More than any other life experience, trauma is ambivalently positioned in relation to language, since, as Cathy Caruth explains, the trauma is not only the actual violent experience but the lack of any ability to fully know and understand it (Caruth, 2016). The complexity of speaking about trauma stems from the fact that in order to keep living in the world as a human being, some memories should never be understood. Any speech that would be a step towards integrating the traumatic memory is also a step in the direction of accepting understanding it and ‘forgetting’ it, and thus involves a profound betrayal of the incomprehensibility of the historical past.
But it was not just the traumatic events of that day that were missing for T, every speech since carried her refusal to testify as a melancholic need to hold on to her mother. As Dana Amir explains, traumatic events have the potential to destroy – or prevent the development of – the ‘inner witness’. They can damage the psychic function that enables the subject to ‘shift between first person and third person’ (Amir, 2012: 885); to be able to both experience life and narrate life – to testify and validate the subject’s experience. T’s traumatic past did not only stop her from remembering her mother’s death but precluded her from any other witnessing as well. Its catastrophic resonance continued to prevent the experiences of her life to be carried into language, in a way that turned every speech into a refusal to testify, a conflicted impossibility.
Beginning the dream with ‘I witness’, something has shifted in our sessions. Gradually, suffering became present, at times with restlessness, other times with tears and often with silence. In my work with T, but also in other encounters, I began to think that perhaps the ‘truth’ does not lie in the elaboration of the untold story, in giving a detailed account of what had happened. It presents itself between us in its rawness with painful silences, confronting us with the unbearable betrayal that narrating this experience into words entails. T began to describe a sense of anxiety in the body – pain in her arms and legs or in the jaws that would often become stiff and would make it difficult to think properly. She sometimes shared with me images of herself running out of the room. Other times she shared dreams of crippled animals in response to which I felt myself to be achingly present.