CONFERENCE 2013: Barry Watt thinks about the politics of representation and the ethics of clinical disclosure

by site.admin | Oct 21, 2013 | Conference 2013

As underscored by many at our conference, one of the characteristics of trauma is the need by the traumatised to repeat their stories, apparently endlessly. There has, over the course of the twentieth-century and now into the twenty-first century, developed a lucrative trauma industry whereby the traumatised, whose voices historically have so often been neglected when not actively relegated to silence, can find a public hearing. However for every victim, for every survivor, there are probably twice as many morbidly curious ‘trauma tourists’, hungry for their next voyeuristic fix, eager to feed a fascination for the tragic and horrific. For those of us, then, who wish to reflect openly upon what it is that we do when we work with the traumatised, there is an urgent question that needs posing: are we to collude with the symptoms of trauma and the trauma industry by repeating our clients’ stories? Or is this to subject our clients to precisely the kind of repetition and exploitation they are so desirous to escape from, to enter into the game of the trauma industry and to expose them to the potentially questionable attentions of others? We are caught in a double bind. On the one hand, if we do not share our clients’ stories we might well be complicit in social sanitising by eliding them and denying them the audience they seek; on the other hand, if we do share, we might well be indulging dubious impulses in ourselves and our audience. Barabara Cawdron has offered a set of reflections on our conference that affords the opportunity to open a debate on just this matter and I would like to offer an initial response, by trying to describe something of the traumatic social reality for many of my clients, whilst simultaneously protecting individuals from being gawped at by prospective trauma tourists.

Trauma has been my bread and butter for six years, as a housing advocate and youth worker for young people caught up in gang violence and ‘post code wars’ in south London, mainly in the Peckham, Camberwell and Walworth areas of Southwark, although my work now branches north and east into parts of Camden, Haringey, Hackney and Tower Hamlets. Most of the young people I engage and develop relationships with have already been exposed to more bloodshed than most in our capital might expect to experience over the course of many lifetimes: stabbings, gang rapes, shootings, immolation, sexual abuse, abductions, torture. All of my clients have lost family or friends to some form of violence or another. Such is the way life goes, ‘on the roads’. These specific traumas, however, have also to be cast against the backdrop of the generalised trauma engendered by the ‘structural violence’ of capitalism. The young people I work with are part of what the late economist J.K. Galbraith called the ‘functional underclass’ or as we might say in the sociological jargon of today, the ‘precariat’: those members of society who have been banished by capitalism to a life on the margins, to fight over an ever shrinking pool of painfully repetitive and/or socially degrading jobs that are necessary for the economy to function in the favour of the smug and comfortable classes, but remunerate so poorly that pay-day loans and the revolving doors of the pawnbrokers become the necessary supplement to putting a bag of chips between hunger and the bitter winter nights.

Because the functional underclass is comprised largely of those families who have, at some point, sought refuge and a better life in our capital from elsewhere in the world, it exhibits glaring racial disparities: structural violence is vested disproportionately upon those of colour, especially those whose family histories speak of displacement by civil unrest, war, political despotism and destitution. Furthermore, current economic policies at home and abroad aim at the ever greater re-appropriation of the bargaining powers of the poor: a miserly minimum wage leads ineluctably to the culture of debt that the poorest are subjected to. Debt culture is a most efficient way for our modern day usurers – the financiers and bankers, the servants of the economically contented – to capture the future of the poor and secure the ongoing transfer of what little wealth they have upwards, maintaining and entrenching a status quo ever more egregiously balanced in favour of the comfortable classes. Indeed, debt functions as a powerful instrument of social control, appropriating the now in the name of the not-yet: it buys the poor’s continuing obedience, through a lifetime of interest repayments, to the very system that despises and exploits them. I have often heard my clients speak of their refusal to play this perverse game of indebtedness, to refuse to be a ‘homo debitor’, an indentured man, in favour of the game on the streets that they have control over, that profits them rather than their would-be masters in the comfortable classes. They protest to me that it is the white man (and, let us be clear: it is always nominally a man, and under current capitalism, he is almost always still white) who continues to expect a steady stream of labour to do the jobs he regards as below him. So much for post-colonialism; many of the brighter young people I work with realise that Empire continues to ignore the fact that it’s supposed to be dead.

