Abstract
This paper seeks to provide a noetic analysis of emotional trauma. It highlights three essential features of trauma, as well as one non-essential feature, and attempts to make sense of them phenomenologically. The first essential feature of trauma that the paper considers is the disbelief that pervades traumatic experience. When traumatized, we cannot believe that the traumatic event has taken place. This is because we will, not for the event not to have happened—we cannot will something that is in the past—but to believe that it did not happen so as to shield ourselves from our painful emotional response to it. The second essential feature of trauma is our inability to distinctly categorially intuit the central state of affairs around which our trauma revolves. The traumatic situation is literally unthinkable by us, for it is incongruent with both our expectations regarding the subject of the trauma and our horizon of sense more generally. The third essential feature of trauma is the temporal disorientation that it brings about. Such disorientation arises from our prolonged and single-minded attention to an increasingly complex categorial object: the traumatic situation. Finally, the paper considers a non-essential feature of trauma, namely, how traumatic experience can motivate phenomenological and scientific reactions.
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Notes
For an account of trauma related to physical, social, and cultural violence, see Mensch (2009: 72–80).
In a very helpful account of affection, Elizabeth A. Behnke writes: “Affection is clearly a double-sided concept. … [A]ffectivity names the world’s power to sing out … a power of ‘interesting’ us and setting up affective lines of force that stream toward us from the affecting element and exert a certain pull. … On the other hand, Husserl also points out that we must be willing to be vulnerable, to undergo, to be moved. Thus just as saliences have varying degrees of affective power, so also the experiencer can vary in sensitivity. … But above and beyond one’s response on any particular occasion, there can be a sedimented general readiness not only to receive or to reject—to be open for the affective invitation or closed off from it—but also to be moved and go along with the movement, or to refuse to do so. Affectivity in the sense of the experiencer’s ability to be affected in this double way is thus a practical condition of possibility for the affective power of the non-I to come to fruition in an actual affective event” (Behnke 2008: 48).
I use the term ‘subject’ here to denote either a personal or impersonal subject. For instance, we may not be able to synthesize that someone we love was attacked, or that our house was destroyed in an earthquake.
Drummond also proposes the possibility that even the judgments made by theoretical scientists reflect a kind of evaluation: they do, after all, relate to matters deemed significant to the scientist. Still, Drummond does at least maintain the possibility of value-free experiences, which Hart here denies.
Unless the syntax of language is betraying the point that Marietta is making here, it seems that his evaluations are indeed grounded in cognition, even though that cognition might be quite indeterminate. After all, his awe is in regard to the majesty of the cathedral, and its buttresses are seen to be graceful.
I think that Drummond and Hart would split the difference with Marietta here, conceding that objectifying acts do not necessarily enjoy a temporal priority, but arguing that they do enjoy a logical priority.
It is clear that such acts need not follow objectifying acts temporally, though unclear how or why they would arise apart from some presentation, however indeterminate it might be.
I use this term in its Husserlian iteration to denote the categorial object that is given in intuition. See §2 of the “Introduction” to “Volume II of the German Edition” of the Logical Investigations, where Husserl famously claims: “Meanings inspired only by remote, confused, inauthentic intuitions—if by any intuitions at all—are not enough: we must go back to the ‘things themselves’ [die Sachen selbst]” (Husserl 2000, 1: 252).
In this respect, our experience of trauma can be described as totalizing, a term I borrow from Jeffrey Wilson.
In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husserl speaks to such embedding: “For example, if we have judged ‘S is p,’ we then can judge, while ‘nominalizing’ and thereby giving a new form, ‘That S is p is regrettable,’ ‘—has its reasons,’ and so forth” (Husserl 1978: 112). For an analogy to how I am conceiving of the increasingly complex object of trauma, see §42e–g for Husserl’s example of nature “as a substrate for determination” that can be articulated ongoingly into an increasingly complex categorial object (Husserl 1978: 115).
My thanks to Mike Kelly for drawing this quote from Shakespeare to my attention.
I extend my thanks to Liz Murray for the suggestion of including this feature of trauma in my phenomenology.
In “Willing and Acting in Husserl’s Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory,” Tom Nenon proposes that the lack of transparency we enjoy with regard to our own wills opens “up a space for a phenomenology of the unconscious that many have found lacking or considered impossible in a Husserlian framework” (Nenon 1990: 308). On such an account, I wonder if my disbelief in the traumatic event is what lead me to engage this paper topic—given in outline form and replete with title—when I had not been consciously working on it. In other words, was my unconscious mind working out what my conscious mind, because of my willful disbelief, was not permitted to address?
We can imagine any number of examples of this. For instance, suppose a scientist is given the conclusion of a study. He may provisionally accept that conclusion, intending to investigate the details of the study. Upon investigation, it is possible that he will find that the study’s sample was unacceptably low, or that its investigators accepted unconventional statistical models. In such cases, the scientist finds he must reject the conclusion of the study, for the evidence supporting that conclusion is supposed, not genuine.
We see here that for Husserl, our judgments are essentially intersubjective. When I establish them, I do so not only for myself, but also for others.
We see this sort of terminology in Ideas I, where Husserl discusses “the natural standpoint” and the “radical alteration” it undergoes when it is disconnected or bracketed in the “fundamental phenomenological outlook”. In such cases, he claims that our various “theses” about the world are “transvalue[d] … in a quite peculiar way,” for they are neither operative nor doubted (Husserl 1962: 98).
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Robert Sokolowski, John Drummond, and Mike Kelly for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. My thanks are also due to two anonymous reviewers from Human Studies whose remarks helped me to clarify the importance of disbelief for trauma and so how the phenomenological and scientific attitudes enable the distance necessary to begin recovering from trauma.
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Gusich, G. A Phenomenology of Emotional Trauma: Around and About the Things Themselves. Hum Stud 35, 505–518 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9247-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9247-8