Discovering embodiment: A poetic method

Trauma and Meaning Making, 2016

Trauma and Meaning Making highlights multiple practices of meaning making after traumatic events in the lives of individuals and communities. Meaning making consists both in a personal journey towards a new way to exist and live in a world shattered by trauma and in public politics locating and defining what has happened. In both perspectives, the collection evaluates the impact achieved by naming the victim/s and thus the right of the victim/s to suffer from its aftermath or by refusing to recognise the traumatic event and thus the right of the victim/s to respond to it. A range of paradigms and techniques invite readers to consider anew the specificities of context and relationship while negotiating post-traumatic survival. By delineating how one makes sense of traumatic events, this volume will enable readers to draw links between practices grounded in diverse disciplines encompassing creative arts, textual analysis, public and collective communication, psychology and psychotherapy, memory and memorial.

Integrating narrative/poetic content with the professional literature relating to trauma, the author explored how writing poetry contributed to her recovery and growth following the murder of her sister. It was concluded that writing poetry helped to reduce internal conflict and restore psychological balance. Metaphors and symbols enabled the exploration of the author's response to trauma, which in turn led to recovery and growth.

2016

WITHIN AND WITHOUT: PSYCHOANALYSIS, TRAUMA THEORY, AND THE HEALING NARRATIVE CARRIE CRISMAN OORLOG 2016 In this collection, I explore the process of writing to heal from trauma. In exploring the rhetorical landscape of trauma writing, I offer a new framework for understanding how those who experience a traumatic event may use the process of writing creatively to engage in a process of healing. I argue that through the creation of art, individuals may take ownership of their experiences and memories, thus exerting the agency over the experience that was lost as the result of trauma. I also demonstrate and reflect upon my own journey in creating the healing narrative as a process of healing from trauma.

Qualitative Inquiry, 2013

The author argues that qualitative research and psychotherapy are both projects of making meaning. Qualitative research may provide therapeutic opportunities for participants that sometimes generate confusion about appropriate boundaries, but psychotherapy does not have a monopoly on the therapeutic. The meanings (or stories) that qualitative research and psychotherapy generate circulate differently, qualitative research entering the public domain more overtly, while psychotherapeutic meanings circulate primarily through the way lives are lived. Qualitative research does not generally purport to produce faithful representations, but sometimes the gap between personal experience and its narration can be troubling, especially in the case of traumatic experience. Drawing on the psychoanalytic distinction between two-person and three-person relating and its link to symbolization, the author elaborates the concept of the third position, which she uses to illuminate this gap between the flow of experience and our narrations of experience. The author shows how the third position is rooted in loss and how loss is therefore intrinsic to our capacity for curiosity and reflection on our lives.

There exists much literature on the student and doctoral candidate relationship across the disciplines. However, there is a gap in understanding this crucial dynamic in the context of creative practices, and an even more pronounced gap interrogating the supervisor to candidate dynamic when a student is conducting life writing involving personal trauma. Despite this, more and more universities are opening their doors to these types of research projects. In 2014, a final year doctoral candidate in life writing and her supervisor conducted a mini research project about their experience of supervision. The crux of their investigation hinged on the relatively nuanced requirements of supervision when the candidate is writing about personally traumatic themes in their dissertation. This paper is an extension of their original findings, amalgamating conclusions about what worked in the context of their relationship, given the delicate nature of the subject matter that they were investigating academically, and existing literature on the ethics of such supervision and theories of trauma writing in the context of life writing. By combining their analysis of their real experiences as supervisor and candidate, and preexisting academic thought on both the requirements of supervision and the differing needs of post-trauma students, the authors seek to contribute to the growing canon within the creative practices on supervisor/candidate relationships, as well as the relatively fraught ethics of the commodification of life experiences within tertiary institutions.

In what we read today, in what is written, the body is changing. After having undergone a kind of disappearance into code and of the symbolic, appearing there as a bare and featureless site for inscription with only a problematic ontological status, and then having been disarticulated without remainder into a nexus of discursive practices and performance, the body has re-emerged by way of multiple challenges to this regime. The insistent disruption of trauma, of an immemorial blow that pierces the fragile screen of symbolic coherence and insists on its priority precisely by its resistance to inscription, is one of these challenges. Within a growing corpus of texts issuing and challenging this challenge, Catherine Malabou’s work is especially important. Malabou draws neuroscience and trauma theory together and offers a what she calls a motor scheme that accounts for the emergence of the regime of writing, persuasively critiques it without thereby returning to a pre-structuralist metaphysics, and forms an interpretive tool for reconceptualizing liberatory practice. She calls this motor schema “plasticity.” In her recent work, however, Malabou challenges any simple appropriation of this motor scheme for liberatory practice. Here, “explosive plasticity,” rather than signifying the embrained body’s capacity to escape its given forms and set out on truly novel paths forged by joyful affects, becomes the “destructive plasticity” of trauma, an irreparable deformation that creates a new self indifferent to itself, bereft of affective valuation and so incapable of political decision, without a future, the living embodiment of the death drive. In fact, destructive plasticity may solidify biopolitical control through the proliferation of accidents that produce post-traumatic subjects as incapable of resistance as they are equipped to become the agents of violence. The body, if more fully emancipated in Malabou’s work from the regime of writing than in previous theoretical work on affect and trauma, finds itself trapped in its own vulnerable materiality. How to wrest free of this new prison, when the death drive is so fully embodied as to leave no way out? How to imagine liberatory practice within a regime that can wield plasticity against itself in a way that resists interpretation? How to write this impossible transition?

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma (edited by Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja), 2020

"Philosophy of trauma" is not a widely used concept, and the topic is rarely discussed, despite the strong philosophical undercurrent of literary trauma theory and its genealogical link to poststructuralism. This is probably due to the fact that trauma is more commonly seen as a psychological or cultural rather than a philosophical concept. It could be argued, however, that precisely for this reason there is a need to explore the philosophical assumptions underlying trauma theory. These assumptions often remain unarticulated-they can be tacit and implicit-but they nevertheless structure different traditions of theorizing trauma. In this chapter, I approach philosophies of trauma precisely from the perspective of the philosophical assumptions undergirding different ways of engaging with trauma. These assumptions can take various forms depending, first, on how explicitly articulated they are and, second, on whether they emerge in the context of theoretical discourse or fiction. Drawing on these distinctions, I will sketch out four types of philosophies of trauma. In addition to this semantic categorization, I propose a substantial one, suggesting that the three main philosophical paradigms of trauma that underlie contemporary trauma theory can be called empiricism, poststructuralism and hermeneutics. I will then analyse in more detail the philosophical underpinnings of dominant literary trauma theory particularly concerning the concepts of experience and narrative understanding. The final part of the chapter elucidates these points through a discussion of Hanya Yanagihara's novel A Little Life (2015).