Post-Trumpatic Stress Disorder

Could we be getting over it?

Listen to it twice, if possible—it's not long, and it's mostly in English. Here's a good text for following along, with the few German bits translated.

A little over a month ago, at my day job as a music bibliographer, I was processing an essay by the Italian musicologist Mariano Russo about the12-tone music of Arnold Schoenberg and his students, which argued that it was never as revolutionary as it sounded, and didn't last very long, if at all, as the norm for contemporary music; nevertheless (according to the abstract I wrote),

in the history of 20th-century music it continues to be felt as the decisive parting of the waters after which everything changed. Jacques Lacan's concept of the après-coup (after Freud's term Nachträglichkeit, "afterwardsness"), a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events", is drawn on to explain the phenomenon: the arrival of 12-tone music was recognized as a traumatic event only after the event had passed. An illustration is provided by the premiere of Schoenberg's A survivor from Warsaw under the conductor Kurt Frederick in Albuquerque in 1948. After the performance, the audience remained stunned and baffled, without applauding, for a full minute. Then Frederick repeated the whole of the 7- or 8-minute work, and the audience applauded thunderously--it was only in the "afterwardsness" of the re-hearing that they were able to process the traumatic character of the first impression.

Which took hours of research, I may say; I don't have any experience with the later 20th-century psychoanalytic material—somewhere in my library there's a chapter on Lacan in a book surveying the French structuralist movement, but I know I didn't read the chapter with much interest or understanding, and I can't find it at all at the moment. But the après-coup concept really stuck in my mind, where it got connected to something completely different: the political events of the last month and the last eight years, and in particular the strange sensation of "joy" Democrats have been experiencing especially last week over the Chicago festivities.

Not just the joy in itself, but what seems to me like its belated character, of a national celebration we really should have been enjoying four years ago, when we drove Trump out of office. We're out singing and dancing in the public square like the Munchkins after Dorothy's house falls on the witch—"Ding dong, the witch is dead!"—at the wrong time, when the witch has actually come back to life, and seriously threatens to retake power.

Of course we had a lot of other things on our minds in January 2021, with the pandemic raging and the schools in crisis and the economy in collapse and the criminality of Trump unrebuked in his second impeachment, and a lot of work to do, which we certainly set about doing, under the cool and imaginative leadership of Speaker Pelosi and President Biden (and maybe less from Attorney General Garland). Now we've gotten rid of them, or they've gotten rid of themselves, depending on how you look at it, and to some of us it almost looks as if that's what we were celebrating, the demise of our own beloved old folks, which can't really be what we mean, can it?

And it struck me that the Lacanian theory I'd just stumbled over offered an alternative way of looking at it: that we've been living with a kind of collective post-traumatic stress disorder from the horror that begins with Donald Trump's inexplicable election to the presidency in 2016 and ends with his flight from Washington on Inauguration Day 2021, from which we are only now, literally après le coup, able to emerge.

So I wanted to write something about that, and did (leaning heavily on Owen Hewitson's website Lacan.com and a rats' nest of Wikipedia articles that I'm not going to reference properly).

So sometime in 1895 or 1896, I guess, Sigmund Freud made up an awkward new German word, Nachträglichkeit, for which the only translation I can find that captures at all what it would seem to mean is an even more awkward English coinage, "afterwardsness", and which was meant to designate the delay that occurred, in his original "seduction theory" of hysteria, between an original trauma, typically sexual abuse by a father in early childhood, preserved in the child's unconscious in the form of a repressed memory, and the onset of neurotic symptoms, triggered after (in the "afterwardsness" of) some second incident typically following the onset of puberty.

Later, when Freud had come to doubt the "seduction theory", with its horrible but also unlikely implication that all his patients' fathers, and who knew how many other fathers, including his own, "seduced" their babies and all somehow successfully kept the crime secret, he switched to the idea of the original seduction as the infant's fantasy, not so much an incident in time as a kind of primal condition (the "Oedipus complex"), and he more or less dropped the Nachträglichkeit concept too. Psychoanalytic theory still had the notion of repressed memories, no doubt, and all kinds of psychologists made productive use of it, but whatever insight was represented by "afterwardsness"  more or less went away.

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Nevertheless, one particular French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, engaged in the early 1950s in the project of a "return to Freud", rescued the word from oblivion, and coined an awkward French equivalent, après-coup; because he thought the most important thing about the original trauma wasn't whether or not it had "really" happened, but that it had occupied a real moment in time, just like the second moment, the coup that had apparently caused the patient's symptoms to appear.

