Introduction

Jane Goodall and Christopher Lee

During the past two decades, there has been a rapid

growth in the literature on traumatic memory and a

corresponding diversification in focus, but what remains

missing from the expanding field of commentary is any

sustained consideration of how those who are outsiders to

the experience deal with the challenge of its presence in

their world. Related to this are some fundamental

questions about how traumatic events are acknowledged in

the public domain, and come to form part of the fabric of

public memory.

This collection of essays and interviews offers

perspectives on traumatic experience from the social and

public side of the equation. Like other books in the

Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series, it is concerned

with redressing the balance of public memory through a

focus on what has been neglected or excluded, but

traumatic memory poses special problems in this regard.

Andrew Hoskins and John Sutton, the series editors,

suggest that the question of how we remember has become

central to historical enquiry, but that the question

itself is fraught with complexity. Generational change

and new technologies of memory are reshaping the ways in

which memory works, and the influence of trauma

1

narratives is a factor in this. They pose another

question: ‘What is ‘memory’ under such conditions?’1

Here, we focus on the distance between traumatic

narratives in the public domain, and the experience of

traumatic recall in the mind of a person who has been

directly affected by extreme events. The traumatic

flashback, as an eruption of the past into the present

that effectively involves a reliving of the original

experience, confounds the very definition of memory. From

a psychological point of view, it is a bizarre and

disruptive phenomenon, a violent experience in and of

itself, which cannot be accommodated in the cognitive

functioning of the individual. Personal memory implies a

connection to personal experience, but public memory does

not carry any such implication.

In their introduction to Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent

Pasts in Public Places, Erica Lehrer and Cynthia E. Milton ask

what happens when knowledge relegated to the social

margins is suddenly inserted into the public domain

(Lehrer and Milton 2011). But if there is ‘difficult

knowledge’ there is perhaps also a form of ‘impossible

memory,’ made so through the gulf between orders of

experience, which can also be seen as a gulf between

orders of reality (Faye 2003). This is not to argue for

some kind of exemption from public recognition of

traumatic events and the psychological after-shocks

associated with them. The editors of Curating Difficult

Knowledge cite the image of German civilians standing by a

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trench filled with the bodies of concentration camp

victims as emblematic of how a reluctant public may be

forced to confront horrific realities. Schwartz and Kim,

in their introduction to Northeast Asia’s Difficult Past: Essays in

Collective Memory, stress that ‘dangerous memories’ may serve

to ‘call communities to alter ancient evils’ (Schwartz

and Kim 2010, pp. 1–2). Some collective memories bite deep

and painfully, prompting strategies of forgetting that

are inversely bound up with public forms of remembrance.

These strategies may be intentional and political. In his

study of Commemoration and Bloody Sunday, Brian Conway

discusses how the emotional legacies of a violently

divisive event are manipulated by ‘choreographers of

memory.’ And the success of memory work, he says,

‘depends upon its resonance and connection to socio-

political institutional contexts’ (Conway 2010, pp. 3,

149). Our central concern here is not with the politics

of public memory per se, but rather with the relationship

—or lack of it—between the experiential memory of

traumatic events, and the kinds of narratives and

commemorative practices embraced by a wider public.

The essays in this collection are concerned with

situations in South-East Asia, Australia, Africa, Europe,

Cuba and the United States, but our research originated

in a series of meetings held at the University of

Southern Queensland in the regional Australian city of

Toowoomba. Toowoomba is a place that rarely makes the

news, though it did so in spectacular fashion on 10

3

January 2011, when a powerful flash flood surged along

normally sleepy creeks to create an ‘inland tsunami’

through the central business district. The deluge created

a second wave of water that flowed down the 1000-foot

escarpment upon which the city rests to inundate the

agricultural valley below. The town of Grantham was hit

by a wall of water that smashed through houses, carrying

heavy vehicles and uprooted trees into a swirling chaos.

News coverage was dominated by images of devastation that

captured international attention, and local residents

began to receive phone calls from distant friends and

relatives—some not heard from in years—checking in to

make sure they were safe. The 2011 floods shook the local

region and too many lives were lost, yet on a global

scale it ranked as a minor disaster. In the news cycle,

it lasted only as long as the supply of spectacular

images. But who is to say that the intensity of the

experience for those caught up in this local maelstrom

was any less than for those affected by the Great East

Japan earthquake and tsunami that occurred two months

later, or the Pacific Tsunami of 2004, where over 150,000

people lost their lives?

