ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the creation of hermetic narratives in the course of the analytic treatment. The "hermetic narrative" refers to a condition in which an excessive, hermetically sealed narrative of witnessing is jointly created by the analytic dyad. One of the questions that must be considered in working with traumatic memories is how the various modes of witnessing emerge in the analytic interaction, and in what way the analytic interaction can be leveraged as a transformative force that helps shifting from one mode of witnessing to another. The analyst's active psychic space is one of the key parameters in facilitating movement from one mode of testimony to another. Analytic work with trauma may collapse into each of these modes: it may collapse into repetition, into stagnation, into evacuation. To work with trauma is to awaken the narrator.