The return to Freud was, crucially, a rereading of Freud in the spirit of the French structuralist movement (from the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss), to which he more or less belonged himself, and one of its key ideas was what you might call the semioticization of the concept of the unconscious; that the unconscious was "structured like a language", taking his cue from Freud's own conception of the process of repression as the "translation" of a traumatic memory into a form that removed its "affective weight", effectively hiding it so that the sufferer could no longer access it directly—what the unconscious consists of is messages hidden in that way. Ideally, in the therapy process, a patient is able to pull out the traumatic memory and "re-signify" it, restore its meaning, through a new translation.

This complex of ideas in turn gave the clue to Lacan's student and patient Jean Laplanche (actually the creator of the English word "afterwardsness") for a "theory of generalized seduction" describing the formation of the sexual unconscious as the reception on the child's part of a whole series of "enigmatic messages" from parent or caregiver,

with ‘enigma’ here implying that it can come without any intention or overtly sexual resonance on the part of the adult. These enigmatic messages are always linked to the body, and they will always refer to what he calls an ‘exchange zone’ – that is, some kind of opening on the body or privileged point of interface in the relationship between child and caregiver. They constitute the ‘sexual pre-sexual’ experiences Freud was describing. The work that the child has to do to decipher these enigmatic, mixed messages kick-starts the process of sexualisation and socialisation

(quote from Owen Hewitson, linked above), including presumably the messages transmitted by actual traumatic abuse where that occurs, but also equally mysterious but benign messages that are crucial to the child's healthy development. It strikes me that our whole lives are spent in this way, like archaeologists, digging enigmatic messages out of our minds, not just about sex, cleaning them off, and exhibiting them to ourselves and our friends. I love that thought.

So my political idea, at long last, is that there must be parallel processes in social organizations, instances of group trauma, and that Trump's 2016 victory really was a traumatic event for all, us Democrats, a blow from which we struggled to recover, with a host of theories, more than one of them no doubt correct, as to what went wrong (for me, the FBI's public revival of the State Department emails scandal was a genuine abuse, and so was the Wikileaks treatment of the Podesta emails, plus the suppression of such facts as were already known about Trump's Russia involvement, and the total media failure on Trump's $25-million Trump University fraud, but I'm sure there's more), stomped into our hearts by the failures of the Flynn trial, the Mueller investigation, and the first Trump impeachment. 

They could break laws they felt like breaking, and there wasn't a thing we could do about it! They could fail repeatedly to break the Constitution's guarantees of equal protection, with their "Muslim ban" proposals, but eventually the Supreme Court would just give in (with a rule that ensured it was only against impoverished Muslims, not Muslims in general). They could treat asylum applicants as criminals, tearing their families apart and parking them in concentration camps. Trump could freely siphon government cash into his businesses, and nobody could do anything about it; he could take much larger sums from from foreign governments with huge interests in influencing US policy, and nobody would say anything. Nobody was in a position to stop him! The Supreme Court wasn't even interested in trying! All those promises in the Federalist papers on how our brilliant Constitution was designed to save us from tyranny turned out to be lies!

And then we won the 2020 election, and it didn't even feel good, poisoned by Trump's rejection of the results and attempts to overturn them, even though they didn't work, and the catastrophic situation we found ourselves in, largely because of his government's mismanagement. That, I think, was the second moment, the beginning of the afterwardsness, in which we began to experience the PTSD symptoms. The souring of America, as I called it last year, in which nothing gave us any satisfaction.

And we've been projecting our unhappiness on Joe Biden, as if the president were our national therapist, in what's known in psychoanalysis as transference. We've been mad at him because he doesn't seem to understand how unhappy we are. He is, as Lacan puts it, the "subject who is supposed to know". Why doesn't he? It must be because he's too old! After which there is just one chapter, the countertransference, in which the therapist interprets the needs the analysand is expressing, and which Biden concluded by stepping down from his candidacy, after a study of the polls. 

We needed for him to let us go out on our own, to be adults, to emerge, and that's what we're rejoicing over, with our wonderful new candidates. The proof is that we're not badmouthing Biden any more, at all—we're speaking of him, and Pelosi too, with reverence, and mercilessly mocking "weird" Trump and his acolytes, even though we haven't gotten rid of him yet. Fear of him was ruling us (that's why we were so negative about Biden's candidacy, because we were sure Trump would beat him) and now it doesn't. We're really starting to be not afraid of him! I don't know if you want to call it a cure, but it's a much better place to be than the one we've been in.