Toowoomba is exposed to trauma in ways that may be

typical of any small city in a relatively peaceful and

prosperous country. There are 25 war memorials, honoring

soldiers lost in conflicts across the twentieth century,

from the South African War (1899–1902) to the Gulf War

(1990–91); the national veterans’ day, Anzac day, is a

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major event on the civic calendar, as it is in towns and

cities throughout Australia. Although most residents have

lived their lives at a distance from major conflicts

there are four generations of war veterans in the local

population and refugee communities from Sudan, Iraq,

Iran, Afghanistan and Burma. Violent crime strikes closer

to home, disrupting the untroubled sense of normality. In

April 2013, a coronial inquest was held into the deaths

of two young women who were abducted, raped and murdered

forty years earlier. Court reporters filed disturbing

stories for the national press about ‘the city’s dark

underbelly,’ as witnesses revealed how a culture of

misogyny and casual brutality thrived in Toowoomba in the

early 1970s.

While it is easy to say that the human experiences

associated with tyranny and abuse, war and violent crime,

disaster and accident ‘touch us all,’ to use a prevalent

cliché, the essays here raise fundamental questions about

how traumatic events may register upon a wider public,

distanced from them in time and place.

Clinical recognition of a condition known as ‘post

traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) has a double-edged

effect. While it has led to the provision of urgently

needed psychological treatment and support programs for

sufferers, it has also led to the privatization of

trauma. The term itself is fraught with problems. The

condition it describes is characterized precisely by an

ongoing relationship to traumatic experience not as

5

‘post’ but as current, as something that continues to

make itself present in sensory and physiological terms,

through the flashback experience. ‘Stress’ is far too

vague a term to describe this kind of recurrent psycho-

physiological state of crisis and ‘disorder’ implies that

it is the manifestation of something wrong with the

individual, rather than a consequence of something that

happened to them. A genuine concern with the impact of

traumatic memory must extend beyond the frame of

personalised treatment. Our premise is that traumatic

events are realities; they happen in the world, not in

the fantasy life of individuals or in the narrative

frames of our televisions and cinemas.

Public memory and public feeling

The idea of public memory is derived from the work of the

early twentieth–century French sociologist Maurice

Halbwachs, for whom it was associated with group

consciousness. Halbwachs established the premise that all

memories are inherently social: ‘A person remembers only

by situating himself within the viewpoint of one or several

groups and one or several currents of collective thought’

(Halbwachs 1980, p. 33, emphasis added). Public memory

emerges when individuals, families and social groups

encounter each other in time and space and negotiate a

common view of shared events.

There is an important distinction to be made between

the collective and the public. Collective memory occurs

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when individuals separately remember the same event;

public memory forms when a people remember in and through

inter-subjective relationships with other members of the

public. In the view of Edward Casey, this implies an

element of embodied demonstration; he suggests that the

concept of public memory is distinct from that of social

or collective memory in that it occurs in the open, in

front of and with others (Casey 2004). According to

Casey, collective memory ‘allows for co-remembering

without co-reminiscing and for the massive convergence of

those who remember the same thing without knowing each

other personally’. Kendall R. Phillips expresses a

similar view of how memories affect and are effected by

various publics. To speak of public memory, he says, ‘is

to speak of a remembrance together as a crucial aspect of

our togetherness’ (Phillips 2004, p. 10).

The question of what constitutes a public is crucial

to these definitions. Jürgen Habermas describes the

emergence of a public sphere as a discursive domain of

more or less open discussion in which a notionally

independent middle class might debate and challenge the

various authorities of church and state. The rise of

literacy and the development of modern forms of mass

communications expanded the means by which this newly

enfranchised citizenry might encounter and imagine

themselves as a public.

This expansion in scope, though, was marred in

practice, according to Habermas, by the increasingly

7

commercial imperative of its key institutions. The

commodification of information and representation soon

compromised the critical independence necessary to a

flourishing liberal democracy (Habermas 1989). This is

perhaps why Casey wants to distinguish between the public

as a group formed in a social encounter situated in time

and space and the collective as a group formed by a

mediated form of common address to separated individuals

or isolated smaller groups. This collective lacks the

means to develop the message amongst themselves. And yet

such a distinction seems to lose much of what has come to

be invested in the notion of the public.

