. were numerous; but the first aim of the army doctors in the battle areas was to remove these amnesias and re-associate the patients as quickly as possible, so that the latter might be either returned to the line or sent down to the base with the minimum of delay. Some of these cases might have lent themselves to unintentional hypnotic "training," under less urgent and peremptory conditions of hospital treatment, and thus have added to the literature of multiple personality; but this was not to be. 14 Brown's observations can help us understand multiple personality as a historical-social construct. During World War I, in a context that saw a modest revival of Freud's cathartic treatment, the fear of suggestibility and automaticity in the male-the demand for the revirilization of the demoralized soldier-limited the deployment of hypnotic suggestion in such a way as to contain the emergence of the more florid symptoms hitherto associated with the diagnosis of multiple personality. That factor, in combination with Joseph Babinski's assault on the entire hysteria diagnosis and the general neurological-organicist orientation of the psychiatric profession, ensured that the shell-shocked soldier might be regarded as a malingerer or treated as a case of male hysteria, but he would never be seen as an example of multiple personality.'5 Nevertheless, the war neuroses brought into prominence once again the very phenomenon of dissociation or splitting that had been considered the defining characteristic of female hysteria and female multiplicity. "The war neurosis, like the peace neurosis, is the expression of a splitting of the personality," Ernst Simmel wrote.16 The rediscovery of splitting as the essential feature of shell shock reopened the debate, inaugurated by Freud, over the role of sexuality in the production of hysteria. Since for 14. Bernard Hart, "The Conception of Dissociation" (with discussion), TheBritishJournal of Medical Psychology6, no. 4 (1926): 255, 257, and 260; Hart's address was given to the medical section of the British Psychological Society, 15 Dec. 1926; ErnestJones, T. W. Mitchell, and Edward Glover's remarks were published in the discussion section that follows Brown's paper. 15. For a contemporary critique of Babinski's views on hysteria by one of the chief architects of the multiple personality diagnosis, see Morton Prince, "Babinski's Theory of Hysteria,"Journal of AbnormalPsychology14 (Dec. 1919): 312-24. 16. Simmel, "Symposium Held at the Fifth International Psycho-Analytical Congress at Budapest, September 1918," p. 33. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 633 Brown, Myers, and others the notion of sexual conflict seemed inapplicable to the traumas of war, the threat of annihilation-the feeling of utter helplessness when confronted with almost certain death-rather than sexual repression came to be regarded as the cause of hysterical dissociation. Indeed, repression itself was called into question as the mechanism of hysteria, with the result that psychotherapists returned to, or reemphasized, Breuer and Freud's early idea, shared by Janet, Morton Prince, and others, that in the dissociative disorders a hypnoid or psychical splitting of the ego occurs prior to, or independent of, the mechanism of repression.'7 Furthermore, with the insistence on the trauma of death came a return to a thematics of maternal trauma that I have already located at the center of discussions of dissociation, or multiple personality, at the turn of the century. 18 (We shall see that Janet's case of the traumatized and dissociated Irene, to be discussed in the next section, fits this pattern.) Not only was the mother, conceived as the mesmerizing "object" of the suggestible child's first or primary identificatory tie, scapegoated as the source of her son's "feminine" hysteria and lack of virile courage in actual battle.19More significant, the war neuroses came to be conceptualized-notably by Freud's colleague, Saindor Ferenczi, and by Freud himself-on the model of the child's earliest reaction to the threatened loss or disappearance of the maternal figure.20 In short, the hysterical 17. For British postwar discussions of the distinction between splitting and repression, see Rivers, Instinctand the Unconscious:A Contributionto a BiologicalTheoryof thePsycho-Neuroses (Cambridge, 1922); and McDougall, Outline of AbnormalPsychology(New York, 1926), esp. chap. 12. I am glad to draw attention here to the convergence between my emphasis on the relationship between splitting and the trauma of death in discourses on hysteria and dissociation and the work of Juliet Mitchell, who, on somewhat different grounds, has recently raised important questions about the link between hysteria, splitting, and the death drive. See her "Psychoanalysis and Hysteria" (paper presented to the School of Criticism and Theory, Dartmouth College, July 1993). 18. For an interpretation of traumatic or hysterical splitting as involving a melancholic identification with, or mimetic incorporation of, the maternal figure, see Ruth Leys, "The Real Miss Beauchamp: Gender and the Subject of Imitation," in FeministsTheorizethe Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York, 1992), pp. 189-94. 19. For mother-fixation as a cause of the war neuroses, see for example Maurice Nicoll, "Regression" and H. Crichton Miller, "The Mother Complex," in FunctionalNerve Disease: An Epitomeof WarExperiencefor the Practitioner,ed. Miller (London, 1920), pp. 101, 115-28, and Simmel, "Symposium Held at the Fifth International Psycho-Analytical Congress at Budapest, September 1918," p. 31. For general discussions of the gender aspects of the war experience, see Showalter, "Male Hysteria," and Behind the Lines: Genderand the Two World Wars,ed. Margaret Randolph Higgonnet et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1987). 20. In an astonishing note added to his discussion of the war neuroses in 1918, Ferenczi cites the work of Moro on the reflexes of the newborn in order to compare traumatic hysteria to the reflex reactions of a very young infant when traumatized by a sudden shock: "We would say: Moro has artificially produced a little shock (or traumatic) neurosis." Ferenczi interprets this infantile reflex as an atavistic reversion to the young monkey's reflex clasping of the mother: "The remarkable thing in this action is that this reflex to the shock in the young infant of less than three months old shows signs of the natural reflexes of clasping, which characterise the 'carried offspring', i.e. the young of animals (monkeys) which are 634 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures splitting of the ego associated with the traumatic neuroses of both war and peace emerged as the sign of a prior, impossible mourning for and incorporation of the lost mother. Affect,Memory,and Representation Can hysteria so defined be cured? Here I want to emphasize that Brown's advocacy of hypnotic abreaction as a technique for recovering traumatic memories involved the claim that emotion always "involves a reference, vague or explicit, towards some object" ("R," p. 17), which is to say that the emotions belonged to a system of representations. That is what made it possible for emotions to persist in the mind with the same continuity and verisimilitude as the images on a movie reel to which Brown compared them, just as the experiences or objects to which the emotions were attached were completely preserved in the memory. And that is why, when emotions were repressed or dissociated, they had not disappeared but were lodged in the unconscious in the form of forgotten recollections. For Brown, it is because the affects participate in the same representational system as other experiences that they can be recalled or "reproduced" under hypnosis with all the intensity of the original experience. He observes: Hypnotic experiments in the revival of early memories of childhood seem to confirm one in the view that the emotional tone of the individual experiences is retained in the mind in the same way in which those experiences themselves are retained, so that, although the mind becomes more and more complex in various ways in course of time, and various experiences, that later on leave their traces in memory, interact, as it were, with one another and produce more complex mental formations, there is at least a continuous thread of actual experience being deposited in memory from moment to moment, like the successive photographic views on a cinematograph ribbon, and these early memories can be revived in the exact form compelled with the help of a pronounced clasping reflex to hold fast with the fingers to the mother's fur while she climbs about the trees. We would say: atavistic reversion of the method of reaction in sudden terror" (Ferenczi, "Symposium Held at the Fifth International Psycho-Analytical Congress at Budapest, September 1918," p. 21). Ferenczi's linking of trauma to the maternal figure anticipates Imre Hermann's subsequent study of maternal trauma in L'Instinctfilial, trans. Georges Kassai (1943; Paris, 1972) as well as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok's analysis of the traumatic "dual union" between the mother and child in L'Ecorceet le noyau (Paris, 1978). Freud also linked traumatic repetition to the threatened disappearance of the mother; see Freud, Beyondthe PleasurePrinciple (1920), SE, 18:364. I am currently pursuing this topic as part of a broader study of the discourses of trauma, splitting, repetition, memory, and mourning in the 1920s and after. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 635 in which they were originally laid down as the mind passed beyond them to new experiences. ["R," p. 17] Brown's idea that the subject is incapable of forgetting anythingthat even if conscious access to such memories is blocked we unconsciously retain a complete record of every single event or experience that has ever happened to us, however insignificant-testifies to the extraordinary importance traditionally attached to memory as-along with volition-the defining mark of personal identity. But what if emotional memories were not what they were assumed to be? What if the (often temporary yet) "undeniable successes" of hypnosis in the treatment of the war neuroses depended not on the revival of emotions that had been previously experienced and were now re-presented to the subject as past, but on the repetition of the emotional experience in the present, with all the energy of the initial "event"?21What if, accordingly, the passionate "relivings" or "reproductions" or "repetitions" characteristic of the cathartic cure could not be used to retrieve emotional memories, for the simple reason that the memories in question did not exist? More broadly, what if the emotions defied a certain kind of representational economy? To Brown's great credit he realized that the question of emotional memory, far from being "entirely unreal" as McDougall believed ("R," p. 24 n. 1), went to the heart of the issue of suggestion and the nature of the hypnotic cure. Moreover, he was also aware that it was a question that in the prewar years had excited the curiosity of many of the best psychologists of the day, with results that did not always support his own position. Brown drew attention to two contributions of particular interest, those of the Swiss psychologist, Edouard Claparede, and Sigmund Freud. Clapar&de, in a remarkable contribution of 1911, had rejected the theory of emotional memory or "affective representation" that subtended Brown's analysis.22 It will help us get our bearings here if we recall that the controversy over emotional memory was part of a wider turn-of-thecentury debate over the epistemological foundations of psychology and that one consequence of that debate was a general shift away from an 21. Ferenczi and Otto Rank, The Developmentof Psycho-Analysis,trans. Caroline Newton (1925; New York, 1956), p. 61. For positive evaluations of hypnosis and suggestion in the treatment of shell shock in World War I, see M. D. Eder, War-Shock:The Psycho-Neurosesin WarPsychologyand Treatment(London, 1917), pp. 128-43; and Frederick Dillon, "Treatment of Neuroses in the Field: The Advanced Psychiatric Centre" and J. A. Hadfield, "Treatment by Suggestion and Hypno-Analysis," in TheNeurosesin War ed. Emanuel Miller (New York, 1940), pp. 119-27, 128-49. For more pessimistic assessments of the outcome of suggestion and other therapies, especially in chronic cases, see Norman Fenton, Shell Shockand ItsAftermath (St. Louis, 1926), and Abram Kardiner, The TraumaticNeurosesof War (Menasha, Wis., 1941). 