Memories and Monsters by Eric R. Severson David M. Goodman

Memories and Monsters by Eric R. Severson David M. Goodman

Author:Eric R. Severson,David M. Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351660372
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)


Therapeutic witnessing

In discussing these literary works, it is tempting to resort to psychological themes and concepts such as trauma, the unconscious, repression, denial, and dissociation to explain the effect of haunting and how the characters respond to it. This can be a fruitful endeavor, and has led to some convincing interpretations (Osborne, 2013, pp. 127–157; Krumholz, 1992). It is also an intriguing approach in general to make sense of historical haunting by way of psychological phenomena. Yet, one must be careful not to treat the psychological concepts employed here as a static explanatory framework. Haunting is not simply equatable with the classical concept of the unconscious, for instance. After all, a concept such as this is itself being reassessed in light of philosophical impasses like the memory crisis. It is just as fruitful, then, to wonder how psychoanalysis, broadly construed, can perform its own conceptual reassessment by way of engaging the phenomenon of haunting, and how it might accomplish this in a way that meets the ethical obligation of remembering well.

A major theme pervading the response to these questions is the recognition that historicity in general, and haunting in particular, is an embedded aspect of the world. Along these lines, we might begin by recalling that Austerlitz and Beloved do more than metaphorically portray haunting; in making it into a concrete experience for their protagonists, they capture an essential aspect of all memory, namely that it exists “out there, in the world.” To cash this out psychoanalytically, it might help to return to the philosophical point, already noted above, that memory is not solely individual and mental; it is distributed and culturally sedimented, and it lurks in present practices, places, and relationships. It is more akin to a decentralized network than an internal, localized possession.

Transposing Gadamer’s notion of horizons to the therapeutic setting, Philip Cushman (2009, pp. 134–135) notes that being situated together with another brings everything of their world along with them. To adopt the therapeutic stance is therefore not to engage in empathy, an interiorization that brackets the outside world and attempts to enter the client’s mental space by remaining apolitical, ahistorical, and acultural. Rather, therapy always involves—at least implicitly—acknowledging our cultural and historical encumbrances. Cushman (2009) insists that “[w]hat hermeneutics supplies is exactly what empathy cannot: a good beginning, a purposefully historical, contextual, relational self in a non-Cartesian world” (p. 135).

Taking this stance in therapy is a way to make a “good beginning”—that is, a hermeneutically appropriate one—because instead of assuming a fully self-possessed initiation from either person, it attends to what is already there in both the client’s and the therapist’s ongoing historicities (and linguisticalities), while also recognizing that much of what is there is not possessed in full awareness. For something to be part of the client’s world, it need not be explicitly formulated or named. To use Gadamer’s terms, the opacity of inner infinity is intrinsically part of the encounter; it is present in the form of cultural inheritances, unreflected assumptions, faded memories, and the like.



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