Trauma, Contingency, and The Psychoanalytic Zero

ABSTRACT

This article begins the examination of suffering and its relation to the experience of being human. Trauma is neither an experience nor an actual event, but the beginning of the “human” condition. The argument is illustrated through interwoven narratives of transgenerational trauma that arose in the psychoanalytic treatment of a traumatized patient whose parents were atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It describes the patient’s and analyst’s surrender to the nameless universe in which the division between victim and victimizer is a production of contingency.

KEYWORDS:

• Traumatization
• emptiness
• psychoanalytic zero
• surrender
• victim-victimizer relationship
• player-witness
• taoism

Acknowledgments

This article was first published in The Psychoanalytic Zero: A Decolonizing Study of Therapeutic Dialogues (2020), 48-56, and is reprinted with permission.

Notes

¹ The Great East Japan Earthquake struck the eastern half of Japan on March 11, 2011, and triggered a huge tsunami, which destroyed some of the emergency generating systems of the nuclear power plant located along the coast of Fukushima. From the 12th to the 15th of March, the plant underwent three nuclear meltdowns, hydrogen-air explosions, and the release of a great deal of radioactive material. By September 10, 2019, 15,898 people lost their lives, 2,531 people were missing, and 6,157 people were injured from the earthquake and tsunami (Emergency Disaster Countermeasures Headquarters of the National Police Agency, 2019). By November, 2019, in Fukushima Prefecture alone, 4,109 people had lost their lives, one person was missing, 183 people were injured, and 41,916 people were still evacuated due to the accident in the nuclear plant (Disaster Prevention Headquarter of Fukushima Prefecture, 2019).

² The Great Hanshin Earthquake occurred on January 17, 1995, in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. It measured 7.3 on the Richter scale. By May 19, 2006, 6,434 people lost their lives, three people were missing, and 40,092 people were injured (The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake Memorial Disaster Reduction and Human Renovation Institution, 2016).

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Notes on contributors

Koichi Togashi

Koichi Togashi, Ph.D., L.P., is a Faculty and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Training and Research in Intersubjective Self Psychology, New York; a Professor at Konan University, Kobe, Japan; and is in private practice in Hiroshima and Kobe, Japan. He is a Council Member of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, and an International Editor of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context.