Surviving a major historical trauma has consequences that are difficult to live with. Survivors who remain silent are often condemned to a desiccated existence, a dried-out life, a death in life. Survivors who speak out run an even greater risk. Telling their ghastly tale may trigger somatic consequences, psychotic episodes, or even suicide. As to the psychoanalytic cure, the free association it requires carries its own danger: negative therapeutic reaction in sometimes extreme forms. Avoidance of horror may turn into avoidance of life itself. Awful as it may seem, this avoidance of life may represent a victory over a menacing chaos. Should we as analysts accept the risk of endangering such a victory, no matter how unsatisfactory? The psychoanalytical injunction to speak out may trigger an upsurge of shame and terror. Is subjectivation always possible? This paper is about what happens when denial and splitting strategies are suspended, when 'crypts' are opened. Is there an analytic 'poros' allowing for a controlled return of affects? Is there a therapeutic solution to the problem of telling a wreckage without being caught in it? The dangers of 'telling' will be discussed in regard to new analytic strategies and new interpretive registers. When the 'silent psychic sharing' proves insufficient, some analysts go so far as to take part in the shame, share the grief, 'lend their own psyche', become a 'double' of the analysand, accept the existence of 'sanctuaries'. To what effect?
Résumé Résumé — Peut-on mourir d'écrire la catastrophe ? Faut-il voir dans la divulgation, les fantasmes inconscients qui la sous-tendent, le retour des affects qu'elle entraîne, une décision lourde de conséquences ? Telle est la question posée ici au cours d'une exploration de trajectoires littéraires qui amènent deux écrivains à témoigner de plus en plus directement d'une expérience jusque dans ses aspects les plus inavouables. Ces deux écrivains, Sarah Kofman et Primo Levi ne survivent pas.
Quelques exemples extraits d’un travail en cours soulignent les dangers inhérents au fait de « dire » des expériences intolérables. Le retour des affects peut être dévastateur. Des stratégies permettant le « sauvetage » du narrateur sont évoquées. Les exemples sont empruntés ici à des victimes et des bourreaux de la Shoah.
The great catastrophes of history can be recognised through the paralysed silence which they leave in their wake, a silence which frequently is broken only to make way for the falsifications of memory. BEtween silence and falsification, a third path may be opened. For those who are capable of it, this path involves saying what happened, writing in the first person. This third possibility is doubly valorised. First of all, it offers a public testimony. It allows a truth which is unspeakable or not to be spoken to erupt onto the social scene. Secondly, it is meant to have a cathartic function. The author of the testimony would in this way be unburdening himself o a horror too heavy to bear. Put into words, his suffering would become something which could be shared. It is this sharing which will be discussed here, its power to grant peace. One may doubt this power.
Dans l’analyse des descendants des survivants de traumatismes massifs, il arrive selon Ilse Grubrich Simitis, un moment où le processus classique d’élaboration-interprétation, peut être complété et relayé par un voyage sur les lieux du trauma. Ce retour induirait une forme de remémoration à même de distinguer entre constructions fantasmatiques et événements réel-lement survenus. Comparant plusieurs types de voyageurs – Gary, Carrère, Perec – ce texte montre que les effets comme les dangers du retour sont radicalement différents pour les survi-vants directs et pour leurs descendants.
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