Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

75The first work on trauma is Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle written after WWI.This book studies the relationship between trauma and historical violence and it could be said toask what it would mean for history to be understood as the history of trauma. Freud’s bookintroduces a theory of repetition as the symptom of trauma. Freud’s theory sees trauma as atheory of the incomprehensibility of human survival, a concept that further developed by CathyCaruth who associates trauma with survival. Trauma theory has grown widely since thepublication of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience in 1996. Trauma theory as articulated byCaruth, brings very basic psychoanalysis (mainly Freudian) to deconstructive historiography. Sheexplains that something is missed in the initial encounter with the traumatic event. She argues inher introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory that “it is this inherent latency of the eventthat paradoxically explains the peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness of historicalexperience: since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only inconnection with another place, and in another time” (8). Traumatic events are historical eventswhich are not accessible despite the mind’s recurrent endeavors (repetition compulsion) tocomprehend what it has failed to understand in the original encounter. This failed encounter leadsto the mind’s failure to figure out the unclaimed circuits of trauma and experience. This failure isgoverned by what Freud calls repetition compulsion. This is a reenactment (symptom) of psychictraumatic events that have not been assigned to a particular past and that have kept the emotionaland physical severity of the lived experience. This restoration of these psychic events interruptsthe present with memories, nightmares, reminiscences, and dreams. These are interfering