Art Spiegelman ‘sMAUS: Working-Through The Trauma of the Holocaust

“ Whether commentary [ … ] is built into a construction of a history or developed as a separate, overlying text is a affair of pick, but the voice of the observer must be clearly heard. The commentary should interrupt the facile additive patterned advance of the narrative, introduce alternate readings, inquiry any partial decision, withstand the demand for closing [ … ] Such commentary may present splintered or invariably repeating refractions of a traumatic yesteryear by utilizing any figure of different vantage points. “ Saul FriedlAnder, “ Trauma, Transference and Working-Through, ”History and Memory4 ( 1992 ) : 39-55.

Robert S. Leventhal

Copyright ( degree Celsius ) 1995 by Robert S. Leventhal, all rights reserved. This text may be shared in conformity with the just use-provisions of the U.S. Copyright Law. Redistribution and republication of this text on other footings, in any medium, requires the written permission of the writer.

Trauma, Working-Through, and the Problem of Historical Understanding

One of the most important efforts to understand the response to the Shoah is through the texts and footings of Freudian Psychoanalysis. In his decisive essay of 1916, Mourning and Melancholia, referred to many times in this archive, Freud distinguishes between two basically distinguishable modes of traveling through the trauamatic loss of a darling object. In bereavement, the topic grieves for the loss of the beloved, and bit by bit comes to footings with that loss through the sustained contemplation sing the multiple significances of that loss. Mourning is characterized by an initial withdrawl from the external universe of things and events, and centres upon the topic ‘s feeling of the loss of a important facet of one ‘s life. In melancholia, nevertheless, there has normally been a extremely ambivalent relation to the beloved object, and the capable becomes isolated, down, and experiences this loss of the Other as the loss of him or herself. The melancholy reaction to the traumatic loss of a beloved is characterized by utmost self-devaluation, to the extent that the topic might really believe that he or she is responsible for the decease or going of the Other, that he or she is a “ liquidator ” him or herself responsible for the “ violent death off ” of the Other. Or, conversely, the capable positions him or herself as the abandoned object, holding been “ left ” by the dead Other, and might see him or herself as a victim, as the hurt or wounded receiver of this traumatic loss that the Other has “ imposed. ”

In the Neo-Freudian Theories of Winicott, the effort has been made to joint the procedure of “ working-through ” the traumatic loss of the darling object more exactly. Winicott ‘s celebrated phrase “ Mourning without empathy leads to lunacy ” has frequently been cited as the key to his theory, which isthat there must be an empathic informant to the hurting of this traumatic loss, that the individual who suffers this loss must be able to give testimony to person as a manner of working-through or treating this loss, and that eventually certain “ transitional ” or “ intermediate ” objects might be necessary in order to travel from the province of dependance and trust on the Other to a renewed province of autonomy after the traumatic rupture.

The trouble with this type of apprehension is its insisting on a remarkable empathic Other who hears the testimony of the informant, and thereby bears witness to the traumatic loss in a curative mode. What does it really intend to “ work-through ” a traumatic loss? and what does this mean with respect non to an person, but to an full people? Many of the normative claims of depth psychology are present in this type of attack: the hope is that a gradual reintergration of the significance of the lost object occurs and the fact of the loss helps the topic to turn beyond this dependence in the building of a ego that is able to digest and understand alterity and is non stiffly defined. This is the thesis of Eric Santner’s Stranded Objects.