To speak of a public is to speak of a group who are

addressed as such, and whose mental world is organized by

shared sources of information. A public memory would

then be a memory disseminated—even formed—by these

diverse but ultimately compromised sources or

institutions and in a suite of ‘locations’ that might be

recognized as constituting various sections of the public

sphere or even various public spheres. In a digital age

of virtual worlds and instantaneous global communications

it seems obsolete to insist on embodied presence for the

constitution of a public. Though one takes Casey’s and

Habermas’ point that the powerful modes of interpellation

of the modern institutions of the public sphere allow

less room for a negotiated bottom-up social response than

collective negotiation in a particular time and a shared

space. The privatization of the public sphere like the

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privatization of trauma itself threatens to constrain a

liberal exchange amongst the people, which is itself

understood as an imperative of personal, social, civic

and political hygiene (Habermas 1989).

Habermas’ fear of the commercialization of the

public sphere is borne out in a global market for news

driven by intense competition for the biggest available

breaking story. On 23 May 2013, barely twenty four hours

after British soldier Lee Rigby was hacked to death in

broad daylight in a London street, his family were

brought out to display their grief before the cameras at

a news conference. What justifies such exploitation of

people who are still in the process of being assailed by

emotions whose full impact has yet to unfold? The

practice of asking grieving relatives to speak to the

media originated in cases where there might be some

advantage to be gained in appealing for information to

assist a police enquiry, especially where there was a

high level of urgency, involving a search for missing or

kidnapped persons. No such advantage was to be gained by

putting the distraught family of Lee Rigby on display.

Media exposure has become a currency in its own right,

with its own circulatory imperatives, and the question of

whose interests are really served remains to be

addressed.

The media cycle moves with its own seemingly

inevitable logic and momentum, carrying us through an

event on its own wave of well-worn conventions. In this

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way Disaster is pre-packaged so that every new instance

comes to resemble the one before it and the steps the

story has to take to reach its narrative conclusion can

be anticipated by everyone. Politicians speaking publicly

during disaster events now seem to be reading from an

established play-sheet. One of the distinctive features

of the devastating Queensland floods of 2011 was the

speed at which the memorials went up. The story could

only end in memorialization and so the sooner it was

memorialized the sooner the community could be encouraged

to move on. The memorials themselves became front-page

news, their images accompanying editorials that served as

conventionalized statements of public grief. The hunger

for traumatic events as part of the dramaturgy of life in

a media environment carries a demand for direct witness

to be rehearsed in public forums. And the principle

players in these events must also become public: not just

as the focus of publicity, but public in the sense of

belonging to the people, so that their trauma is

vicariously owned and encompassed in a shared

consciousness.

History has its more traditional theatres as well

as its archives. For French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, one

of the defining attributes of collective memory is that

it is accorded the power to place on stage the events of

the past, on the occasion of holidays, rites and

celebrations (Ricoeur 2004, p. 119). Halbwachs emphasises

how commemorative occasions work against the risk of

10

forgetting and promote a sense of the continuity of

communal identity through a shared past, but this means

that they are also susceptible to cultural and

ideological manipulation. Ricoeur, echoing Todorov,

expresses concern about ‘forced memorization … enlisted

in the service of the remembrance of those events that

are held to be remarkable, even founding, with respect to

common identity’ (Ricoeur 2004, p. 85)

Where the events in question are traumatic, their

foundational legacy is often associated with cultures of

grievance and resentment, and can feed into ethnic or

nationalist forms of extremism. One of the triggers for

the late twentieth century Yugoslav conflicts was an

incendiary speech delivered by Serbian leader Slobodan

Milosevic at Kosovo Polje, the site of the 1389 battle on

the Field of the Blackbirds, in which the Serbian army

was almost wiped out by invading Ottoman forces. This

battle, commemorated in epic poetry and painting, is

relived in the national psyche of the Serbian people as

an expression of their identity as a nation under

perpetual threat of violation, therefore perpetually

justified in staging violent counter-active measures.

‘There exists no historical community,’ says

Ricoeur, ‘that has not been born out of a relation that

can, without hesitation, best be likened to war’ (Ricoeur

2004, p. 79) National days of remembrance around the

world are testament to this principle, including Anzac

Day in Australia, Bastille Day in France, the Day of

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Ashura in Islamic countries, Patriot Day (on the

anniversary of the 9/11 attacks) in the US and Yom Ha

Shoah (Holocaust remembrance day) in Israel. Such

occasions also testify to what Ricoeur terms ‘a certain

demand raised by impassioned memories … against the

vaster and more critical aim of history’ (Ricoeur 2004,

p. 89).

