Reliving Trauma Unawares: The Clinical Clincher

My Traumatic Reliving in History, Literature, and Film (London: Karnac, 2010) describes a widespread normal pattern of re-enacting trauma unconsciously in those three fields. It cites no clinical material apart from a single case of traumatic reliving in a trance called “somnambulic” recorded by Pierre Janet. Since completing this work I have explored Janet’s further examples of traumatic reliving drawn from his decades of practice at the Salpêtrière in Paris and scattered about in his lectures and writings on philosophy and psychol-

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ogy. What I have found is a distinctive pathological pattern of traumatic reliving that departs radically from the normal pattern only to clinch it in the final analysis.

The normal pattern is simple: an individual or group re-enacts a traumatic experience in disguise and unawares. As for the pathological pattern, here is how Janet evoked it at the Collège de France on February 18, 1929, when discussing trance behavior in general:

One-track trance episodes [les somnambulismes monoïdéiques] are innumerable. I could find hundreds of them straight off in my notes. They are full to the brim with an event that for some reason or other made a lasting impression on the subject. One may react to such an event in different ways. In some cases one may react by copying it, by trying to replay it, to get it going again. In earlier lessons I told you the funny story of the woman who sees a lioness on an outing and then starts playing the lioness, becomes a lioness herself. At times a subject will speak about the event, wonder what he should have done, discuss how to handle it. At other times on the contrary one is emotionally in its grip.

There are trances that repeat such an emotion-charged moment—a fear of something such as that fear of the lion, a fear of fire, of meeting up with a drunk or with an epileptic having a fit, with a dog, or the like.

Here’s a curious instance. A youngster sees an epileptic having a fit in the street. He rushes to the sick man’s help. The man doesn’t understand, fights with the boy, and bites his hand. Our youngster remains absolutely obsessed: ‘How I’m being abused. I want to help

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and I get bitten for my pains.’ So he begins throwing such fits himself in which he tries to bite everyone he encounters.

A girl I’ve observed closely was arrested in the Bois de Boulogne for improper conduct and taken to the police station. This incident upset her. She has had a single fixed idea ever since: to disguise herself, not to be recognized, to paint her face so that the patrolmen don’t recognize her. She is replaying the scene in the Bois de Boulogne. [L’évolution psychologique de la personnalité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), pp. 264-265–from one listener’s transcription.]

Janet’s examples elsewhere include notably a young woman who would go into a trance to mime her mother’s traumatic death in her care [Les névroses (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), pp. 6-8, 40, Les médications psychologiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1919), pp. II 93, 269-275, III, 97-102, L’état mental des hystériques, 2^nd edition (Paris: Alcan, 1911), pp. 507-544, La psychanalyse de Freud (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004), p. 93, The Chief Symptoms of Hysteria (New York: Macmillan, 1920), pp. 39-40, L’évolution de la mémoire et de la notion du temps (Paris: Chanine, 1928), pp. 205-215] and another young woman who would call out in a trance to a workman who had rescued her from a fire [Les névroses, pp. 41-42. Further: Premiers crits psychologiques (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005,) pp. 87-112; L’automatisme psychologique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005), pp. 436-440; Les médications pp. II, 205-206, 210, La psychanalyse, pp. 51-52, 70, 71, and L’état, pp. 72-73; ibid., p. 194, and La psychanalyse, p. 77; “L’amnésie continue,” Revue générale des sciences 4 (1893), pp. 169-179, La psychanalyse, p. 53, and Les médications, pp. 206-207; La psychanalyse, pp. 53-54, 68, and Les médications, pp. 207-208; ibid., p. 207; and L’évolution, 269]. In all such cases the sufferers remembered nothing of their somnambulic episodes afterwards.

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It is unclear why Janet’s traumatic relivers, as against my historic, literary, and cinematic subjects, relived in amnesiac trances detached from their normal lives. They were not mental patients when they were traumatized; on the contrary, several were quite normal before and, trances aside, afterwards as well, nor did they necessarily come across as abnormal even while reliving. To thicken the plot, the syndrome is evidently démodé in contemporary psychiatric practice.

In any event, Janet’s cases clinch the impression, conveyed by all the traumatic relivers I have studied historically, that they acted in trance-like obedience to a felt imperative. One such normal historic reliver encroached particularly closely on Janet’s pathological model: Adolf Hitler, whose felt mission to relive a two-stage trauma originated in an induced hypnotic spell, who pursued that mission with what he himself called the assurance of a sleepwalker, and who would notoriously work himself up into a trance whenever he expounded his core traumatic themes (Jew, gas, poison, cancer). A trauma may also convey a preternatural empowerment to relive. Just as cripples can walk in a somnambulic trance [Les névroses, 4], so could a shallow provincial nobody, duly traumatized and entranced, fanaticize millions.

Janet did not highlight somnambulism, let alone traumatic reliving, in his wide-reaching works. Rather, his somnambulic cases, along with numerous other marginal disorders likewise richly exemplified, served his larger purpose of conceptualizing the personality on its pathological edge. I single out the entranced relivings because they complement, and ultimately corroborate, the pattern of traumatic reliving that I have spotted again and again bedeviling history, haunting literature, and now pervading film. Its significance in the overall scheme of historical causality remains to be defined, nor was I able even to ascertain who, singly or collectively, relives which traumas why. But I hoped at least to have shown how that mechanism works, thus giving future theore-

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ticians a head start. Now, thanks to Janet, I can sign off definitively on that how.

I can do so even though, as against the normal pattern of unconscious reliving, Janet’s patients would relive transparently in trance-like episodes subject to total amnesia. Superficially the two patterns contrast. But the Janet pattern of alternance between normalcy and unremembered somnambulic reliving is like a parceling into two of a normal reliving–that is, of normal living with a trauma re-enacted unawares. The two patterns thus reconcile around the equivalence of normal unconscious reliving with trance-like amnesiac reliving. Their one remaining difference is that the two simultaneous components of normal reliving (conscious/unconscious) are consecutive moments in the clinical pattern. But once the equivalence of the clinical amnesiac moment with the normal unconscious component is granted, the fact of normal traumatic reliving is validated beyond dispute, given the transparency of the re-enactments in the clinical mode.

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