Commentary on Carola M. Kaplan's “Navigating Trauma in Joseph Conrad's Victory: A Voyage From Sigmund Freud to Philip M. Bromberg”

Abstract

This commentary adds a few additional sparks to Carola M. Kaplan's incandescent essay at the boundary of literary fiction and psychoanalysis, and attempts to place her already generous treatment of my work into a perspective that enriches her synthesis. Conceptually, I try to further develop our shared understanding of why the legacy of developmental trauma too relationally barren to allow cognitive symbolization and self-reflection, leads to an adult life shaped by a dissociated mental structure that channels the “best of intentions” toward tragically predestined defeat. But beyond our conceptually explicit link, and perhaps even more central, is that the history of my own attempt to “navigate trauma” at the interface of psychoanalysis and literature has become part of a deeper connection between Kaplan and me. I discuss this implicit link between us as representing the fuller meaning of intersubjectivity and the wonders of selfhood, otherness, and human relatedness. My overarching emphasis is that Professor Kaplan, meticulously respecting the boundary of what defines fiction in literature, has simultaneously demonstrated the permeability of the boundary between fiction and nonfiction in human relationships —showing that what is most human in human beings is in one way always nonfiction if it is experientially authentic.

Notes

¹Tony Bass (1993), in a creative and astute struggle with the same dilemma, proposed a temporary if not nutritionally fulfilling means of differentiating the two uses of the term enactment in published papers by identifying its clinical usage through capitalizing the first letter of the word, as in [E]nactment. This suggestion, is not unlike the effort to distinguish “massive trauma” from developmental trauma” by writing the former as “Big T” [T]rauma. It serves the concrete purpose but still leaves Tony and me with the deeper level of the struggle still haunting us.