The structures of these deferrals and re-presentations are immediately recognisable in the consulting room in those moments when that which is associated too closely to trauma must be made strange in order to create and maintain a bearable distance. The traumatic signifiers, the words associated to the trauma, are stripped of their earlier associations and are re-formed and reconstructed. This uncanny space – the unfamiliar familiar – allows for something new to emerge, unfamiliar enough to be rendered acceptable, allowing a ‘passage to’ the repressed material. A young patient who finds he can only utter the word ‘girlfriend’ in his weekly calls home if he uses his adopted, rather than his native language must, like Beckett, enact a turning away from the mother tongue in order to be freed of its restricting forces. Or the woman who recounts a tale of when as a young girl at school she was asked at the start of the autumn term to write an account of how the summer break was spent: she finds that when she gets to the part when her mother’s new partner joins them on their vacation, she cannot recall (or perhaps doesn’t know how to define) the word that would describe the relationship this man had to her mother, let alone the word that might describe the sly touches and not so sly stares that he directed towards her. In her account for class, the phrase she was able to come up with to describe this moment was that her mother and she were joined on their holiday by the ‘Frenchman’. No other form of language was available to her without a return to an unbearable, traumatic association with her mother’s sexuality, her own sexuality and the disturbing intrusion of the other’s sexualised gaze. The phrase ‘my mother’s lover’ was unutterable, unnameable. The substitution of a generic phrase – The Frenchman – neutralises, desexualises and de- translates while allowing a path towards a re-translation, and towards a way of putting into words what once left her speechless.