In their 2001 study Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry and

Trauma in the Modern Age 1870-1930, Mark S. Micale and Paul

Lerner are concerned about a cultivated obsession with

catastrophe, victimization and memorialization. Trauma,

they say, ‘has become a metaphor for the struggles and

challenges of late twentieth century life’ (Micale and

Lerner 2001, p. 1). Geoffrey Hartman, writing on the

Holocaust in public memory, remarks that ‘the culture of

remembrance is at high tide’ (Hartman 2006, p. 1). The

memory wave undergoes surges and resurgences that are

generated through organized campaigns of commemoration,

often associated with changes in the political climate.

During the Toowoomba seminars that were the start of

our research into trauma and public memory, we were

concerned with what we saw as a polarity on the emotional

spectrum, with trauma at one extreme, and sentimentality

at the other. Traditions of public memorialisation—

narratives, film versions of traumatic events, media

reports, built memorials and commemorative events—

typically cater to the ‘softer’ end of the emotional

spectrum, with the laying of flowers, singing of anthems

12

and the quiet shedding of tears. They foster admiration

for bravery and endurance, and promote narratives of

sacrificial heroism, so that the events in question

acquire a redemptive aura. Narrative coherence is an

important aspect of the public consumption of traumatic

events.

Such traditions contrast sharply with the way memory

works for individuals who have experienced such events.

Traumatic memories are characterised by violent and

incoherent sensory replay, often accompanied by a sense

of pointlessness that the individual finds overwhelming

and disabling. Their onset is sudden and involuntary.

While public commemorations may be governed by the

resolution ‘lest we forget,’ those who suffer from

traumatic recall may develop vigilant practices to shield

against the threat of its return.

In practices of commemoration, public memory is

bound up with public feeling in ways that allow for

coherent stories to be told and coherent responses to be

expressed. There is no place for the panic, anguish and

horror that belong to first hand experiences of trauma.

Ann Cvetkovich, who convenes a research group on Public

Feeling at the University of Texas, describes how the

focus of their concern arose from an open meeting on

campus following the invasion of Iraq, where ‘a dominant

response was one of incredulity, a seemingly normalized

version of the epistemic shock that is said to accompany

trauma’ (Cvetkovich 2012, pp. 1–2). Two years later, at a

13

gathering in response to Hurricane Katrina, the urgency

of the disaster, she says, created a ‘split focus’

comparable with the lived realities of class and race

division. The split signals different orders of reality,

but it may be more radical and, in psychological terms,

more technical than is the case with other forms of

social division.

Orders of Reality

Commemorative traditions work to intensify a sense of

commonality. They are all about association: between the

participants, between those assembled in the present and

those remembered from the past, between historical causes

and the ongoing convictions of a contemporary society.

Yet traumatic experience produces states of dissociation.

The first psychological studies of trauma in the late

nineteenth century arose from observations about the

disjointed workings of memory. Trauma from the past

refuses to work with and through normalised systems of

memory. Freud and Breuer referred to it as ‘a foreign

body,’ operating like an agent provocateur to disturb the

whole system (Freud and Breuer 1955, p. 301). Written in

1893, this statement inaugurates a clinical tradition of

focusing on trauma as pathological disturbance within the

individual.

Current guidelines in clinical diagnosis continue to

acknowledge a radical disjunction in the psychology of

patients affected by acute traumatic experience. They

14

will typically present with symptoms that include

persistent re-experiencing of the trigger event, and

persistent avoidance of thoughts, feelings,

conversations, activities or sensory stimuli associated

with it (American Psychiatric Association 2012). In other

words, there is a vigilant practice of defence against

and attempted separation from the ordeal of recollection,

yet flashback experiences repeatedly break through the

barrier. The 2012 revision of the entry for Post

Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual of Mental Illness acknowledges the

work of Freud’s contemporary Pierre Janet in pointing to

‘a division of the personality or of consciousness’: a

Dissociative Subtype is now added to the profile,

characterised by states of depersonalisation and

derealisation, which can include ‘out of body’

experiences. Freud’s term ‘double consciousness’ may have

faded from the clinical vocabulary, but the core elements

of late nineteenth century psychological modelling remain

in place.

For someone living with the after-effects of

traumatic experience, the work of memory is the work of

integration, but the problem of dissociation or schism

does not only manifest as inner experience. There can be

a profound existential isolation that cuts through

personal relationships as well as affecting wider social

interactions. Australian novelist Alex Miller recalls the

impact on his own family:

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Towards the end of the war, when my father returned

wounded in mind and body, we did not know him. He was

changed. …He disappeared into the horror of war for

four years and another, crueler man, wearing his

tortured mask, returned in his place. (Miller, pp.

