4 Quotes by Cathy Caruth

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.

As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashbacks can be itself re-traumatizing; if not life-threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivor, for example, survivors of Vietnam.

إذا كان فرويد قد لجأ للأدب لوصف تجربة الصدمة النفسية (التروما)، فذاك لأن الأدب، كالتحليل النفسي، يهتم بالعلاقة المعقدة بين أن تعرف وألا تعرف. وتحديداً عند النقطة التي تتقاطع بها المعرفة مع عدم المعرفة تلتقي تماماً اللغة والأدب ونظرية تجربة الصدمة النفسية في التحليل النفسي.

It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself” (p. 5)