Witnessing, particularly that of trauma, Patricia Ticineto Clough writes, must ‘go beyond or beneath meaning and simply witness unspeakable yet embodied wounds’ (Clough, 2009: 150). Privileging speaking in the construction of the subject, psychoanalysis often directs itself towards ‘production of a meaningful narration of traumatic symptoms’, overlooking ‘bodily life’ and ‘accompanying rhythms of affect’. She introduces Bruce Reis’ concept of ‘enactive witnessing’, in which memory can be redefined not just in terms of narrating, understanding or symbolising experience but also as bodily and affective traces beyond ‘content’. Thus analytic practice of witnessing should aim ‘to accept the experience of the experience … without therapeutic ambition’ (Clough, 2009: 153).
Gradually learning to accept my own position in-between languages, I also became more tolerant and attentive to a realm beyond meaning and articulation, and began wondering about the unspoken dimension of my encounters with T. I found myself less preoccupied with exploration of the ‘content’ of her stories and increasingly tuned to the conflict in the way the words came out. Listening to her pre-linguistic movements, something else became apparent: different voices and body movements accompanying both her attempts to speak and her silences. In difficult sessions with T, I would sometimes echo the obstructed movement of words between us, its deadliness and the painful inability to speak. Rather than trying to understand the exact chronology of what she was telling me, I listened to the structure of her speech, to the struggles of our translations. After a while, T shared a dream that I felt was an opening into the conflicted language between us:
I witness a catastrophe, buildings are falling, collapsing and then we are in a care home. People around me are talking to each-other, trying to go about as if everything is ok but I know we are all dying, my arms and legs are falling off.