When I was at school, we learned about the age of the Restoration. This was the restoration of the monarchy. Perhaps in our time we are living through a different restoration: the restoration of the aristocracy, of the super wealthy, following the progressive dissolution of the post-war settlement that, for a time, had some impact on levelling economic and social disparities. Gang lifestyles offer many young people growing up in inner city areas a way to bear contemporary apartheid, to even protest against apartheid, by offering some self-validation within a situation of perpetual economic hopelessness and racial exclusion. Why, so many of my clients say to me, would I choose to leave my friends on the streets who give me respect and honour and a far better income through dealing and robbery, for the pathetic pay meted out in exchange for subordination to the petty cruelties of the managers in the local pound shop?

I have been and continue to be deeply disturbed by the stories I have to absorb daily and the extreme presentations of clients I have to manage, not to mention the physical risks of reprisals I expose myself to from the enemies of those I help. I remain outraged and repulsed at the contented classes and the despicable image of the poor they cultivate and circulate through their news and media organs which – woe of woes! – my clients identify with and accept as true. All of this, I suspect, is potentially scintillating for many: righteous indignation and a glimpse into the palpable danger of an ‘underworld’ many are aware of but will never know first hand. And it is, precisely, for this reason that I demurred from speaking explicitly of this work at our conference, electing instead to present a single ‘glamour-free’ case study through which I attempted to translate my wider experiences into the calm and sober theoretical language of psychoanalysis. This translation does not, as some might seem to believe, entail that the voices of my clients were absent. Indeed, there would have been no theoretical material without their voices.

I am personally of the view that it is to fall into the trap of the traumatised, to ape the symptoms of trauma and play the trauma tourist’s game, to seek to emote on one’s personal experiences in our work by sharing our clients’ horror stories and our reactions to them. Not only does it fail to further the project of psychoanalysis, but it expropriates the plight of the suffering in the service of what, surely, runs the risk of being a narcissistic enterprise to solicit the voyeuristic attentions of others. My view is that the social place of the analyst is one of humility and self-effacement; the analyst should not seek to draw attention to the work they do through the stories of their clients. I am deeply suspicious of those strains of psychoanalytic culture that privilege accounts of the analyst’s own trials and tribulations, whether that is tacitly through recounting the terrible or difficult cases they handle, or overtly by venting on the powerful and startling emotions the work conjures up. We must continually struggle to direct attention to where the real interest should be – not with the gossipy titillation inherent in the nitty-gritty of individual cases, but with what is generative of this suffering at either a social, economic or a psychological level. This is therefore as much an ethical as it is an intellectual commitment.

‘Keep your mind in hell and despair not’, is something of a refrain in the philosopher Gillian Rose’s memoir Love’s Work, written as she is dying of cancer. It is, amongst wider significations, part of her plea for critical engagement no matter what the terrors that bedevil us, so as to better traverse those very terrors. To renounce our critical engagement when faced with the terrible is, for Rose, one of the ways we might flee into despair. What impressed me most about many of the papers at our conference was how they evidenced their authors’ long gaze into some of our terrors, without despair, in an attempt to translate the untranslatable into a clinco-theoretical language that helps us to step beyond our bedevilments. If this is not what psychoanalysis is about then surely it remains at the level of anecdote, serviceable only for the cheap thrills of a good old yarn.

Barbara Cawdron reflects on the SITE 2013 Conference on Trauma

by site.admin | Oct 12, 2013 | Conference 2013

On Saturday October 5 2013, the Site held a conference on the topic of trauma adding the question: ‘Can’t we just let the past BE the past?’ and then elaborating ‘Why we need to talk about trauma and what might happen if we don’t’. The question of speaking or not speaking about trauma arose throughout the conference, raised in different ways by different speakers, from the therapist whose circumstances led her to tell her patients about a personal trauma, to the image evoked of the space on the wall where a picture used to be. In the first discussion following the first two papers and then again in the plenary at the end, the point was made that there had been perhaps an absence within the conference itself, a lack of the speech of our patients, of case studies, of clinical material.