22. Edouard Claparede, "La Question de la 'memoire' affective," Archivesde psychologie 10 (1911): 363; hereafter abbreviated "MA." 636 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures atomistic, sensationalist psychology to a more intentionalist or functionalpragmatic approach that called into question the general role of sensation and the image, or representation, in psychic life. Hovering about these prewar developments, and influencing them in ways that have yet to be determined, was the talismanic figure of Henri Bergson. We will not let Sartre's brilliantly articulated phenomenological critique of Bergson, Claparede, and others prevent us from acknowledging the historical interest of their work in revising the interpretation of the place of the image and representation in mental life.23 Although what has chiefly attracted the attention of historians is the debate over "imageless" thought, the role of the image in emotion was also a major topic of interest and discussion.24A key figure here was William James, discussed by both Brown and Claparede, who had denied the existence of emotional memory. When we think of a past feeling, James had argued, what surges up in our consciousness is not the memory of that feeling but a new feeling experienced in thepresent."Therevivability in memoryof the emotions,like that of all the feelings of the lower senses, is very small," James writes in a passage cited by Clapare'de. We can remember that we underwent grief or rapture, but not just how the grief or rapture felt. This difficult ideal revivability is, however, more than compensated in the case of the emotions by a very easy actual revivability. That is, we can produce, not remembrances of the old grief or rapture, but new griefs and raptures, by summoning up a lively thought of their exciting cause. The cause is now only an idea, but this idea produces the same organic irradiations, or almost the same, which were produced by its original, so that the emotion is again a reality. We have "recaptured" it.25 With respect to the hypnotic treatment of the shell-shock victim, we might put it that, according to James's theory of emotion, it is because the organic conditions of the original experience have been brought back so vividly to the traumatized soldier that they again produce the emotion of fear-but the emotion is an actual, present feeling caused by the visceral sensations aroused during the hypnosis. 23. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Imagination:A PsychologicalCritique,trans. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972), where he argues that despite the new orientation and the new terminology, Bergson and others retained the concept of the image in its classical empiricistmaterialist guise. 24. See George Humphrey, Thinking:An Introductionto Its ExperimentalPsychology(New York, 1963); Thinking:FromAssociationto Gestalt,ed. Jean Matter Mandler and George Mandler (New York, 1964); and David E Lindenfeld, The Transformation of Positivism:AlexiusMeinong and EuropeanThought,1880-1920 (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 220-64. 25. William James, Principlesof Psychology,ed. Frederick Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis, 3 vols. (1890; Cambridge, 1981), 2:1087-88. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 637 Claparede extends James's argument. Specifically, he sets out to discover what he himself experiences when he tries to remember a past emotion. Claparede reports that when he attempts to project an emotion into the past-the sadness he experiences at the thought of his dead parents (significantly, an example of mourning)-either he continues to feel the emotion in thepresent, and hence not as past, or he ceases to experience the emotion altogether and instead merely represents himself to himself as a kind of depersonalized or dead "mannequin-self" whom he sees objectively, at a distance, without any emotion, as if he were a spectator of himself. "For me," he writes, "it is impossible to feel an emotion as past" ("MA," p. 367). He observes: "Thus I know that I was sad, but I have no consciousness of any state of sadness. In order for these nonaffective images of sadness to renew their original meaning and their life, I am obliged to retranslate them into affective terms; but then I relapse into emotional states in the present, which is to say that it is my present self that is sad, and no longer only my past self." An emotional state and projection into the past are "incompatible facts," Clapar&de states, for "emotion ... is always conscious," is always only experienced in the present ("MA,"p. 367). In a fascinating passage he adds: As soon as I project the past moment far from the present moment which fills myself, then it is as a simple spectator, so to speak, that I consider these past memories-which is to say that if I represent myself there to myself, I see myselffrom outside,in the same way that I represent other individuals to myself. My past self is thus, psychologically, distinct from my present self, but it is ... an emptied and objectivized self, which I continue to feel at a distance from my true self which lives in the present. And if, from being a simple spectator, I try to become an actor, if I try to identify myself with this second self [image-sosie],then I draw it back to the present in order to reincarnate it; but it attracts with it the ambient images, and then I have the impression of again enjoying in the present the scene that has passed. ["MA,"p. 368] He concludes: This tendency to experience in the present a previously experienced scene is especially likely to occur when I seek to represent to myself a past emotion: the emotion can only be experienced as a state of myself. It can only be known from within, and not from outside. If I attribute it to my phantom-self [or double] (which is only seen from outside) then in that very moment I see it vanish from my present consciousness. One cannotbea spectatorof one'sfeelings; onefeels them,or one doesnotfeel them;one cannot imaginethem[image them,representthem] 638 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures withoutstrippingthemof their affective essence. ["MA," pp. 368-69; my emphasis]26 As a description of what might be called the phenomenology of affect this could hardly be bettered. In his modest yet elegant way, Clapar&de appears to break with an entire metaphysics of representation according to which-in a genealogy that goes back to the dominant interpretation of Descartes-the certitude of the cogito is conceived as the spectatorial or specular certitude of the self-observing subjector onlooker who sees or representshimself to himself, as if in a mirror or on a stage. On the contrary, Claparede, in his critique of the concept of emotional memory or affective representation, abandons the metaphorics of specularity and spectatorship on which such an ontology of the subject crucially depends.27 Indeed, there is a sense in which he breaks even more decisively with that ontology than Freud himself. This becomes clear when we consider the other text on emotional memory, besides Claparide's, to which Brown in his paper on the traumatic neuroses of the war also draws attention-Freud's great 1915 metapsychological essay on the unconscious. It is one of Brown's achievements that he should have pointed to the precise moment in Freud's difficult and disconcerting text where he seems to posit the absolute irreducibility between affect and representation on which Claparede also insists. This is the moment where Freud appears to acknowledge that if there is such a thing as an unconscious idea or representation-since, for Freud, even in the unconscious the drive (or instinct) is known only through its representations-affect itself manifests the drive directly, without any intermediary or representation. In the passage cited by Brown, Freud writes: 26. Among those mentioned by Claparide as supporting the idea of emotional memory are Ribot, Pillon, Pieron, Dugas, Paulhan, Dauriac, Baldwin, Bain, Fouill&e, and Patini; among those he mentions as opposing the idea of emotional memory are James, Titchener, Hoffding, and Mauxion. At the end of his essay Claparede recognizes Binet's role in launching a general critique of the mental image in psychology. In this connection, see especially Binet, "Qu'est-ce qu'une emotion? Qu'est-ce qu'un acte intellectuel?" L'Anniepsychologique 17 (1911): 1-47, cited with approval by Claparede in his "Feelings and Emotions," in Feelings and Emotions:The WittenbergSymposium,ed. Martin L. Reymert (Worcester, Mass., 1928), p. 136. In that essay, Claparede is still asking: "Does a true affective memory exist? (Or do affective memories constitute an actual revival of feelings and emotions?)" (p. 125). 27. More generally, what is at stake here is not the rejection of the image or representation as such, but the rejection of a particular interpretation of the image or representation as always involving a "representative theatricality," implying a specular distance between the subject and object, ego and alter ego. On this topic, see Michel Henry, Gindalogiede la perdu (Paris, 1985); Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: psychanalyse:Le Commencement Derridaand the Philosophyof Reflection(Cambridge, 1986); and three works by Mikkel BorchJacobsen: The FreudianSubject,trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif., 1988); Lacan: The AbsoluteMaster,trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, Calif., 1991), esp. pp. 43-71; and "The Unconscious, Nonetheless," TheEmotionalTie: Psychoanalysis,Mimesis,and Affect, trans. Brick et al. (Stanford, Calif., 1993), pp. 123-54; hereafter abbreviated "UN." CriticalInquiry Summer1994 639 An instinct can never become an object of consciousness-only the idea [Vorstellung]that represents the instinct can. Even in the unconscious, moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea. If the instinct did not attach itself to an idea or manifest itself as an affective state, we could know nothing about it.... We should expect the answer to the question about unconscious feelings, emotions and affects to be just as easily given. It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, i.e., that it should become known to consciousness. Thus the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings and affects are concerned [Freud's words here are strikingly close to Claparbde's similar claim]. But in psycho-analytic practice we are accustomed to speak of unconscious love, hate, anger, etc., and find it impossible to avoid even the strange conjunction, 'unconscious consciousness of guilt', or a paradoxical 'unconscious anxiety'. Is there more meaning in the use of these terms than there is in speaking of 'unconscious instincts'? The two cases are in fact not on all fours. In the first place, it may happen that an affective or emotional impulse is perceived but misconstrued. Owing to the repression of its proper representative it has been forced to become connected with another idea, and is now regarded by consciousness as the manifestation of that idea. If we restore the true connection, we call the original affective impulse an 'unconscious' one. Yet its affect was never unconscious; all that had happened was that its idea had undergone repression.... Strictly speaking ... there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas. . . . The whole difference arises from the fact that ideas are cathexes-basically of memory-traces-whilst affects and emotions correspond to the processes of discharge, the final manifestations of which are perceived as feelings. In the present state of our knowledge of affects and emotions we cannot express this difference more clearly.28 Brown remarks of this passage that "Freud finds great difficulty in coming to a conclusion on the nature of 'unconscious affects' as contrasted with 'unconscious ideas,' and recognizes that the problem of the former is different from that of the latter" ("R," p. 33).29 Of the same 28. Freud, "The Unconscious" (1915), SE, 14:177-78. Brown's source for Freud's text was Freud, "Das Unbewusste," SammlungkleinerSchriftenzur Neurosenlehre,5 vols. (Vienna, 1906-22), 4:309. 29. Brown's statement in full reads: "I cannot agree with Dr McDougall's remark in a footnote that the question of emotional memory is an unreal one. Freud finds great difficulty in coming to a conclusion on the nature of 'unconscious affects' as contrasted with 'unconscious ideas,' and recognises that the problem of the former is different from that of the latter. I, too, find this problem a difficult one and anything but unreal, and I had hoped that it might have attracted discussion, especially in relation to Bergson's theory of memory and to the interactionist theory of the relation of mind to brain (which I accept)" ("R," pp. 32-33). For Brown the theory of emotional memory and Bergson's theory of memory are indeed closely linked. In opposition to James's theory of emotion, Brown argues that "an 640 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures problematic of affect in Freud's 1915 text, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has recently commented: It is no accident that Freud writes ... "even in the unconscious, moreover, an instinct cannot be represented [reprasentiert sein] otherwise than by a Vorstellung[an idea]," despite immediately adding, as though with remorse, that the drive would remain unknowable if it "did not attach itself to an idea or manifestitselfas an affectivestate."In reality, it is only the Vorstellungthat reprdsentiertthe drive, for the good reason that the affect, for its part, presentsit immediately, without the slightest mediation. This is attested to by the fact . . . that affect, by Freud's own admission, cannot possibly be unconscious, as if it would short-circuit every distance and every exteriority between the drive and the psyche (between "body" and "soul"). Affect either is or is not.... Contrary to the Vorstellung,which can be and yet not appear, the affect is only in appearing, exists only as manifest.... That is why, according to Freud, there cannot be, in all rigor, any "unconscious affects." And so, in speaking of "unconscious anxiety" or, still more paradoxically, of an "unconscious consciousness of guilt" (unbewusstesSchuldbewusstsein),the psychoanalyst would only mean that the representation to which the affect was initially attached has succumbed to repression. But the affect itself would never cease to impose itself on consciousness. In other words, the affect may well be "suppressed" ("inhibited," "blocked," reduced to the state of a "rudiment"), but it can by no means be repressed.["UN," pp. 138-39]30 Indeed it would be possible to show that, in his writings of the 1920s on transference and the second topography, Freud simultaneously conceives affect as that which is always and only experienced in consciousness and emotional experience is always more than a sum of organic sensations, in that it involves a reference, vague or explicit, towards some object, in the psychological sense of that word. All the evidence quoted from pathology in favour of the theory-from cases of visceral anaesthesia on the one hand and heightened emotionality on the other-equally fails to prove the absence of this subject-object relationship in any single case" ("R," p. 17). In this connection he mentions the case of one of his patients who on two separate occasions experienced exactly the same emotion when recalling under hypnosis the events of his sixth birthday: "The two revivals were practically identical. Here it seems as if the two different emotions were integral elements in the successive memories, and that they were certain to come up if the memories were revived in their ideational completeness" ("R," p. 18). In 1921 Brown refers to the same experiments on hypnotic age regression as supporting Bergson's theory of memory. See Brown, Psychologyand Psychotherapy(London, 1921), pp. 17990. It is a sign of the complexity of Bergson's role in these developments that, directly or indirectly, he influenced Brown and Claparede into adopting diametrically opposed positions on the existence of emotional memory. 30. Borch-Jacobsen points out in this connection that Freud never uses the expression "affective representative" ("UN," p. 197 n. 26). CriticalInquiry Summer1994 641 as that which absolutely resistscoming into consciousness; paradoxically, Freud appears to undo the very distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness that he elsewhere appears to enforce. "The affect," Borch-Jacobsen has observed in this connection, "far from being a second psychic Reprirsentanzof the drive . .. is, rather, its very manifestation. That affect always be 'conscious' means, in effect, that the psyche can never 'distance' it, never flee it (repress it) like an exterior reality, never obpose itself to it in the light of the Vor-stellung,and thus neither can it ever dissimulate it from itself. In short, this signifies that the opposition of consciousness and the unconscious is not applicable to affect" ("UN," p. 139).31 So that-always according to the same logic-the transference, or emotional tie to the analyst, far from dissimulating a prior, repressed 31. Borch-Jacobsen goes on to observe that this does not mean that the unconscious is thereby reabsorbed into consciousness as pure manifestation, presence, or auto-affection, as the phenemenologist Henry maintains, but that-following Freud's own arguments of The Ego and the Id and other writings-"the unconscious invades consciousness itself; indeed, here everything depends on that infinitesimal yet decisive difference of accent between a conscious unconscious and an unconsciousnessof consciousness" ("UN," p. 142). Commenting on the "formidable difficulties" with which Freud surrounded the concept of affect, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy have observed: Inaccessible to direct apprehension, the affect is nonetheless the only manifestation of the instincts. A veritable qualification of the unconscious, it is also that which accedes directly to consciousness, without passing through the preconscious-in other words, it eludes the "descriptive unconscious" and forms the essence of the "dynamic unconscious." However, it cannot properly be termed "unconscious," nor "repressed." The affect is the unconscious as consciousness, and it invokes what one would have to call a "restraint" or a "withdrawal" whose origin is more archaic than that of any repression. It may then be that external force which, for Freud, precedes the internalized prohibition that is repression. But one would thus be led to an originary sociality of the affect for which the same Freud leaves us somewhat unprepared, if the affect first appears, or seems to appear, in his presentation, from within an intrapsychic immanence which only secondarily comes into contact with the outside world. This "immanence" which the affect seems to incarnate would thus be undone, disordered in its very principle by a social "transcendence." Its interior "identity" could only be posterior to an unidentifiable "exteriority." The unconscious is destructured like an affect: this may also be the truth [a reference to and revision of Lacan's claim that the unconscious is structured like a language]. The authors go on to link Freud's discussion of the ambivalence of affect to the question of hypnosis by adding that ambivalence signifies that there is no objectas such until it is incorporated in the subject (incised, regraven into it) as subject (in an abyssal subjectness without a subject, exemplified by hypnosis and amorous dependence). It equally signifies that there is no subject until it is incorporated as object. If the identity of that which is called a subject does in fact have its origin in affect, in a being-affected, that is to say, in an affectable being, this identity then alters itself in principle, in a pulsation of origin without origin. For to be affectable is to be always-already affected [Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Unconscious Is Destructured Like an Affect (Part I of 'The Jewish People Do Not Dream')," trans. Brian Holmes, StanfordLiteratureReview 6 (Fall 1989): 197-99]. For a different reconsideration of the problem of affect in Freud's thought, see Andre de l'affect (Paris, 1973). Green, Le Discoursvivant: La Conceptionpsychoanalytique 642 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures oedipal or preoedipal memory or representation, as Freud continues to argue, rests on an affect that, as Freud also states, can only be experienced in the immediacy of an acting in the present that is unrepresentable to the subject and that, like the unconscious or primary process itself, knows no time, no negation, and no degrees of certainty.32Most paradoxically of all, it is hypnosis that, again according to Freud, best exemplifies the peculiar workings of the unconscious defined in those terms. Strangely, Freud treats hypnosis as the paradigm of the emotional transference to or identification with the other at the very moment he seeks to exclude hypnosis from the psychoanalytic project.33 All this suggests that what is problematic in the use of hypnosis to cure the war neuroses is precisely the attempt to recover past traumatic experiences in the form of emotional representations that can be brought back into the subject's consciousness, for the passionate relivings or "reproductions" characteristic of hypnotic abreaction precede the distinction between "self" and "other" on which the possibility of self-representation and hence recollection depends. The same is true of psychoanalysis, defined as the reconstitution of the subject's history through the recovery and analysis of the patient's repressed memories or fantasies, because the existence of such affective memories or affective representations is what Freud calls into question. In sum, there is no "subject" of suggestion in the sense of a subject who can see or distance himself from his emotional experience by re-presenting that experience to himself as other to himself; that appears to be the lesson of Claparede's and Freud's astonishing dissection of the emotions. But that is a conclusion that Freud also resists, as do Brown and his colleagues. They remain committed to the view that what "disciplines" or 32. See Freud, "The Unconscious," SE, pp. 186-87. 33. Here I am summarizing a complex argument, brilliantly elaborated by BorchJacobsen in The Freudian Subject and other texts. On the one hand, Freud attempts to ground the patient's neurosis in (real or fantasized) repressed infantile psychosexual representations, and it is the latter that, displaced transferentially on to the person of the analyst, are held to become accessible to consciousness in the form of the patient's recollections and narrations. On the other hand, as Freud's GroupPsychologyand the Analysis of the Ego and other writings of the 1920s show, the transference, far from facilitating recollection, proves rather to be its major stumbling block. Instead of remembering, patients repeatthe earlier scenes or memories in the present, in a "positive" emotional transference onto the analyst that, for all the absence of overt suggestion, or rather precisely because of the analyst's deliberate self-effacement, manifests all the more clearly that "affective tie" to the "other" that for Freud is primary identification. In other words, if Freud continues to believe that the transference constitutes a resistance to recollection by dissimulating-or "misrepresenting"-a prior oedipal affective tie, his own writings on the second topography suggest that no such dissimulation is involved. This is because the patient's transferential resistance rests on an affect that, as Freud observes, cannot be unconscious or repressed but can only be felt and experienced in the immediacy of a suggestive or mimetic repetitionin the present that is unrepresentable to the subject and that-like the unconscious itself-knows no delay, no time, no doubt, and no negation. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 643 cures patients is that they can be made to distance themselves from their traumatic emotional experiences by re-presentingthem to themselves as other to themselves in the form of recollected "repressed" or "dissociated" experiences. Accordingly, they demand that the emotional acting out of the hypnotic catharsis be converted into re-presentation and selfnarration-that the patient's speech and behavior under hypnosis be interpreted not as a "reproduction" of the traumatic scene in the mode of a "blind" emotional acting in the present but as a narrative in full consciousness of that lived experience as past. Yet a scrutiny of the case histories of the traumatic neuroses suggests that this is a demand that cannot readily be met. The subject in deep hypnosis is not a spectator of the (real or fantasized) emotional scene but is completely caught up in it, as Claparbde claimed. And if, as BorchJacobsen has argued, speech or verbalization often accompanies those scenes, it does so not in the form of a discourse in which the patient narrates the truth of his past to himself or another (the physician or analyst) but in the mode of an intensely animated miming of the traumatic "event" that occurs in the absence of self-observation and selfrepresentation.34 As Brown himself states, the shell-shocked soldier immediately begins to twist and turn on the couch and shouts in a terror-stricken voice. He talks as he talked at the time when the shock occurred to him. He really does live again through the experiences of that awful time. Sometimes he speaks as if in dialogue, punctuated with intervals of silence corresponding to the remarks of his [hallucinated] interlocutor, like a person speaking at the telephone. At other times he indulges in imprecations and soliloquy.... In every casehe speaksand actsas if he wereagain undertheinfluenceof theterrifying emotions.["TC," p. 198] Still more drastically, the emotional acting out of the trauma in the trance state occurs in a profound absence from, or forgetfulness of, the self. The dissociated patient suffers his passion "beyond" himself-beyond memory and self-representation-literally fainting away in the hypnotic enactment. In Brown's paraphrase: "'It is not I who feel ... it is not I who speak, it is not I who suffer ... I am dead.'"35 34. On these points, see Borch-Jacobsen's essays in TheEmotionalTie, especially "Hypnosis in Psychoanalysis," in which he emphasizes the fundamental ambiguity, in Studieson Hysteriaand other texts by Breuer and Freud, between the reexperiencing of a traumatic event in the trance state and the recollection and narration of that event in clear consciousness, and the ways in which Freud resolved that ambiguity for psychoanalysis by deciding in favor of recollection and narration. 35. Brown, Psychologyand Psychotherapy, p. 24. It might appear that the claim that hypnotic experience is not a specular process of self-observation is contradicted by the "hidden observer" phenomenon of age regression and other hypnotic experiences. Thus Breuer reports of Anna O. that "even when she was in a very bad condition-a clear-sighted and 644 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures That is why it was difficult for the physician to obtain information concerning the traumatic scene while the traumatized soldier was in the regressed state and why patients often became confused to the point of swooning when they were asked to narrate their experiences in the past tense. "In some cases [the shell-shocked soldier] is able to reply to my questions and give an account of his experiences," Brown relates. "In others he cannot do so, but continues to writhe and talk as if he were still in the throes of the actual experience" ("TC," p. 198). Sometimes, patients responded to the demand for self-narration by alternating between the past and present tense. "One subject ... whispered to me. 'Did you see that one? ... It went up on top,'" Myers reports. "'What now?' I asked, 'What did you say?' 'I was talking to my mate,' was the reply. To my question 'What were you saying?' he answered 'Get rifles.' He could be made to realise he was in hospital, but explained his inconsistent behaviour by the remark, 'Can't help it. I see 'em and hear 'em (the shells).'" "His thoughts repeatedly [fly] to the trenches," Myers notes of another patient. "For a few minutes his attention could be gained, then his answers became absurd; the question 'How old are you?' for example receiving the reply, 'It passed my right ear.' He would often ask me to speak louder when on the point of lapsing into thoughts of trench life. In another case the alternation of states was so marked that on being unduly pressed for his thoughts when in a stuporous condition he assumed an attitude of hostility, rushing about the room with an imaginary rifle in his hands."36 Breuer and Freud had made similar observations about their calm observer sat, as she put it, in a corner of her brain and looked on at all the mad business" (SH, p. 46) and, in another passage, that "many intelligent patients admit that their conscious ego was quite lucid during the [hysterical] attack and looked on with curiosity and surprise at all the mad things they did and said" (SH, p. 228). Similarly, Freud states that Emmy von N. "kept a critical eye upon my work in her hypnotic consciousness" (SH, p. 62 n. 1). Binet and others made similar observations. Breuer qualifies Anna O.'s claim by attributing it in part to her retrospective sense of guilt for all the trouble she had caused and to her feeling that, from the perspective of her reunified personality, she could have prevented it, noting of her in this connection that "this normal [or specular] thinking which persisted during the secondary state must have fluctuated enormously in its amount and must very often have been completely absent" (SH, p. 46). It is also likely that the "hidden observer" phenomenon is a function of the demand characteristics of hypnotic age regression experiments and of contextal cues. Of special interest in this connection is the use of induction procedures in which hypnotized witnesses in criminal cases are asked to recall memories by "zooming" in on them as if the witnesses were a TV camera. This is a technique that yields confabulation and false memories with considerable regularity, yet the "recollections" are accompanied by a sense of great subjective conviction as to their veracity on the part of the hypnotized subject and are rarely questioned by the police. For a valuable review of the contradictory data on this topic, see Campbell W. Perry et al., "Hypnotic Age Regression Techniques in the Elicitation of Memories: Applied Uses and Abuses," in Hypnosis and Memory,ed. Helen M. Pettinati (New York, 1988), pp. 128-54. 36. Myers, "Contributions to the Study of Shell Shock," Lancet, 8 Jan. 1916, pp. 67-68. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 645 female patients. "In the afternoons she would fall into a somnolent state which lasted till about an hour after sunset," Breuer had stated of Anna O. "She would then wake up and complain that something was tormenting her-or rather, she would keep repeating in the impersonal form 'tormenting, tormenting'. For alongside of the development of the contractures there appeared a deep-going functional disorganization of her speech. ... It was also noticed how, during her absences[or unconscious states] in day-time she was obviously creating some situation or episode to which she gave a clue with a few muttered words.... When she was like this it was not always easy to get her to talk, even in her hypnosis" (SH, pp. 24-30). "The words in which she described the terrifying subject-matter of her experience were pronounced with difficulty and between gasps," Freud had reported of Emmy von N., adding that in the case of Elizabeth von R. the details of a certain episode "only emerged with hesitation and left several riddles unsolved" (SH, pp. 53, 151). Moreover, as Freud was the first to observe, patients lacked conviction as to the reality of the reconstructed traumatic scenes. "Sometimes, finally, as the climax of its achievement in the way of reproductive thinking [a wonderful formulation, I believe]," he observes of his "pressure" technique in Studieson Hysteria, "it causes thoughts to emerge which the patient will never recognize as his own, which he never remembers,although he admits that the context calls for them inexorably, and while he becomes convinced that it is precisely these ideas that are leading to the conclusion of the analysis and the removal of his symptoms" (SH, p. 272). To which he adds in a stunning admission of the inherent irretrievability of the traumatic "event": The ideas which are derived from the greatest depth and which form the nucleus of the pathogenic organization are also those which are acknowledged as memories by the patient with greatest difficulty. Even when everything is finished and the patients have been overborne by the force of logic and have been convinced by the therapeutic effect accompanying the emergence of precisely these ideas-when, I say, the patients themselves accept the fact that they thought this or that, they often add: 'But I can't rememberhaving thought it.' It is easy to come to terms with them by telling them that the thoughts were unconscious. But how is this state of affairs to be fitted into our own psychological views? Are we to disregard this withholding of recognition on the part of patients, when, now that the work is finished, there is no longer any motive for their doing so? Or are we to suppose that we are really dealing with thoughts which never came about, which merely had a possibilityof existing, so that the treatment would lie in the accomplishment of a psychical act which did not take place at the time? It is clearly impossible to say anything about this-that is, about the state which the pathogenic material was in before the analysis-until we have arrived at a thor- 646 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures ough clarification of our basic psychological views, especially on the nature of consciousness. [SH, p. 300] The problem of the patient's lack of confidence in the reality of the memory of the trauma-the victim's inability to remember, and hence testify with conviction to, the facticity of the reconstructed event-will haunt not only psychoanalysis but the entire modern discourse of the trauma.37 "There is one feature of the modern that is dazzling in its implausibility: that the forgotten is the formative," Ian Hacking has recently stated.38One can see the force of this. But the entire impetus of my argument is to suggest that, at the limit, it is precisely what cannot be remembered that is decisive for the subject-and for psychoanalysis. Indeed it may be, as I have proposed elsewhere, that the trauma cannot be lifted from the unconscious because that trauma has never been "in" the unconscious in the form of repressed representations.39 If Brown, Myers, and McDougall gloss over the failure of memory in the cathartic curethat is, the failure of memory defined as self-narration and selfrepresentation-Freud, on abandoning hypnosis, interprets that failure as an expression of the patient's resistanceto recollection and narration. Such a strikingly original solution opens up an entire dynamics of unconscious desire and repressed representations and dramatically shifts attention away from the affective reliving of the cathartic cure to the question 37. "They have an 'unstory' to tell, that which, according to Blanchot, 'escapes quotation and which memory does not recall-forgetfulness as thought,'" writes Lawrence Langer of the victims of the Holocaust. "'That which, in other words, cannot be forgotten because it has always already fallen outside of memory"' (Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies:The Ruins of Memory[New Haven, Conn., 1991], p. 39). Langer adds, in terms that invoke the acting out of the cathartic repetition, that "the witness does not tell the story; he reenacts it. The brusque economy of his narrative, the motions of his arms, as if placing the actors on the stage (and then playing all the roles himself), the brief, staccato sentences, with connectives often omitted, all conspire to reduce the value of verbal effect and to remind us how often terms like 'heroic' and 'dignified' become orphans in this obscure universe." "Witnesses in the testimonies do not search for the historicity of experience, nor do they try to recapture the dynamic flow of events. They are concerned less with the past than with a sense of that past in the present" (pp. 27, 40). 38. Hacking, "Memoro-Politics: Trauma and the Soul" (paper delivered to the Department of History, Princeton University, 25 Sept. 1992). Compare Hacking, "Two Souls in One Body," CriticalInquiry 17 (Summer 1991): 838-67. 39. See the section "The Subject of Trauma" in my "The Real Miss Beauchamp" where, on the basis of a reinterpretation of Freud's concept of identification, I argue that the trauma is never present to the subject in the form of affective representations that could in principle be remembered. Rather, trauma can be defined as the mimetic affection or identificatory dissociation of the "subject"that occurs outside of, or prior to, the representational-spectatorial economy of repressed representations or the "subject-object" distinction on which recollection depends. Cathy Caruth has also suggested that the traumatic symptom cannot be understood in terms of repression, interpreting the "enigmatic core" of the trauma in terms of the inherent latency or belatedness of the traumatic event. See Cathy Caruth, introduction to special issue entitled "Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Trauma," American Imago 48 (Spring 1991): 1-12. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 647 of corporeal signification and linguistic meaning; but it is a solution that will eventually unravel at the level of practice in the problem of traumatic repetition and at the level of theory in the aporias of Freud's second topography. In short, as Freud himself becomes increasingly aware, nothing is less certain than whether the cathartic "reproduction" or "repetition compulsion" can be converted into conscious recollection, nothing more ambiguous than the nature and mechanism of what he calls "working-through." 