ABSTRACT
Theoretically speaking, I have stacked the deck with the previous quotes. My starting point is Lacan, specifically his essay, “Tuché and Automation,” in which he revisits Freud’s analysis of a father whose son has died, and who sleeps in the room next to his dead son’s body. The father has a dream in which the son asks, “Father, can’t you see that I am burning?” and something occurs in this dream between awakeness and sleep that bears on the father’s emotional state in the dream. As Lacan noted, “stages are organized around a fear of castration,” (p. 58), by which he meant Oedipal stages of development that can be understood according to their “possible registration in terms of bad encounters,” such as primal scenes and traumas. If we focus on school shootings in the United States, occurring between 1996, and April 20, 1999, we can revisit the primal scene of American culture in relation to youth at a very specific developmental and libidinal stage: adolescence. It is not merely youth who are traumatized, but also the generations before them who respond to the primal scene in accordance to their own stages of development in the libidinal milieu. Lacan further revisited Freud in this essay on other pertinent topics and themes that are applied to school violence and its reactions: unconscious states of knowledge (yes, knowledge), the role of emotion in repetition, repetitive behavior induced by traumas and primal scenes, and the objects to which humans relate, as Lacan fastidiously mimicked Aristotle, “man thinks with his object.”4 In this chapter, I attempt a broad psychoanalytic reading of the dynamics between students and the objects they choose to “think with” when they are passing through grief, fear, and politics in the wake of school shootings in the United States.