As someone who prefers my theory with an abundance of clinical application attached, I was pleased to hear this raised, especially as it touches on a particular concern of mine about writing or speaking about clinical practice in general, which is how to do it without it being an expropriation of the patient (an issue alluded to in one of the first papers), and a breach in the confidentiality of the clinic. And yet not to speak of the work is to risk rendering psychoanalytic conferences a predominantly academic discourse stripped of the very thing that most of us are spending our working lives doing – hearing the voices of human suffering and in very different language from that used in a conference setting.

This is a problem of ethical practice and is true of all psychoanalytic conferences. But it is also worth wondering whether it was a particular feature of this particular conference, and its topic of trauma, as was suggested by the questioner at the end who thought this conference was particularly lacking in clinical material. The sub-title said that we need to talk about trauma but maybe we didn’t quite, and the question is what might happen if we had done.

So part of my response to the conference is a desire to speak from a more clinical perspective. I have worked with people who have experienced prolonged childhood trauma which is re-experienced through flashbacks and nightmares – not uncommon phenomena of trauma. What I have noticed, and often only retrospectively, has been a reluctance on my part to bring this work to supervision, or even to my own therapy, to speak of it to anyone outside the room, despite being aware of it having quite a profound impact on me, leaking into my psyche (to appropriate a metaphor used by Dorothee in her paper). On one occasion, having finally brought a piece of work to supervision, I was advised to focus more on the guilt, the sense of agency that my patient felt with regard to what happened, rather than getting too caught up in the horrific dynamic of powerful adult and powerless child. This proved a particularly difficult but also fruitful direction for the work. Whereas the initial speaking about the experience had allowed it to be witnessed, this had actually led to an increase in the symptoms – as if the guilty part was asserting itself as it encountered a listening, and perhaps sympathetic ear. I feel somewhat ashamed as I write the word “sympathetic” as it is not part of my analytic training to be sympathetic but it had been my response nonetheless and a very powerful one. A good reason to avoid the supervision session then, to avoid exposing my own sense of shame and guilt at my un-analytic response.

This sense of guilt was referenced several times in the conference – a subject on which Klein has much to say so perhaps it was not as surprising as it first appeared to have a keynote speaker at a Site conference speaking in Kleinian language. The funny thing about guilt is that whereas Klein may put it together with the notion of reparation; in everyday language it is often spoken of with the notion of pleasure – “guilty pleasures”, naughty but nice, something enjoyed but forbidden, or perhaps enjoyed because it is forbidden. This point was alluded to in the introduction to the conference by Val, speaking about the public appetite for trauma, in the days of rolling 24 hour news. And if it is part of the public’s appetite, why not ours too, the guilty pleasure of the consulting room, to be privy to the worst of human depravity, whilst protected by the boundaries of the clinic and of course by language? Because whilst Lacanians will speak of the trauma that is language, they also acknowledge that by always missing the mark, by never being able to symbolise the Real, language could also protect us from trauma, from encountering it too much.

To imply by my questions and responses to my patient that I was accepting their sense of guilt in the matter felt profoundly uncomfortable, but his sense of relief that it could be heard was also profound, more so I think than the relief at being able to speak of the events in the first place. So the past events may be in the past, but what haunts the psyche is the guilt and shame associated with trauma, the shame of what it exposes, the guilt that we are not who we want to be, and that our pleasures can be very guilty indeed is what makes them so unspeakable. As so often in the clinic, maybe it was as much what was not said as what was said that calls our attention.

2013 Conference on Trauma: Programme

by site.admin | Sep 29, 2013 | Conference 2013

The SITE 2013 conference on October 5th is on Trauma and asks the question: Can’t we just let the past BE the past? The  papers investigate why we need to talk about trauma, and what might happen if we don’t. See the programme below for more details. Some full-price place are still available.  Conference Booking Form

The SITE 2013 Conference Programme