ABSTRACT
Traumatic experiences often activate a psychic process of self-annihilation. Their acidity creates types of psychic holes that absorb the unbearable traumatic substances along with the subject who contains them, to the point of a total collapse of inner barriers. Trauma is often conceptualized as an external event, detached from the narrator who experienced it. Survivors of trauma claim that they live in two worlds: the world of their traumatic memories and the real world. Metaphor and metonymy are two forms of semantic shift, that is, two modes of transition from one semantic field to another. Metaphor is based on analogy, on a relationship of similarity between two semantic fields. The metaphoric mode collapses into language while also constituting language. The Muselmann mode of witnessing has only rare narrative manifestations — since it essentially attacks both the ability to narrate and language itself.