34–5)

Aid workers, emergency response specialists,

journalists and military personnel are amongst those

whose professional commitments mean that they are moving

between worlds in which the conditions of normality are

poles apart. Kathryn Bigelow’s film The Hurt Locker follows

the activities of an American bomb disposal team in

Baghdad. It is critically dangerous work, and tension is

drawn out second by second in the action scenes as the

team leader William James, encased in heavy protective

gear, closes in on some lethal device and manually

defuses it. In one such scene, the bomb is attached to a

man who is begging hysterically for release, but the

steel bands around him cannot be cut and James has to

back off and watch the explosion of carnage as a helpless

bystander. But he copes with this. It is his work and his

reality. When the tour of duty ends and James goes home

to his wife and baby son, he finds himself in a scenario

he can’t cope with at all: instructed to find breakfast

cereal in the supermarket, he stares down the aisle at

the impossible profusion of choices, and is overcome with

16

a crippling sense of disorientation. This second order of

reality is one he can no longer inhabit, and he goes back

to his work on the front line in Iraq. The emotional

split of which Cvetkovich writes opens onto a yawning

gulf.

There are degrees of commonality in fellow feeling,

and the extremes of the emotional spectrum are not for

sharing. If the traumatic experience of the individual

must remain a foreign body in the social world, this says

something about the limits of community itself. And if,

as Halbwachs believes, historical memory serves to

promote communal identity through the rehearsal of a

shared past, what are the parameters of communal

identity? A shared sense of victimhood may serve as a

bond, but narratives of victimhood stir up forms of

pathos that are incommensurable with the states of

cognitive and sensory disorder associated with traumatic

experience.

Moving from the social world to the public sphere,

the empathic disjunction yawns ever wider. Mass media

reportage of natural disasters and other large-scale

tragedies can promote the most obtuse forms of popular

reaction, as some of our interview subjects attest. In

the case of the Lockyer Valley floods, this meant dealing

with an avalanche of inappropriate donations, from used

mattresses to broken fridges.

Yet in the public sphere, the reverberations of

trauma are bound up with live tensions over national

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security and cultural identity, and may have a disturbing

influence in subliminal ways. At this level, the

disjunction is not just between the general public and

the individuals directly affected; it also operates in

the collective consciousness itself so that, as for the

individual, the work of memory is bound up with tensions

between misaligned planes of awareness.

The argument about a collective form of lack or

unconscious displacement in relation to the traumatic

impact of past events has some correlation with

interpretations that stress denial, though denial may

also operate in deliberate, politically motivated ways.

When it comes to more direct engagement with the

political implications of such events through war crimes

tribunals or the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the

distancing process has a ruthless edge, as Allen Feldman

argues in a 2004 essay. Human rights testimony and

medicalized talking cures, he writes, ‘function as

Enlightenment stand-ins, morally polarized to the murky

density of embodied suffering’ (Feldman 2004, p. 168).

Habermas’s warning about the distorting effects of

commerce in the public sphere has specific application to

what has become a thriving trade in books authored by

those who can bear first hand witness to horrors around

the world. The holocaust has generated a small publishing

industry that continues to burgeon, along with a wide

ranging trade in what Feldman calls ‘biographies and

testimonies of political terror’ from around the world.

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Turning the focus on the consuming public, we need to ask

about what kinds of interests these are catering to, and

where their effect is to assist in healing the

dissociative impact of trauma, or how they may be

actively contributing to it.

If one of the hallmarks of the post-traumatic

condition is an incapacity to integrate extreme

experience with normalised patterns of memory, this is

surely a pathology that can be applied to the public at

large, albeit with effects and implications very

different from those confronting an individual. The

terrain between the politics and the psychoanalytics of

public memory is an interpreter’s minefield, but in the

most objective terms, there is an undeniable correlation

between the history of clinical response to trauma and

the most turbulent events of the twentieth century.

At the end of World War I, soldiers returning from

the trenches presented symptoms of nervous disorder that

were originally described as ‘shell-shock.’ That term

was unsatisfactory in the view of Charles Samuel Myers, a

physician who was confronted with the syndrome and began

to see it as a form of structural dissociation, triggered

when the soldiers tried to return to the mental attitude

of civilian life. In other words, the causal factor was

not just the experience in the trenches, but that of

dealing with different orders of reality. Myers

subsequently made his career as a psychologist

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specialising in trauma and had a strong influence in its

identification as a clinical condition.

