ABSTRACT

Bearing Witness to the Witness examines the different methods of testimony given by trauma victims and the ways in which these can enrich or undermine the ability of the reader to witness them. Years of listening to both direct and indirect testimonies on trauma has lead Dana Amir to identify four modes of witnessing trauma: the "metaphoric mode", the "metonymic mode," the "excessive mode" and the "Muselmann mode." In doing so, the author demonstrates the importance of testimony in understanding the nature of trauma, and therefore how to respond to trauma more adequately in a clinical psychoanalytic setting.

To follow these four modes of interaction with the traumatic memory, the various chapters of the book present a close reading of three genres of traumatic witnessing: literary accounts by Holocaust survivors, memoirs (located between autobiographic recollection and fiction) and "raw" testimonies taken from Holocaust survivors. Since every traumatic testimonial narrative contains a combination of all four modes with various shifts between them, it is of crucial importance to identify the singular combination of modes that characterizes each traumatic narrative, focusing on the specific areas within which a shift occurs from one mode to another. Such a focus is extremely important, as illustrated and analyzed throughout this book, to the rehabilitation of the psychic metabolic system which conditions the digestion of traumatic materials, allowing a metaphoric working through of traumatic zones that were so far only accessible to repetition and evacuation.

Bearing Witness to the Witness will appeal to trauma researchers of all research areas, including psychologists, psychoanalysts, literary scholars as well as philosophers of language and philosophers of the mind. The book will also be of interest and relevance to clinical psychologists, psychoanalytic candidates and graduate students in literary theory and criticism.

chapter |5 pages

Introduction

chapter |16 pages

When language meets the traumatic lacuna

Four modes of traumatic testimony

chapter |15 pages

Autobiographical fiction or fictional autobiography?

Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood 1

chapter |12 pages

The post-traumatic dyad

Agota Kristó f’s The Notebook

chapter |10 pages

The center mode as opposed to the marginal mode

Yehiel Dinur (Ka-Tzetnik)’s House of Dolls

chapter |11 pages

The traumatic lacuna as the negative possession of the other

Aharon Appelfeld’s “Bertha” 1

chapter |16 pages

Transcending the traumatic real

Six variations in six stories by Ida Fink

chapter |26 pages

From the collapse of signifiers to the reconstruction of language

Robert Antelme’s The Human Race 1

chapter |36 pages

The lacuna

Reading children’s testimonies

chapter |4 pages

Modes of memory, modes of healing

chapter |8 pages

Awakening the narrator

Clinical work with modes of testimony

chapter |5 pages

Epilogue

Hiroshima Mon Amour and the command of boundary violation