Trauma and the Material Signifier

Through an analysis of the signifier and its relation to traumatic repetition, this essay explores the necessity of psychoanalytic theory for an analysis of trauma. Arguing that deconstructive approaches, which have come to form the center of what is currently known as "trauma theory," ignore the structure of the subject and, consequently, the significance of the psychoanalytic primal scene for the analysis of trauma, the essay argues for a more psychoanalytically-inflected understanding of trauma and the missed event. Inhabiting a time before time, an impossible time, the primal scene--which, for Freud is the most significant missed event--marks the inaugurating moment of society, repression, and the law. Because analytic practices themselves open onto the space of trauma, enacting a missed encounter, they are necessary to begin the arduous process of understanding, or of what Freud calls "remembering, repeating, and working through." Because psychoanalysis is able to commemorate the traumatic missed encounter as the forgotten event, it is able to attend to the structural force of trauma without giving way to the temptation to idealize the experience as something untouchable or inaccessible. Such idealization, the essay claims, has been the tendency of some deconstructive theories of trauma that maintain that trauma is beyond the limits of representation and our symbolic periphery. Through an analysis of the role of the signifier in the traumatic event, the essay argues that trauma, like Lacan's notion of the real, is very much a part of the symbolic, even though it only makes its mark negatively.