Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience

by Cathy Caruth (Photographer)

Overview

Interviews and intimate photographic portraits of witnesses to the collective and cultural significance of trauma.

This new collection from Cathy Caruth features interviews with a diverse group of leaders in the theorization of, and response to, traumatic experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Crossing the boundaries of discipline and profession, Caruth’s subjects include literary theorists and critics, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, political activists, filmmakers, public intellectuals, institutional leaders, and researchers. Exploring the intertwining of the intellectual and personal dimensions of experience, each interview is accompanied by Caruth's intimate photographic portrait of its subject.

Caruth chose her subjects because of their impact on her thinking as well as their significant role as witnesses to the collective and cultural significance of trauma. The individuals profiled here are innovators in the theory of trauma (Part I), in the clinical, activist, or testimonial interventions in trauma (Part II), or in the creation or modification of institutions that provide therapeutic, artistic, or legal responses to traumatic events (Part III).

Two of the interviews first appeared in Caruth's landmark 1995 work, Trauma: Explorations in Memory. The rest were conducted between 2011 and 2013 after the field of trauma studies expanded significantly.

Representing both the foundation of trauma research and cutting-edge approaches to the topic, this collection will be useful to practitioners with an interest in post-traumatic stress disorder as well as scholars exploring the multiple dimensions of profound human experience.

A portion of the proceeds from sales of this book will go to the Grady Nia Project for abused, suicidal, and low-income African American women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781421414454
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	11/25/2014
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Cathy Caruth is a leading figure in psychoanalytically informed literary theory and humanistic approaches to trauma. She is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University, with appointments in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. Her books include Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud; Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History; and Trauma: Explorations in Memory, all published by Johns Hopkins.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Learning to Listen xiii

Part I Death in Theory

1 Giving Death Its Due: An Interview with Robert Jay Litton (June 8,1990, New York, New York) 3

2 Traumatic Temporality: An Interview with Jean Laplanche (October 23, 1994, Paris, France) 25

3 A Record That Has Yet to Be Made: An Interview with Dori Laub (June 15-16, 2013, Woodbury, Connecticut) 47

4 Mad Witnesses: A Conversation with Françoise Davoine Jean-Max Gaudillière (May 18, 2012, Burgundy, France) 81

Part II A Revolutionary Act

5 The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over: A Conversation with Gregg Bordowitz Douglas Crimp Laura Pinsky Thomas Keenan (September 25, 1991. New York, New York) 113

6 The Politics of Trauma: A Conversation with Judith Herman (May 16, 2013, Cambridge, Massachusetts) 131

7 The Body Keeps the Score: An Interview with Bessel van der Kolk (June 17, 2013, Boston, Massachusetts) 153

8 The Haunted Self: An interview with Onno van der Hart (July 16, 2013, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) 179

9 Words and Wounds: An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman (September 11, 1994, New Haven, Connecticut) 213

10 A Revolutionary Act-The Video Testimonies of the Nia Project: An Interview with Members o£ the Grady Nia Team (October 2 and 9, 2012, Atlanta, Georgia) 237

Part III The System is Weeping

11 Apocalypse Terminable and Interminable: An Interview with Arthur S. Blank Jr. (January 23, 2013, Washington, DC) 271

12 Filming Madness: A Conversation with Mieke Bal Françhise Davoine (November 26, 2011, Vevey, Switzerland) 297

13 A Ghost in the House of Justice: A Conversation with Shoshana Felm; (August 7, 2013, Tel Aviv, Israel) 321

Index 355

What People are Saying About This

Roger Luckhurst

Cathy Caruth is one of the key founders of cultural trauma theory: her books have been indispensable. This collection of interviews shows how for twenty-five years Caruth's groundbreaking work has been established in dialogue with other key figures across the fields of holocaust studies, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology and memory studies. This book once more enacts Caruth's central lesson: that responses to trauma are best forged in the ethical act of listening to others.

From the Publisher

The poet William Stafford wrote that 'the authentic is a line from one thing along to the next . . . it holds together something more than the world, this line.' Cathy Caruth has followed a line of thought and feeling in these interviews that is breathtaking in its intelligence, vulnerability and authenticity. Her goal, beautifully realized, is to 'hold together trauma and testimony.' Stafford ends with: 'Are you coming? Good: now it is time.' It is indeed.
—M. Gerard Fromm, Author, Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma across Generations

Cathy Caruth is one of the key founders of cultural trauma theory: her books have been indispensable. This collection of interviews shows how for twenty-five years Caruth's groundbreaking work has been established in dialogue with other key figures across the fields of holocaust studies, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology and memory studies. This book once more enacts Caruth's central lesson: that responses to trauma are best forged in the ethical act of listening to others.
—Roger Luckhurst, Professor at Birkbeck College, University of London

M. Gerard Fromm

The poet William Stafford wrote that 'the authentic is a line from one thing along to the next . . . it holds together something more than the world, this line.' Cathy Caruth has followed a line of thought and feeling in these interviews that is breathtaking in its intelligence, vulnerability and authenticity. Her goal, beautifully realized, is to 'hold together trauma and testimony.' Stafford ends with: 'Are you coming? Good: now it is time.' It is indeed.

Editorial Reviews

In this extraordinary enterprise, Cathy Caruth achieves what is by definition an impossibility: making familiar the unfamiliar country of trauma, the place of displacement par excellence; the lieu of an ‘erasure’, as Dori Laub would say, where language is at a loss and a new language struggles to be heard, thanks to the construction of a new channel created by the very act and presence of a totally committed listening.
—The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

In this extraordinary enterprise, Cathy Caruth achieves what is by definition an impossibility: making familiar the unfamiliar country of trauma, the place of displacement par excellence; the lieu of an ‘erasure’, as Dori Laub would say, where language is at a loss and a new language struggles to be heard, thanks to the construction of a new channel created by the very act and presence of a totally committed listening.

From the Publisher

In this extraordinary enterprise, Cathy Caruth achieves what is by definition an impossibility: making familiar the unfamiliar country of trauma, the place of displacement par excellence; the lieu of an ‘erasure’, as Dori Laub would say, where language is at a loss and a new language struggles to be heard, thanks to the construction of a new channel created by the very act and presence of a totally committed listening.

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis