Women writing in contemporary France

40 Rewriting the past
clever solutions in times of impossible conflict, and also the way that those
solutions are often partial, neurotic and fraught. The dream exemplifies
this contradiction perfectly, being at once a creative and masterful dramatisation
of psychic disorder, and a troubling, haunting revelation of irreconcilable
difference within. Dreams can provide powerful recompense in the
face of loss and clever encapsulations of psychic dilemmas. However, they
are incomplete without their interpretation in narrative. This is possibly
why dreams fascinate so: they demand explanation as their essential
counterpart. Both narratives point to the limits of the mind’s creative power
in the face of trauma. The events of the Holocaust, for instance, continue
to prove resistant to any form of symbolisation. Yet, in the final analysis,
creativity holds our best hope of mental health, not just in the mind’s spectacular
resources, nor in the infinite possibilities of narrative, but in the
process of transformation between the two. Lambrichs’s work urges us to
consider the alchemy of metamorphosis that takes place between inner and
outer worlds, between experience and its internalisation, and between
differing forms of symbolic representation, to discover to what extent we
can truly possess our many lives.
Notes
1 Louise L. Lambrichs, Journal d’Hannah (Paris: La Différence, 1993); A ton image
(Paris: Olivier/Seuil, 1998). All subsequent page references are given in brackets
in the text.
2 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Penguin Freud Library,
vol. 4 (London: Penguin, 1976), pp. 114–15.
3 On this point see Melvin R. Lansky, ‘The legacy of The Interpretation of Dreams’,
in Melvin Lansky (ed.), Essential Papers on Dreams (New York: New York
University Press, 1992), pp. 3–31 (p. 4).
4 My reading of Klein is taken here from Melanie Klein, ‘The rôle of the school in
the libidinal development of the child’ (1923), in Love, Guilt and Reparation and
Other Works 1921–45 (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), pp. 59–76.
5 Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (London and New York: Routledge,
1991), p. 16.
6 See Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, ‘The intrusive past: the flexibility
of memory and the engraving of trauma’, in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma:
Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995), pp. 158–82.
7 Freud believed that traumatic dreams were a retrospective wish to master unpleasant
stimulus by developing the anxiety which caused the neurosis. This led to his
deduction of the repetition compulsion. For a more detailed reading of this, see