The “Voice” of Breakdown: On Facing the Unbearable Traumatic Experience in Psychoanalytic Work

Abstract

This article weaves together three major contributions to the theory of trauma and repetition compulsion: Freud's (1920/1955b) reformulation in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” of his metapsychological theory regarding the notion of trauma and the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences and traumatic dreams; Cathy Caruth's (1996) elaboration, based on a dramatic story in Freud's article, of “the voice that cries out, a voice that is released through the double wound”; and Winnicott's (1963/1986, 1965/1989a) unique ideas about the early unthinkable breakdown that has not yet been experienced and has to be relived and experienced in analysis.

The author explores the clinical implications of the intricate relation between knowing and not-knowing in facing trauma, which is simultaneously demanding and inaccessible, massively dissociated, and thus never and forever there. In particular, she relates to the profound difficulty of hearing the “voice” of breakdown that cries out from the belated “double wounding,” the critical importance of experiencing the unexperienced with the analyst; and the immensity of the terror and hope that is at the heart of reaching to the original unbearable traumatization in psychoanalytic work. Three detailed clinical illustrations from psychoanalytic writings and an autobiographical essay by Virginia Woolf are presented.

Keywords:

• “voice” of trauma or breakdown
• Beyond the Pleasure Principle, double wound
• early breakdown/madness
• catastrophic change, catastrophic chance
• patient–analyst interconnectedness, withness

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Corrigendum

Notes

¹ For simplicity's sake, throughout this article I will use “analyst” to refer both to analyst and therapist, unless I am describing a particular patient–therapist situation.

² Freud (1897/1966a) wrote to Fliess that “in the last few months, I no longer believe in my neurotica [theory of the neuroses]” (p. 259, emphasis in original). This was a sharp and enigmatic shift because the seduction theory—that neuroses are the consequence of a child's sexual abuse by an adult, usually the father—was so central to Freud's original formulations of hysteria in the two preceding years (1895/1955a, 1896/1962). A year earlier, on April 21, 1896, lecturing to the local Society for Psychiatry and Neurology on “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” Freud was still committed to the seduction theory before this select professional audience. The great Richard von Krafft-Ebing was presiding. Freud's lecture “was a lively, highly skillful forensic performance … [in an] effort to persuade his incredulous listeners that they must seek the origin of hysteria in the sexual abuse of children. All 18 of the cases he had treated, Freud noted, invited this conclusion.” But the lecture, he wrote irritably to Fliess a few days later, “had an icy reception from the donkeys and, on Krafft-Ebing's part, the odd judgment: ‘It sounds like a scientific fairy tale.’ And this, after one has shown them the solution of a thousands-years-old problem, a source of the Nile!” Well, Freud added rudely, “they can all, euphemistically expressed, go to hell.” He perceived the atmosphere around him to be chillier than ever, and was certain that his lecture made him an object of ostracism (Gay, 1988, p. 93, emphasis added). The lecture and the publication of “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896/1962) marked the end of this line of Freud's theory of the traumatic origins of hysteria.

³ In T. S. Eliot's (1942) words, it is “Never and always”: “Here the intersection of the timeless moment. … Never and always” (p. 215).

⁴ I am grateful to Dr. Max Hernandez for his generous permission to use this clinical example.

⁵ In my view, this conclusion of Guntrip's, who was later criticized for controlling his treatment primarily by structuring the overall therapeutic situation by means of a self-determined goal of lifting his amnesia (Glatzer & Evans, 1977; Markillie, 1996; Padel, 1996), is greatly supported by Ogden's (2014) article on Winnicott's “Fear of breakdown.” Ogden focuses on the breakdown of the mother–infant tie as the unthinkable agony that could not be experienced, and suggests that the driving force of the patient's need to find the source of his or her fear is the feeling that unexperienced critical parts of oneself are missing and unlived.

⁶ It is interesting to note that this kind of undifferentiated “becoming” may be seen in the Biblical description of God's relating to the crying out of the children of Israel from their slavery in Egypt: “and the children of Israel sighed from the labor, and they cried out, and their cry ascended to God from the labor. And God heard their cry, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God saw the children of Israel, and God knew” (Exodus 2:23–25). These verses contain a sequence of verbs, moving from “God heard their cry,” “God remembered His covenant,” “God saw the children of Israel,” to the last one, “God knew” (וידע אלוהים), which, unlike the other verbs, has no object following it (emphasis added). I understand this to mean that when a deep knowing of a traumatic state is reached, there is no longer a differentiation or divisibility between subject (God) and object (the children of Israel).

⁷ I wonder whether the name that Guttieres-Green chose for her patient—Ariane—reveals her own complex feelings over abandoning the patient. Ariane is a French translation of the Greek name Ariadne, a name mostly associated with a woman in love, ruthlessly abandoned. Ariadne, in Greek mythology, was the daughter of Minos, king of Crete, who fell in love with Theseus, the son of King Aegeus of Athens, who came to Crete to be sacrificed to the Minotaur in the labyrinth, but instead intended to kill it. Ariadne helped him by giving him a sword and a ball of thread, so that he could slay the Minotaur and find his way out of the labyrinth. She eloped with Theseus after he succeeded in killing the Minotaur, but Theseus abandoned her, sleeping, on the island of Naxos. Ariadne was desolate and wanted to die, but she was discovered by Dionysus, who married her, and they had two children. In the end, however, Ariadne dies a tragic death (in some myths, she was killed by Perseus at Argos, and in others, she hanged herself from a tree).

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Ofra Eshel

Ofra Eshel, Psy.D., is faculty member, and training and supervising analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; cofounder, former coordinator and faculty member of the Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Advanced Psychotherapists, the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute; cofounder, coordinator, and faculty member of the Israel Winnicott Center; founder of the track “Independent Psychoanalysis: Radical Breakthroughs” at the advanced studies of the Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University; visiting scholar at the Psychoanalytic Institute of North California, San Francisco; book review editor of Sihot [Dialogue], Israel Journal of Psychotherapy.