From a broader cultural point of view, the idea of

shell shock blends curiously with the Freudian image of a

foreign body in the system. After the war, the shells,

exploded or dormant, remained on foreign soil, but the

shock was brought home to Britain and America, where new

theories of traumatic pathology were being generated,

with the effect of cordoning off this reverberating

aftermath of the horrors. They focused not on the

challenge of bridging different orders of reality and

experience, but on diagnosis and treatment of a condition

seen as a ‘disorder.’ Traumatic experience was being

privatised, made the property of individuals who suffered

its after-effects.

Clinical studies of psychological trauma intensified

following World War II. The first Diagnostic and

Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric

Association, produced in 1952, included a syndrome known

as ‘gross stress reaction,’ described as a response to

the exceptional physical or mental stresses of war and

other catastrophic situations. Another surge in cases was

seen in soldiers returned from Vietnam. The term ‘post

traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) entered the clinical

vocabulary in 1980, and four years later the US Congress

passed the mandate for a National Centre for PTSD, to be

established in Association with Veterans Affairs. The

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struggle for medical recognition of the condition was as

much a political as a medical and sociological campaign.

In public as in personal memory, traumatic events

threaten to destabilize a whole apparatus of cognitive

management, but the history of treating traumatic memory

as a personal matter has major cultural consequences. One

of these is the sidestepping of public responsibility for

coming to terms with a past that includes episodes of

horror and devastation. There is a sense, then, in which

the key steps in the clinical history mark a cultural as

well as an individual pathology, and the dissociative

disorder is something manifested in the public at large,

who invest in forms of memory that insulate them from the

sensory and cognitive turbulence suffered by those who

have been direct witnesses to the scenes of horror.

Michael S. Roth, author of a significant recent study of

the relationship between memory, trauma and history, also

sees the parallel between a split or dissociation in

workings of historical memory, and the psychological

split that manifests in the patient suffering flashbacks.

The traumatic event, says Roth, ‘seems to defy the

meaning-making activity at the core of both the

psychoanalytic and historical enterprise’ (Roth 2012, p.

xviii).

This is a significant insight, with regard to the

operations of public memory, and Roth’s observation that

such events have a magnetic appeal, yet resist

representation is worth testing. Certainly there is a

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long tradition of converting the horrors of war into

adventure narratives that give very little consideration

to the psychological impact of real violence, but in

cinema there has also been a counter-movement to expose

audiences to the turbulence, disorientation and sheer

absurdity of the combat zone. Perhaps this is where some

of the bridging work may take place. After watching

Apocalypse Now, Jarhead, The Hurt Locker or Saving Private Ryan,

audiences may genuinely have a better understanding of

what it means to carry the burden of traumatic

recollection. Yet the viewing experience is also about

other things, which serve to distance and distract from

or temper the impact of the most confronting elements.

Saving Private Ryan, whose opening sequences present some of

the most graphically realistic battle scenes in

contemporary cinema, moves on to interweave the wartime

scenario with the sentimental narrative of the bid to get

Private Ryan safely back home to his family. What the

future may be like for those who do make it home is a

question that remains unexplored.

World Memory: Personal trajectories in Global Time, an anthology

of essays by Jill Bennett and Rosanne Kennedy, offers

some valuable analysis of how traumatic memory challenges

the boundaries of communication, generating vernacular

and aesthetic languages that disrupt conventional

narrative and linguistic modes of remembrance. Some of

the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century

were clearly driven by a compulsion to find the means of

22

giving expression to extreme states of mental and

emotional disturbance associated with large-scale

traumatic disturbance in the external world. The defining

image of Expressionism is Edward Munch’s The Scream (Der

Schrie der Natur) originally created as a pastel drawing in

1895, and twice reworked as a painting, in 1903 and 1905.

Reproductions are often featured on websites about post-

traumatic stress disorder, so that it has become an icon

of the condition. On a bridge in the midst of deserted

landscape, an isolated figure stands, pale face distorted

in horror, head clasped between the hands as if to keep

it from exploding, while the sheer force of the inner

experience sends shock waves through the surrounding

earth and sky. By Munch’s own account, the impulse for

the painting was an anxiety attack with visionary

dimensions:

I was walking along a path with two friends—the sun

was setting—suddenly the sky turned blood red—I

paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence—

there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-

black fjord and the city—my friends walked on, and I

stood there trembling with anxiety—and I sensed an

infinite scream passing through nature. (Munch 2005,

p. 82)

Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern

department, where the work was auctioned for a record sum

23

in 2012, describes the image as ‘one of the visual keys

for modern consciousness.’ (qtd in Michel 2012).