40 The Persistenceof anet If I mention Janet at this juncture it is partly because, recognizing in one of Janet's early cures a method analogous to theirs, Breuer and Freud place Janet at the origin of the cathartic cure (an ambiguous gesture, as we shall see).41 But it is also because Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, Onno van der Hart, and other recent theorists of trauma have hailed Janet as a pioneer in developing a fully formulated mnemotechnology for the treatment of the trauma victim. In particular, returning to Janet's long-neglected meditations on the nature of memory and narration, Herman and others have praised Janet for distinguishing between two kinds of memory-"traumatic memory," which merely and unconsciously repeatsthe past, and "narrative memory," which narratesthe past as past-and for validating the idea that the goal of therapy is to con40. Freud, "Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through" (1914), SE, 12:145-56. In this remarkably complex paper, written at the same time as the Wolf-Man case and apparently in reference to its theoretical and therapeutic difficulties, Freud identifies hypnotic catharsis with the "simple" or "ideal" form of remembering, that is, with self-representation and self-narration, and psychoanalysis with the compulsion to repeat or the tendency to act out [agieren]in the absence of any awareness of the repetition: "the patient does not say that he remembers that he used to be defiant and critical towards his parents' authority; instead, he behaves in that way to the doctor. He does not remember how he came to a helpless and hopeless deadlock in his infantile sexual researches; but he produces a mass of confused dreams and associations, complains that he cannot succeed in anything and asserts that he is fated never to carry through what he undertakes" (p. 150; my emphasis). On this basis Freud compares the process of working-through [durcharbeiten]the resistances, by which the repetition of repressed affects and representations are to be converted into recollection, with hypnotic abreaction: "This working-through ... is a part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion. From a theoretical point of view one may correlate it with the 'abreacting' of the quotas of affect strangulated by repression-an abreaction without which hypnotic treatment remained ineffective" (pp. 155-56). But on the basis of Freud's discussion of affect in "The Unconscious" and other texts we need to ask, Do the affects belong to the scheme of repressed representations posited here? If not, what is the nature and mechanism of working-through? 41. "In Janet's interesting study on mental automatism (1889) [a reference to Janet's classic text, L'Automatismepsychologique],there is an account of the cure of a hysterical girl by a method analogous to ours" (SH, p. 7 n. 1). 648 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures vert traumatic memory into narrative memory by getting the patient to recount his or her history. "In the second stage of recovery, the survivor tells the story of the trauma," Herman writes. "She tells it completely, in depth and in detail. This work of reconstruction actually transforms the traumatic memory, so that it can be integrated into the survivor's life story. Janet described normal memory as 'the action of telling a story.' Traumatic memory, by contrast, is wordless and static .... The ultimate goal ... is to put the story ... into words."42 But such an appropriation of Janet on the part of Herman and others involves repudiating that aspect of his psychotherapy that seeks to make the patient forget. Take for example Janet's famous cure of Marie (the case cited by Breuer and Freud). Marie was a nineteen-year-old girl whom Janet saw at Le Havre early on in his career when she was hospitalized for hysterical convulsive crises and a delirium that, Janet soon established, always coincided with the arrival of her menstrual periods, periods that, after about twenty hours, would then abruptly cease. During her delirium, Marie sometimes "uttered cries of terror, speaking incessantly of blood and fire and fleeing in order to escape the flames; sometimes she played like a child, spoke to her mother, climbed on the stove or the furniture, and disturbed everything in the room," he wrote in his first description of the case in 1889. The end of each hysterical crisis was accompanied by the vomiting of blood. Marie was completely amnesiac for what had transpired. In between her attacks she suffered from small contractions of the muscles of the arms and chest, various anesthesias, and a hysterical blindness of her left eye. Positing a connection between the origin of Marie's hysterical symptoms and the onset of her menstrual periods, Janet hypnotized her in order to "bring back" the apparently forgotten memories. Based on Marie's dramatic reenactments in the trance state, Janet was "able to recover the exact memory of a scene which had never been known except very incompletely." Owing to the shame she had felt when, aged thirteen, she had experienced her first menstrual period, Marie had succeeded in interrupting the flow of blood by plunging into a large tub of cold water. The shock had produced shivering, a delirium for several days, and a complete cessation of her periods; when five years later these had recom42. Judith Lewis Herman, Traumaand Recovery(New York, 1992), pp. 175, 177; hereafter abbreviated TR. For similar appeals to Janet's work, see Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma," AmericanImago 48 (Winter 1991): 425-54 and "Pierre Janet and the Breakdown of Adaptation in Psychological Trauma," AmericanJournal of Psychiatry146 (1989): 1330-42; van der Hart and Rutger Horst, "The Dissociation Theory of Pierre Janet," Journal of TraumaticStress2, no. 4 (1989): 397-412; van der Hart, Paul Brown, and van der Kolk, "Pierre Janet's Treatment of Post-traumatic Stress," Journal of TraumaticStress 2, no. 4 (1989): 379-95; and Frank W. Putnam, "Pierre Janet and Modern Views of Dissociation," Journal of TraumaticStress2, no. 4 (1989): 413-29. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 649 menced, they had produced the symptoms which had led to her hospitalization. Janet continued: Now, if one compares the sudden cessation [of bleeding], the shivering, the pains which she describes today in the awake state, with the account [le recit] which she gives in somnambulism and which, besides, was confirmed indirectly, one arrives at this conclusion: Every month the [hallucinated] scene of the cold bath is repeated, leads to the same cessation of her periods and to a delirium which, it is true, is much stronger than before, to the point that a supplementary hemorrhage takes place via the stomach. But, in her normal consciousness, she knows nothing of all this.43 Janet's "supposition" concerning Marie's originary trauma, "true or false" as he expresses it (AP, p. 412), served as the basis for her cure. "I could only succeed in effacing this [fixed] idea by a unique method. It was necessary to take her back by suggestion to the age of thirteen, to put her back again into the initial circumstances of the delirium, and thus to convince her that her period had lasted for three days and had not been interrupted by any unfortunate incident. Now, once this was done, the next menstrual period arrived on time and lasted for three days, without leading to any pain, convulsion, or delirium" (AP,pp. 412-13). He treated Marie's remaining symptoms, including her hysterical blindness, as well as other cases of dissociation by the same method.44 In other words, according to Janet's first account of the case and contrary to the ingrained beliefs of many of his commentators, Marie was cured not by the recovery of memory but by the excisionof her imputedor reconstructedtrauma (see AP, p. 7). In 1880 the novelist Edward Bellamy imagined an invention for the extirpation of thought processes. "'I deem it only a question of time,' " Dr. Gustav Heidenhoff says to Henry, who loves a woman driven almost to suicide by a guilty sexual past that she cannot forget: When science shall have so accurately located the various departments of thought and mastered the laws of their processes, that, whether by galvanism or some better process, the mental physician will be able to extract a specific recollection from the memory as readily as a dentist pulls a tooth, and as finally, so far as the prevention of any future twinges in that quarter are concerned. Macbeth's 43. Janet, L'Automatisme psychologique:Essai de psychologieexpirimentalesur les formes infirieures de l'activitehumaine (1889; Paris, 1989), pp. 411-12; hereafter abbreviated AP 44. See also Janet, "L'Amnesie continue" (1893), "Histoire d'une idle fixe" (1894), and sur les troubles "Un Cas de possession et l'exorcisme moderne" (1895) in Etudesexperimentales de la volonte, de l'attention,de la memoire,sur les emotions, les iddesobsidanteset leur traitement (1898), vol. 1 of Nivroses et ideesfixes (1898; Paris, 1990), pp. 156-212, 375-406; hereafter abbreviated NIE 650 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures question, "Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased; pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow; raze out the written troubles of the brain?" was a puzzler to the sixteenth century doctor, but he of the twentieth, yes, perhaps of the nineteenth, will be able to answer it affirmatively.45 In 1894 Janet himself remarked that one of the most valuable discoveries of pathological psychology would be a sure means of helping us toforget (see NIF, 404). The same year he criticized Breuer and Freud's account of the cathartic cure on the grounds that what mattered in the treatment of the neuroses was not the "confession" of the traumatic memory but its elimination (NIJ, p. 163).46 Nor did the ethical implications of such "modern exorcism" or "psychological surgery" trouble him (PH, 1:678). As he 45. Edward Bellamy, DoctorHeidenhoff'sProcess(1880; New York, 1969), p. 101. In the novel, Dr. Heidenhoff, who describes his process of memory extirpation as "'merely a nice problem in surgery"' (p. 104), criticizes traditional notions of moral responsibility, based on our capacity to remember past acts, as grounded in ideas concerning the permanence of identity-ideas that he rejects: "Memory is the principle of moral degeneration. Remembered sin is the most utterly diabolical influence in the universe," he declares.... "But," remarked Henry, "suppose there were no memory, and men did forget their acts, they would remain just as responsible for them as now." "Precisely; that is, not at all," replied the Doctor.... I say that there is no such thing as moral responsibility for past acts, no such thing as real justice in punishing them, for the reason that human beings are not stationary existences, but changing, growing, incessantly progressive organisms, which in no two moments are the same. Therefore justice, whose only possible mode of proceeding is to punish in present time for what is done in past time, must always punish a person more or less similar to, but never identical with, the one who committed the offense, and therein must be no justice ... Justice demands identity." [Pp. 120-24] Dr. Heidenhoff's claim that the point of confession is not just to be forgiven but actually to forget one's sins harks back to an earlier moment in the history of confession in the West when confession was defined not as the biographical act of remembering but as the effacement or "purging" of the past through the performance of an affective avowal or "discharge" of sin. See Alois Hahn, "Contribution ia la sociologie de la confession et autres formes institutionnalisees d'aveu: Autothematisation et processus de civilisation," Actesde la rechercheen sciencessociales 62/63 (June 1986): 61. The pragmatist George Herbert Mead endorses the same idea of confession when he observes that "what goes with forgiving is forgetting, getting rid of the memory of it" (George H. Mead, Mind, Self and Societyfrom the Standpointof a SocialBehaviorist,ed. Charles W. Morris [Chicago, 1934], p. 170). It should be stressed that in his novel Bellamy does not endorse the solution to the problem of morality adopted by his fictional character, Dr. Heidenhoff. The haunted young woman cannot be absolved of her guilt by being helped to forget her shameful past, and Dr. Heidenhoff's method of erasing memories turns out to be only a dream of Henry brought on by a sleeping powder. Morality, Bellamy seems to be saying, depends on our having permanent remembered identities; the novel ends with the heroine refusing Henry's offer of marriage and choosing instead to kill herself. Only death can bring about the absolute forgetting that she craves. 