ABSTRACT
On any given day in the year 2015, reading the morning newspaper over a cup of coffee is likely to fill one with anguish. Or so we hope. The absence of anguish would surely mean blankness, that apocalyptic state beyond the psychic threshold in which the full apprehension of reality can be taken in. There is no shortage of devastation in today’s world. There will be no shortage of ghostly passages from one generation to the next. We look for any glimmer of light or color amidst the grey newsprint. And sometimes we find it. Mostly, I am sorry to say, we in the helping professions have our work cut out for ourselves. Any tools we collect in these times of wreckage are tools we will need. In that spirit, with tools in hand we must roll up our sleeves and do what we can. I believe this book was written with that work in mind. These three chapters offer us more tools. They address the rather large domain of the making of history in the therapeutic setting, the sphere of critical social theory and our personal lives. They all address the travesties of war and the twisted ways war leaves its victims bewildered and unknowing where to look. History is made when the facts of history are realized in the lives of the people who carry it. We all carry history in our bones. But if it remains only in our bones we are more likely doomed to repeat it. So, much of what we hope for in the therapy setting today pertains to releasing our patients from the clutches of the unspoken history in their bones. We in the profession, write about the unconscious transmission of trauma across the generations. We aim to locate ourselves with our patients in those – yes – prehistoric moments in which what we share is the immediacy of our embodied and timeless presences – together. Those
presences appear as strange encounters, flashes, incongruous somethings. The possibilities are endless. But, that is how the unconscious (those timeless repositories of trauma) speak. They do not speak English, French, Urdu, Hebrew or Arabic. They speak the language of now. Catch me if you can. And our method is call “serious noticing.”1 James Wood coined this phrase while describing the kind of noticing involved in writing fiction. He asks,
what do writers do when they seriously notice the world? Perhaps they do nothing less than rescue the life of things from their death . . . the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us – the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavors, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention. By congested habit, or through laziness, lack of curiosity, thin haste, we stop looking at things.”