If the figure at the centre of the scene is an

emblem of modern consciousness, this would suggest that

an experience of traumatic anxiety is some kind of common

touchstone, but the figure at the centre of the scene

expresses intense isolation, and his two companions are

passing out of the frame.

Memory in Crisis

Human kind, as T. S. Eliot wrote in 1936, cannot bear

very much reality (Eliot 1971, p. 14, lines 42–3). What

is held in common is rather something generally termed

‘normality,’ a state that excludes the extreme and the

exceptional, and presumes a certain level of order. In

one of our interviews, emergency nurse Therese Lee

recalls a briefing session in which disaster relief

workers headed for Banda Aceh were advised of the need to

understand ‘how abnormal their normal is.’ Yet most of us

persist in the assumption that disorder is abnormal, and

this applies to psychiatric conditions as well as the

conditions of civilian life. Traumatic experience

confounds any presumed correlation between reality and

normality, threatening to expose us to the realization

that what we call normality is a consensual delusion.

Common sense would suggest that the orientations of

human memory are to the exceptional rather than the run

of the mill events in our lives, and this also applies to

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public memory, but when it comes to recollection of

extreme events, we encounter a paradox. While traumatic

experience compels recollection, and with such insistence

that a form of hyper-memory takes over with a dynamic of

its own in defiance of any conscious control, in many

ways traumatic recall does not behave like memory at all.

A study of how traumatic experience is and is not

accommodated in public memory raises issues that go to

the heart of a phenomenology of memory and tests the

defining properties of memory itself.

Ricoeur’s work Memory, History, Forgetting, offers a

comprehensive account of these properties as they have

been identified in the European philosophical tradition.

‘All memory is of the past,’ a maxim Ricoeur quotes from

Aristotle, serves as the lodestar for his exploration

(Ricoeur 2004, p. 6. To this we can add Augustine’s view

that ‘it is to memory that the sense of orientation in

the passage of time is linked.’ (Ricoeur 2004, p. 97) A

sense of temporality, or the passage of time, is central

to the structure of human consciousness, and modes of

tracking and measuring time underpin all our

communications about events in the world. History is

concerned with their relative distance or closeness on a

strictly chronological spectrum, while in public memory,

some events have greater emotional immediacy than others

because of the ways in which they resonate with

contemporary circumstances.

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In the case of traumatic memory, the consciousness

of the individual is at the mercy of an intolerable form

of immediacy. The past is recalled to the present with an

urgency that violates temporality as a structuring

principle of mental and emotional life. The event is re-

experienced as a sensory, physiological and mental

emergency. In a recent book on coping with trauma, Jon G.

Allen writes of the ‘90/10’ syndrome: 90% of the emotion

is coming from the past, and 10% from the present.

Another way of expressing this is that the experiential

distinction between past and present is ruptured (Allen

xxxxx).

This signals other forms of rupture in human

cognition. Ricoeur’s phenomenology of memory assumes a

fundamental cognitive control. He discusses Aristotle’s

distinction between memory (mnēmē) as a spontaneous

arising and the act of recollection (anamnēsis), which

involves conscious work against forgetting and ‘the

conquest of temporal distance. Mnēmē is driven by pathos;

what arises is some kind of feeling, that carries with it

an aura of times past. (Ricoeur, pp. 24–6) For the modern

philosopher, this inevitably calls up Proust, and the

euphoria, melancholia and sensory immersions of his turn

of the century novel, À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of

Lost Time.) Ricoeur does acknowledge the phenomenon of

‘obsessional eruptions’ that are suffered rather than

simply experienced. They are forms of ‘wounded or sick

memory,’ and here he acknowledges that ‘one can wonder to

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what extent a pathology of memory, and so the treatment

of memory as pathos, fits into the exercise of memory’

(Ricoeur, p. 69)

One can also reverse the speculation: if a theory of

memory cannot take account of the phenomenon of traumatic

recall, either the theory itself is flawed or traumatic

recall is something quite other than what we generally

call ‘memory.’ If according to Aristotle, ‘the primary

distinction is between laborious recollection and

spontaneous recollection’ the sheer force of traumatic

affect railroads both sides of the equation. It operates

not in accordance with mental effort but in spite of it.