46. Here as elsewhere Janet adds that more than simple suggestion is necessary to cure hysteria and goes on to describe the various methods he uses to remove or rub out [enlever] or efface [effacer]or otherwise transform the patient's traumatic "memories." These meth- CriticalInquiry Summer1994 651 observed of a cure strikingly similar to that of Bellamy's imagined scenario, that of a hysterical husband whose guilt over his infidelity had driven him into hysteria: "The memory of his fault was transformed in all sorts of ways thanks to hallucinated suggestions. Finally even the wife of Achille, evoked by hallucination at an appropriate moment, came to give a complete pardon to this husband who was more unfortunate than guilty" (NIE p. 404).47 But it is precisely that aspect of Janet's legacy that Herman disowns: 'Janet sometimes attempted in his work with hysterical patients to erase traumatic memories or even to alter their content with the aid of hypnosis," she observes. Similarly, the early "abreactive" treatment of combat veterans attempted essentially to get rid of traumatic memories. This image of catharsis, or exorcism, is also an implicit fantasy in many traumatized people who seek treatment. ods include the method of "decomposition" and "substitution" by which the traumatic memories are broken down into their component parts-into specific images, words, or even parts of words-and hypnotic suggestion is then deployed, in a lengthy treatment process, to substitute neutral or positive experiences for each of the traumatic component elements. 47. Janet does not seem to have been aware of Bellamy's novel. But, thanks to Peter Swales, we now know that Freud was familiar with the book and that when, in July 1889, during his visit to Bernheim, he wanted to give his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, an idea of how he was treating his patient "Frau Cicilie M" (Anna von Lieben), he advised her to consult Dr. Heidenhoff'sProcess.See Peter Swales, "Freud, His Teacher, and the Birth of Psychoanalysis," in Freud,Appraisalsand Reappraisals:Contributionsto Freud Studies, 3 vols., ed. Paul E. Stepansky (Hillsdale, N. J., 1986), 1:35-36. Swales's description of Dr. Heidenhoff's method as a brilliant anticipation of Freud's cathartic method encapsulates the ambiguities inherent in that method as I have been attempting to describe them. Understanding Dr. Heidenhoff's method as involving a "kind of hybrid version of catharsis and ECT [electroconvulsive therapy]," Swales reports that Dr. Heidenhoff's patient is liberated from her traumatic memories by being induced to recall and narrate them during the operation: In order that the woman may gain liberation from her pathogenic memories, Heidenhoff gets her to tell him her story-that is, she has to plunge into her past and tell him what is troubling her so deeply. Whereupon all of her traumatic memories are abolished during their narration through the action of... electrodes ... that automatically wipe out all the troublesome reminiscences .... To what extent Freud was perhaps influenced by this book cannot be said. But-as far as we are concerned here-the only real basis that I can see for Freud's comparison as made in his letter to Minna Bernays between the 'process' of Dr. Heidenhoff and his own treatment of Anna von Lieben is if, by the time of writing it, he had already begun to use the cathartic method to induce this woman to recall those memories from her past life that were supposedly responsible for her illness. [P. 36] But as the novel clearly shows, and as Swales seems to realize, the patient has no difficulty in remembering what troubles her; on the contrary, her problem is that she can't forget. Nor is she asked to tell or narrate the events of her past during treatment; rather, she is asked to concentrate her attention on the memories she finds impossible to forget so that Dr. Heidenhoff can remove them with his electrical machine. 652 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures It is understandable for both patient and therapist to wish for a magic transformation, a purging of the evil of the trauma. Psychotherapy, however, does not get rid of the trauma. The goal of recounting the trauma story is integration, not exorcism. In the process of reconstruction, the trauma story does undergo a transformation, but only in the sense of becoming more present and more real. The fundamental premise of the psychotherapeutic work is a belief in the restorative power of truth-telling. [TR, p. 181] What appears to motivate Herman's attitude here is a powerfully entrenched commitment to the redemptive authority of history-even if that commitment is tempered by an awareness of the difficulty of historical reconstruction. For Herman and for the modern recovery movement generally, even if the victim of trauma could be cured without obtaining historical insight into the origins of his or her distress, such a cure would not be morally acceptable. Rather, the victim must be helped to speak the horrifying truth of the past-to "speak of the unspeakable" (TR, that truth has not merely a personal therapeutic p. 175)-because telling but a public or collective value as well. It is because personal testimony concerning the past is inherently political and collective that the narration of the remembered trauma is so important. "In the telling, the trauma story becomes a testimony," Herman writes, adding: "Testimony has both a private dimension, which is confessional and spiritual, and a public aspect, which is political and judicial. The use of the word testimony links both meanings, giving a new and larger dimension to the patient's individual experience" (TR, p. 181). Or as she also states: "Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims" (TR, p. 1).48 Recently, a few critics have begun to analyze the stakes in assuming 48. Even as they emphasize the therapeutic importance of transforming traumatic memories into narrated memories, van der Kolk and his colleagues recognize the difficulty of achieving such a transformation in severe or chronic cases of trauma and indeed acknowledge that the restoration of memories alone doesn't necessarily cure (see van der Hart, Brown, and van der Kolk, "Pierre Janet's Treatment of Post-traumatic Stress," p. 380). Moreover, they grant that Janet treated some patients not by converting traumatic memories into narration but by hypnotically exorcising the past-for example, by using the trance state to substitute pleasant memories for painful ones (see van der Kolk and van der Hart, "The Intrusive Past," p. 450). These authors even observe that Janet's famous patient, Marie, was cured in this way (see van der Hart, Brown, and van der Kolk, "Pierre Janet's Treatment of Post-traumatic Stress," p. 388). But, apparently uneasy with the idea of altering or playing with history, they appear to equate Janet's hypnotic manipulation of memory with the patient's voluntary control of the past: "Many patients who are victimized by rape and other forms of violence are helped by imagining having all the power they want and applying it to the perpetrator. Memory is everything. Once flexibility is introduced, the traumatic memory starts losing its power over current experience. By imagining these alternate scenarios many patients are able to soften the intrusive power of the original, unmitigated horror" (van der Kolk and van der Hart, "The Intrusive Past," p. 450). CriticalInquiry Summer1994 653 that the determination and recuperation of the historical past has an inherent ethicopolitical value.49 But what I want to focus on here is the influence exerted by an apparently similar commitment to the importance of historical reconstruction on Janet's representation of his own contribution to psychotherapeutics. As a consequence of a growing emphasis on recollection and narration in psychotherapy, mediated in part by his famous rivalry with (but also implicit dependence on) Freud's model of the talking cure, Janet comes to distort his own record.50 He does not want to forget that he was the first to propose a technique for the cure of patients by getting them to remember their traumas. But preSimilarly, even as she acknowledges the difficulty of recovering memories in cases of severe trauma (see TR, pp. 178-79, 187, 211), Herman compares the work of memory reconstruction to "putting together a difficult picture puzzle" (TR, p. 184), a figure that, by imagining the possibility of fitting all the pieces together so that the picture is complete, seems to imply that the patient's recovery of memories will likewise be entire-there will be no gaps. She observes in this connection that Freud in his paper on "The Aetiology of Hysteria" (1896) used the same image of a picture puzzle to describe the "uncovering of early sexual trauma" (TR, p. 184). But in that notorious, ambiguous paper Freud employs his patients' absence of belief in the reality of the sexual scenes, reproduced or "recollected" with such distress in treatment, as evidence in favor of the genuineness of the scenes in question. Thus for Freud the absence of belief in, or the feeling of remembering, such scenes count as arguments in favor of their genuineness, for why, Freud asks, would patients assure him of their unbelief "if what they want to discredit is something which-from whatever motive-they themselves have invented?" On the basis of this and related arguments, he proposes that what vouches for the reality of the infantile sexual scenes is that they fit in with the content of the whole of the rest of the case history, just as the pieces of a child's puzzle can be fitted together to complete the picture (Freud, "The Aetiology of Hysteria," SE, 3:204). 49. For vigorous arguments against the widespread belief that there is an intrinsic relationship between history and ethics, arguments bearing for the most part on the question of collective rather than individual memory, see Steven Knapp, "Collective Memory and the Actual Past," Representations,no. 26 (Spring 1989): 123-49. See also Walter Benn Michaels, "Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity," CriticalInquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 679-80, "The Victims of New Historicism," ModernLanguage Quarterly54 (Mar. 1993): 111-20, and "The No-Drop Rule," CriticalInquiry20 (Summer 1994): 758-69. For reflections on the moral dilemmas associated with the often unrealizable demand that veterans of the Vietnam War and other wars be made to remember as a requirement of the treatment strategies for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), see three works by Allan Young, "ADescription of How Ideology Shapes Knowledge of a Mental Disorder (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder)" (paper presented at the "Analysisin Medical Anthropology" conference, Lisbon, 1988); "Moral Conflicts in a Psychiatric Hospital Treating Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)," in Social Science Perspectiveson Medical Ethics, ed. George Weisz (Dordrecht, 1990), pp. 65-82; and "Making Facts and Making Time in Psychiatric Research: An Essay in the Anthropology of Scientific Knowledge," unpublished manuscript. My thanks to Ian Hacking for drawing Young's work to my attention, and to Allan Young for allowing me to read his manuscripts. 50. For Janet's well-known rivalry with Freud, see especially Perry and Jean-Roch Laurence, "Mental Processes Outside of Awareness: The Contributions of Freud and Janet," in The UnconsciousReconsidered,ed. Kenneth S. Bowers and Donald Meichenbaum (New York, 1984), pp. 9-48. 654 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures cisely because he does not want to forget his priority, he forgets what that discovery was. In fact from the startJanet's attitude toward memory appears ambivalent. On the one hand, he believes that memory is overvalued. "'One must know how to forget,' " he is fond of quoting Taine as saying, and of remarking that "one must not be surprised at this forgetfulness, it is necessary that it should be so. How could it be that our own minds, our poor attention, could fix itself constantly on the innumerable perceptions that register in us? We must, as has often been said, forget in order to learn. Forgetting is very often a virtue for individuals and for a people" (NIJ, narratable memp. 421).51 On the other hand, memory-continuous, in comes to have a status his texts as that ory-increasingly privileged which makes us distinctly human. Thus at almost the same moment Janet discovers the therapeutic value of erasing memory, he begins to suggest that, in order to be cured, patients must be helped to dissolve their amnesia by telling the story of the traumatic event. As it does for Brown and his colleagues, the task of psychotherapeutics becomes one of getting the patient to "say 'I remember"' (NIf p. 137; my emphasis). For Janet in this mode, memory proper is more than dramatic repetition or miming. It involves the capacity to distance oneself from oneself by representing one's experiences to oneself and others in the form of a narrated history. In a statement of 1919 that has recently been cited by van der Kolk and others, Janet observes: Memory,like belief, like all psychological phenomena, is an action; essentially, it is the action of telling a story.Almost always we are concerned here with a linguistic operation .... The teller must not only know how to [narrate the event], but must also know how to associate the happening with the other events of his life, how to put it in its place in that life-history which each one of us is perpetually building up and which for each of us is an essential element of his personality. A situation has not been satisfactorily liquidated, has not been fully assimilated, until we have achieved, not merely an outward reaction through our movements, but also an inward reaction through the words we address to ourselves, through the organisation of the recital of the event to others and to ourselves, and through the putting 51. "It would seem ... that the identity of the self rests entirely on memory" (The•odule Ribot, Les Maladiesde la memoire[Paris, 1881], p. 83; quoted in Michael S. Roth, "Remembering Forgetting: Maladiesde la Mimoirein Nineteenth-Century France," Representations,no. 26 [Spring 1989]: 54). At the same time, as Roth has shown, for physicians and philosophers at the turn of the century too much memory, or hypermnesia, was as potentially dangerous to health as too little memory, or amnesia. We are reminded here of William James's remark that "if we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing" (James, ThePrinciplesof Psychology,1:640). For an interesting discussion of Proust's theory of involuntary memory as an example of hypermnesia, see Richard Terdiman, PresentPast: Modernityand the MemoryCrisis (Ithaca, 1993), pp. 185-239. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 655 of this recital in its place as one of the chapters in our personal history. [PH, 1:661-62] "Strictly speaking," Janet adds, "one who retains a fixed idea of a happening cannot be said to have a 'memory' of the happening. It is only for convenience that we speak of it as a 'traumatic memory.' The subject is often incapable of making with regard to the event the recital which we speak of as a memory; and yet he remains confronted by a difficult situation in which he has not been able to play a satisfactory part, one to which his adaptation had been imperfect" (PH, 1:663). Janet calls this act of narration "presentification," an operation of self-observation and self-representation that he imagines as an act of internal policing or self-surveillance by which at any moment we are compelled to attend to and communicate our present experiences to ourselves and above all to others-for memory is preeminently a social to situate and organize those experiences in their phenomenon-and proper time and place. "Presentification" thus depends on our ability to constitute the present as present and to connect the stories we tell about ourselves with present reality and our actual experiences. Janet conceives narrative memory in economic terms as an act of abbreviation that-unlike traumatic memory, which is rigidly tied to the specific traumatic situation, takes place without regard for an audience, and by virtue of its inflexible acting out takes a considerable length of time-can be performed in only a few minutes and, depending on the social context, in a variety of ways. For Janet, it is precisely because language is conceived as intrinsically portable-as representing an absent present-that narrative memory can be detached from the occasioning event in this manner. The act of presentification is one that animals, primitive people, young children, and hysterics are characteristically unable to perform-animals, because they are incapable of self-knowledge and self-representation; and primitive people, young children, and hysterics because, owing to their undeveloped or degenerate or weakened mental condition, they lack the mental synthesis necessary for paying attention to present reality and hence for locating their narratives in an appropriate temporal order. From this perspective, as Janet makes clear, the animated acting out or reliving characteristic of the trauma patient, for all its inclusion of verbalization (Herman seems wrong to imply that traumatic repetition or traumatic memory is necessarily "wordless"), does not constitute such a narration precisely because it occurs in the absence of selfrepresentation.52 Janet's favorite example of the failure of presentification is the case 52. See Janet, L'Evolutionde la mimoireet de la notiondu temps(Paris, 1928). As Janet makes explicit, for him narrative replaces the role previously given to the mental image in theories of memory proposed in the past and, in a revised form, by Bergson. Janet's views on memory may thus be seen to participate in the general reaction against the role of the mental 656 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures of Irene, a young woman who was traumatized by the death of her mother (a case of maternal mourning, as I have already noted). Unable to realize the fact of her loss, Irene instead reenacts the scene of death in a somnambulistic repetition that is completely unavailable to subsequent recall. Irene "has not built up a recital concerning the event, a story capable of being reproduced independently of the event in response to a question," Janet observes. She is still incapable of associating the account of her mother's death with her own history. Her amnesia is but one aspect of her defective powers of adaptation, of her failure to assimilate the event.... In her crises she readopts the precise attitude which she had when caring for her mother in the death agony. This attitude is not that of a memory which enables a recital to be made independently of the event; it is that of hallucination, a reproduction of the action, directly linked to the event. [PH, 1:662-63] Janet seems to imply that Irene was cured when she became capable of transforming the traumatic memory of her mother's death into narrative representation. But a careful reading of the text from which the above quotation is taken reveals that something far more interesting and complex is going on. For in this text Janet singles out not the case of Irene but that of Marie as exemplifying the cure of hysteria by the recollection and narration of the forgotten trauma. Emphasizing his priority over Breuer and Freud, Janet revises his earlier account of the case of Marie by suggesting that she was cured not bythe excisionbut bythe recollection and narrationof the traumaticevent. Without referring to his attempts to hypnotically eliminate memories in that case, Janet observes: In my early studies concerning traumatic memories (1889-1892), I drew attention to a remarkable fact, namely that in many cases the searching out of past happenings, the giving an account [l'expression] by the subject of the difficulties he had met with and the sufferings he had endured in connexion with these happenings, would bring image in psychology to which Claparede's critique of affective representation also belongs, even as Janet appears to side with those who, unlike Clapar'de, continue to believe in the existence of affective memories or representations. Janet's discussion of the widely debated phenomenon of dejaivu or false recognition bears on this topic. He attributes the phenomenon not to any confusion between perceptual images on the one hand and memory images on the other, as had previously been argued, but to the hysterical absence of the capacity to attend to or represent-that is, to narrate-the present. Recently, Monique David-Menard has used the term presentification[Darstellung]in a sense opposite to that of Janet-not for the process of self-representation to which Janet attaches the term but for the hysterical acting in the present that occurs precisely in the absence of self-representation and symbolization. See Monique David-Menard, Hysteriafrom Freudto Lacan: Bodyand Language in Psychoanalysis,trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), p. 110. CriticalInquiry Summer1994 657 about a signal and speedy transformation in the morbid condition, and would cause a very surprising cure. Marie'scase was typical. In the somnambulist state, this young woman told me what she....had never dared to confess [dire] to anyone. At puberty she had been disgusted by menstruation, and had dreaded its onset. When the flow began, wishing to check it, she got into a cold bath.... After she had made this disclosure, her fits of hysterics ceased, and normal menstruation was restored ... In these earlier writings, I drew the inference ... that the memory was morbific because it was dissociated.... The morbid symptoms disappeared when the memory again became part of the synthesis that makes up individuality. I was glad to find, some years later, that Breuer and Freud had repeated these experiments, and that they accepted my conclusions without modification. In their first work on hysteria, these authorities said they had noticed how the hysterical symptoms disappeared one after another, disappeared for good, when it had been possible to bring the exciting cause into the full light of day, and to reawaken the affective state which had accompanied it. [PH, 1:672-74; my emphasis] In other words, Janet seems to transform a cure based on the excision of memory into a therapy based on the patient's conscious recollection. And yet in another section of the same book, to which in the above passage the translators (but not Janet) refer the reader, Janet writes of Marie: "Finally, it was found possible, by modifying the memory in various ways [en modifiantle souvenirpar diversprocidds], to bring about the disappearance or the modification of the corresponding symptom" (PH, 1:591)a formulation that, in the light of my earlier analysis of his original description of the case, strongly suggests that Marie's traumatic memory was altered or replaced by others, and in that sense eliminated. But what, then, of the melancholic Irene-the focus of the recovery movement's interest in Janet-who failed to mourn her mother by failing to remember that her mother was dead? How was she cured? In this text as in later writings, Janet's attempts to describe and explain the therapeutic process are extraordinarily convoluted, as if the task of characterizing the nature of the cure-of defining what Freud calls working-through-defies systematic articulation. More precisely, his texts are marked by displacements and slippages such that every effort he makes to stabilize his account of his various psychotherapeutic methods (for he recognizes the need for many different approaches) necessitates repeated gestures of supplementation. So that far from belonging chiasunproblematically to the category of cure by narration-indeed matically crossing the case of Marie-Irkne's case turns out to depend not entirely or exactly on rememorization in the absence of hypnosis but on an additional procedure or set of procedures that Janet calls both "assimilation" and "liquidation" and that appears to have much in com- 658 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures mon with-no surprise here-hypnotic suggestion. "Irene's case is of special interest because her absurd behaviour was so out of place in the circumstances, and because of the lacunae in her interior assimilation which found expression in her amnesia," Janet writes in the same text of 1919. "After much labour I was able to make her reconstruct the verbal memory of her mother's death [nuances in original are lost in the English translation: je suis arrive"a lui faire retrouverou plut6t a' lui faire construirele discours-souvenirde la mortde sa mere]. From the moment I succeeded in doing this, she could talk about the mother's death without succumbing to crises or being afflicted with hallucinations; the assimilated happening had ceased to be traumatic" (PH, 1:680-81). But in citing this same passage, van der Kolk, van der Hart, and other modern trauma theorists fail to acknowledge that Janet's claim leaves a certain remainder.53 For he immediately adds: Doubtless so complex a phenomenon cannot be wholly explained by such an interpretation. Assimilation constitutes no more than one element in a whole series of modified varieties of behaviour which I shall deal with in the sequel under the name of "excitation." Irene, under the influence of the work which I made her do, threw off her depression, "stimulated" herself, and became capable of bringing about the necessary liquidation. Irene was cured because she suc.... ceeded in performing a number of actions of acceptation, of resignation, of rememorisation, of setting her memories in order, and so on; in a word, she was able to complete the assimilation of the event. [PH, 1:681]54 Under Janet's authoritative "influence" Irene was "excited" to give up her melancholic attachment to her dead mother and adapt to the needs of the present. And in general the process of cure for Janet does not necessarily depend on the recovery and narration of memory. As he writes in 1923: The well-known expressions one repeats without cease, 'to act, forget, pardon, renounce, resign oneself to the inevitable, to submit,' seem always to designate simple acts of consciousness. . . . In reality these expressions designate a complicated ensemble of real actions, actions that one must perform, other actions that one must suppress, new attitudes to adopt, and it is all these actions which liquidate the situation and make one resigned to it. A woman is very gravely ill 53. See van der Hart, Brown, and van der Kolk, "Pierre Janet's Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress," p. 388. 54. If in this text Janet claims that Irene recovered, her cure cannot have been a simple matter for in 1927, apparently referring to the same case, he observed that "patients act out indefinitelythe scene of rape or the scene of the death of their mother for yearsafter the event" (Janet, De l'angoissea l'extase[1927; Paris, 1975], 2:334; my emphasis; see also 2:322). CriticalInquiry Summer1994 659 since the rupture with her lover. You will say this is because she cannot resign herself; no doubt, but this absence of resignation consists of a series of actions which she continues to make and which it is necessary for her to cease making. The physician must help this woman stop carrying out these absurd actions, teach her to make others, give her another attitude. Toforget thepast is in realityto change behaviorin thepresent. Whenshe achievesthis new behavior,it matterslittle whethershe still retainsthe verbalmemoryof heradventure,she is curedof her neuropathologicaldisorders.55 A process of cure requires both assimilation and liquidation. It demands a discharge or "demobilization" of psychic energies that Janet links to Freud's method of cathartic abreaction and that in relation to the cure of Irene he describes in the following terms: [I] have already often remarked that it is necessary to employ the most eloquent imprecations and to use all the resources of rhetoric in order to make a patient change a shirt or drink a glass of water. This is what I especially emphasized in my earliest researches. 'The treatment which I imposed on the patient is not only a suggestion, but moreover an excitation. In psychological treatments, one has not always distinguished between the role of suggestion and the role of excitation which tries to increase the mental level. I demand attention and effort on the part of Irene, I demand clearer and clearer consciousness of her feelings, everything that helps to augment the nervous and mental tension, to obtain, if you will, the functioning of the higher centers. Very often I have observed with her as with so many other patients that the truly useful seances were those where I was able to make her emotional. It is often necessary to reproach her, to discover where she has remained suggestible, to support her morally in all sort of ways to raise her up and to make her recover memories and actions.' All the reeducation of neuropaths of which there is much talk today are subject to the same law, whether it's a matter of gymnastics, the education of movements, the excitation of the sensibility, the search for memories, it is always necessary that the influence of the superintendent awakens attention and effort, excites emotion and produces a larger tension. When the higher functioning is obtained, the subject feels a modification of his consciousness that translates into an increase in perception and activity.56 If Janet's notion of "assimilation" appears terminologically analogous to the recovery movement's notion of "integration" based on the recovery and narration of memory, it is nevertheless the case that for Janet narrated recollection is insufficient for the cure. A supplementary action is required, one that involves a process of "liquidation" that, 55. Janet, La Medecinepsychologique(1923; Paris, 1980), p. 126; my emphasis. 56. Ibid., pp. 129-30. 660 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures terminologically, sounds suspiciously like "exorcism" or forgetting. Moreover "liquidation" does not just supplement "assimilation"; the mutual entanglement of the two operations is so intense that the entire chapter in which Janet in 1919 expounds his understanding of the therapeutic process is called "Treatment by Mental Liquidation"-not "Assimilation." Perhaps most important, the supplementary procedures necessary for Irene's cure manifestly involve the physician's deliberate manipulation of the patient by processes that Janet himself understands as involving suggestion (see PH, 1:145). In Janet's mnemo-technology, hypnotic suggestion is discovered to be not external to the process of cure but internal to its effectiveness. In sum, Janet's extensive writings bear witness to the impossibility of sustaining theoretically or practically the opposition between forgetting and remembering on which so much of the edifice of modern psychotherapeutic thought has been made to depend. In 1920, the "daemonic" compulsion to repeat painful experiences-a phenomenon long familiar to psychoanalysts as the fixation to trauma in the case of female hysterics but appearing during World War I as the revelation of something new and remarkable now that it was seen to apply to a large number of males-led Freud to posit the existence of death drives that lay "beyond" pleasure and that seemed to pose a virtually insuperable obstacle to remembering.57 If Freud never completely abandoned his belief in the curative power of recollection, this is not the case for one major school of his successors-the linguistic-rhetorical school of Lacan and his followers-for whom the failure of memory in the trauma exemplifies the need for a structural or formal version of psychoanalysis, conceived (or reconceived) as a discipline that on the one hand invests patient narratives with decisive significance but on the other hand maintains that those narratives are characteristically, perhaps inherently, discrepant with the (themselves often unknowable) "facts" of the case. As Lacan emphasized, in the Wolf-Man case of 1918 Freud himself attempted to resolve the tension between forgetting and remembering by proposing such a structural treatment of the problem of psychoanalytic narrative. Put more strongly, psychoanalysis as Lacan and the Lacanians define it is committed to the project of formalizing memory by eliciting and analyzing narratives whose fidelity to individual experience is no longer of central importance.58 57. See Freud, Beyondthe PleasurePrinciple, in SE, 18:13, 20. 58. "The dimension proper to analysis is the reintegration by the subject of his history right up to the furthermost perceptible limits, that is to say into a dimension that goes well beyond the limits of the individual," Lacan observes in 1954: The fact that the subject relives, comes to remember, in the intuitive sense of the word, the formative events of his existence, is not in itself so very important. What matters is what he reconstructs of it .... The stress is always placed more on the side of recon- CriticalInquiry Summer1994 661 More provocatively, it might be argued that Janet's psychotherapeutic work also may be understood as committed to such a project. As we have seen, what mattered according to Janet in the treatment of hysteria was that, through the use of techniques of liquidation and assimilation, the patient acquired the ability to produce an account of herself that conformed to certain requirements of temporal ordering but that did not necessarily entail a process of self-recognition. The distinction between forgetting and remembering thus virtually collapsed in the demand that, whether or not she remembered the traumatic "event," the patient became capable of developing a coherent narrative of her life the importance of which lay not so much in its adequation to personal experience as in its bearing on her present and future actions. Viewed in this perspective, Janet's well-known disagreement with Freud over the sexual content of psychoanalysis seems less significant than their agreement that, if narration cures, it does so not because it infallibly gives the patient access to a primordially personal truth but because it makes possible a form of self-understanding even in the absence of empirical verification. In short, what I earlier described as Janet's ambivalence with respect to the problem of memory emerges as more apparent than real. For his seemingly conflicting claims that memory is overvalued and that memory is fundamental turn out to resolve themselves into the noncontradictory propositions that memory conceived as truth telling is overestimated but that memory conceived as narration is crucial. But this account of the convergence between the views of Janet, Freud, and Lacan overlooks certain significant differences. In the first place, notions of speech and narration by no means play an indispensable role in Janet's assessment of the totality of the methods of psychotherapy. In Janet's writings the opposition between remembering and forgetting dissolves in the requirement that the patient learn to make an appropriate "adaptation" to the past, present, and future, but narrative selfunderstanding is not always essential for such adaptation and other forms of adjustment may serve the purposes of the curative process. For Janet, struction than on that of reliving, in the sense that we have grown used to calling affective. The precise reliving-that the subject remembers something as truly belonging to him, as having been truly lived through, with which he communicates, and which he adopts-we have the most explicit indication in Freud's writings that that is not what is essential. What is essential is reconstruction .... I would say-when all is said and done, it is less a matter of remembering than of rewriting history. [Jacques Lacan, Freud'sPaperson Technique,1953-1954, vol. 1 of The SeminarofJacquesLacan, trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York, 1988), pp. 12-14] For helpful analyses of Freud as a pivotal figure in the modern critique of memory conceived as that which restores the past to full presence, see David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence,and Writing:On the Verge(Bloomington, Ind., 1990); Ned Lukacher, Primal Scenes:Literature,Philosophy,Psychoanalysis(Ithaca, N.Y., 1986); and John Forrester, The Seductionsof Psychoanalysis:Freud,Lacan and Derrida (Cambridge, 1990). 662 Ruth Leys TraumaticCures the physician's rhetorical and suggestive skills are directed at improving the traumatized subject's mental synthesis by producing modifications in conduct and behavior, modifications that do not necessarily depend on acts of conscious self-representation and self-enunciation. (For Lacan, of course, psychoanalysis has nothing to do with what is ordinarily meantor what Janet presumably meant-by adaptation.) Moreover, my discussion of the role of rhetoric and suggestion in Janet's work implies a second difference between his view of psychical treatment and the views of Freud and Lacan. Throughout his career Janet defended the use of hypnosis in psychotherapy and regarded the emotional rapport between physician and patient as fundamentally suggestive. Such an interpretation of the relationship between patient and physician was alien to Freud and especially to Lacan who, developing various themes in Freud's thought, configured psychoanalysis as a rhetorical enterprise but one from which the persuasive arts of hypnotic suggestion were strictly excluded. But recent deconstructive and other readings of the Freudian corpus have shown that the problem of suggestion in psychoanalysis cannot be disposed of so easily.59 On the contrary, that problem resurfaced in Freud's texts of the 1920s at precisely those junctures where it appeared that the best way to understand the nature of the identificatory bond between the ego and the other was by comparing that bond to the unconscious hypnotic rapport between subject and physician. That comparison threatened to unsettle the dynamics of repressed emotional and desiring representations on which the very identhat of Lacan's subsequent "return to tity of psychoanalysis-like Freud"-ultimately depended. During the same years, Saindor Ferenczi, more than anyone else, made those issues a matter of urgent debate through his revival of catharsis and Freud's theory of trauma. For this, he was considered a traitor to the psychoanalytic cause. It took another major war-World War II-for the value of hypnotic catharsis in the treatment of the traumatic neuroses to be rediscovered. But the history of trauma is a history of forgetting, as the delayed reaction to the trauma of the Holocaust also serves to "remind" us. And it is not at all obvious even today, when the trauma of sexual abuse, the diagnosis of hysterical splitting, and the deployment of hypnosis for the recovery of memories are commonplaces of psychotherapy, that we have grasped the scandalous nature of the traumatic cure. 59. In addition to texts already cited, see Roustang, PsychoanalysisNever Lets Francois Go, trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore, 1983) and L'nfluence (Paris, 1990), and Leon Chertok and Isabelle Stengers, A Critiqueof PsychoanalyticReason:Hypnosisas a ScientificProblemfrom Lavoisierto Lacan, trans. Martha Noel Evans (Stanford, Calif., 1992).