ABSTRACT
In their powerful book on war trauma and psychosis, History Beyond Trauma (2004), Davoine and Gaudillière made the important point that unspeakable catastrophe of war is handed down from one generation to the next; it comes to be relived in the present and haunts the individual. Their subtitle for the book is Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent, a paraphrase of the words of Ludwig Wittgenstein that originally appeared in his philosophical treatise Tractatus (1918/1999). In the text, Davoine and Gaudillière further extended the phrase to “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot be silent and cannot help showing what cannot be said” (p. 79). To their important psychoanalytic idea that trauma that eludes verbalization is inevitably expressed in symptoms and behavior and passed on through the generations, I would add that through artistic expression, trauma can find a voice.