All the effort goes into avoidance of the replay, which

is driven by a complex fusion of sensory activity,

nervous reaction and emotional distress. Such experiences

also produce cognitive dissociation.

Classical accounts of memory, and Augustine’s in

particular, tend to characterize it as a repository that

underpins the cohesiveness of human understanding, a

consistent sense of self, and a sense of stability and

security in the world. It is ‘a vast, immeasurable

sanctuary’ and a storehouse from which he can draw at

will on the riches of past experience and accumulated

knowledge. (Ricoeur, p. 98). The passions are muted or

screened. Former joys and sadnesses are recollected, but

at one remove from one’s present emotional state.

Set against this is all the turbulence and distress

of the flashback experience, in which physiological

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processes take over in defiance of mental control. The

body re-enacts a state of terror and the sensory nervous

system is in chaos, with manifestations that may include

sweating, palpitation, tremor, nausea, vertigo, choking,

paralysis and hallucination. But the hallucinations—

auditory, visual, olfactory—are not simply delusional.

They belong to an acute sense of actuality that has

fallen outside the time-scheme of a shared world.

If traumatic recall tests the definition of memory,

it is also a challenge to how we think about the

relationship between remembering and knowing. Revisiting

Descartes’s Second Meditation, Ricoeur notes that ‘the

cogito is not a person defined by his or her memory and

the capacity to give an accounting to himself. It bursts

forth in the lightning flash of an instant … the cogito

does not possess duration’ (Ricoeur, p. 103) If the

cogito is more akin to a revelation or recognition than

to a discursive construction of the world, it may be more

closely related to involuntary flashbacks than to

processes of conscious recollection.

This brings us to an important point, and perhaps

one that should not need stating. Traumatic flashbacks

may be an affliction, but they are not delusional in the

sense of belonging to some kind of false consciousness or

belief system. They may be a form of disorder in the

individual, but their origin lies in a form of turbulence

that has occurred in the world. Besides being aspects of

the individual’s inner experience, flashbacks are also

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forms of witnessing that demand to be reckoned with in

the wider social environment.

Modernity disciplines our societies and specializes

our knowledge and so our response to trauma can take the

form of a sentence, an assessment or a diagnosis that

whisks the experience away from our social encounters and

sequesters it as an object of specialized attention. A

return to the mode of address that is implicit in Munch’s

painting invites a different approach. For the scream

has a face, and that face addresses those of us who stand

outside the frame. The painting does not address us as

the figures in the background who seem entirely

uninvolved. It catches us—pins us—in an act of

recognition that compels witness. If traumatic experience

cannot be made public then how are we to bear witness to

the trauma of others? Through a tradition of clinical

practice focused on the challenge of overcoming a

personalised ‘disorder’ we are effectively privatising

trauma, especially in situations where those who have

been through it are relocated to societies and

communities that have not been subject to the levels of

distress and chaos brought about by violent events.

This is not to say that we can simply shift the

emphasis away from the pathological aspects of post-

traumatic distress. Bruce Shapiro, Director of the Dart

Center for Journalism and Trauma, insists on the

fundamental fact that people sustain psychological injury

as a result of exposure to trauma, and compares the

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psychic aftershocks to those that follow an earthquake.

These, he says, manifest themselves in ways that are

‘deeply personal’ (Shapiro 2010). Neurobiologists have

now identified that there is specific damage to brain

function, including shrinkage of the hippocampus leading

to impaired memory processing and difficulty in placing

memories within a time frame (Blum 2003, p. 428).

Since Freud and Breuer began their work on hysteria

in the 1890s, the association between traumatic

experience and a range of symptoms signalling serious

psychological disturbance has been vital to an effective

clinical response. Sleeplessness, social disorientation,

anxiety attacks and recurrent flashback experiences are

afflictions requiring personalised forms of support and

treatment. But Freud and Breuer also introduced some

problematic assumptions to the treatment process,

prominent amongst them being a view of human memory as

untrustworthy, and especially so in cases where symptoms

of hysteria or neurosis are present. Notions of false or

repressed memory risk undermining the trauma survivor’s

position as a witness to objective realities whose public

validation is of the most urgent importance. The

distinguished German psychoanalyst, Werner Bohleber,

warns that psychoanalysis ‘is in danger of becoming a

treatment technique that actually fades out history’

through a focus on memories in isolation from any concern

for the context of their emergence, so that the past

loses any autonomous meaning (Bohleber 2007, p. 88).

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Notes

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1 General Editors’ statement, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies.