ABSTRACT
Drawing mainly on Freud, Caruth, and other scholars in trauma studies, this chapter argues that McGrath’s Trauma illustrates not only Charlie Weir’s unrecognized and displaced traumatization but the ways in which trauma may be induced by the perception of another’s wound, by the existence of another’s traumatic story. An act which, while pointing to the communal dimension of trauma as well as to the function of multidirectional memory, in many ways may be read as a parable of psychoanalysis itself. In reconfiguring recent American history as trauma that needs to be acknowledged and worked through, the novel establishes a conceptual parallelism between a medical phenomenon pertaining to individual pathology and a broader trauma culture, insisting on the therapeutic and ethical significance of remembrance and its inherent potential to generate compassion and recovery. Since traumatic memory is fixed at an iconic, not at a linguistic, level—images play such an important role in the representation of trauma that it is probably in the image that the psychic registration of trauma resides—it is not surprising that an old family photograph triggers a crisis bringing forth Weir’s long-buried trauma. Its resolution emerges out of a process of mourning since, as Freud points out, the power of trauma can be removed not through forgetting but rather by the discharge of energy that results from recollections. Structured as a psychological thriller and a confessional narrative, the novel’s closure, with Weir’s decision to finally entrust himself to a psychiatrist, reaffirms one of the central motifs at the heart of Trauma, namely, the healing function of both psychotherapy and writing as equal enterprises in recovering memories and thus giving meaning and shape to unspoken suffering.
