Trauma: A Descent Into Mystery

How Injuries Abruptly Expose Us to the Unknown (Vol. 4; Issue 18)

When severely injured in an automobile accident, informed of a terminal diagnosis,* sexually assaulted, or otherwise traumatized, individuals’ reactions differ. Subjective experience is unimaginably complex, and can only be studied from different perspectives. For example, from one viewpoint, these situations can be expected to create acute psychophysiological stress responses. The victims’ circulatory systems would become infused with norepinephrine and epinephrine from the adrenal medulla. These hormones, in turn, increase blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration; create gastrointestinal symptoms like nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea; and elicit other psychophysiological stress responses.

If exposed to prolonged stressors, like harassment at work, homelessness, or chronic pain, chronic maladaptive reactions like depression, anxiety, cognitive impairment, and heart disease develop (Chu et al, 2024). Chronic stress responses trigger a complex interplay of nervous, endocrine, and immune mechanisms. Scholars like Van Der Kolk (2014), with his wisely titled book, The Body Keeps the Score, elaborates upon these complicated mind-body reactions. In brief, your body enters a state of chronic nervous system overreaction.

On to yet another, more subjective angle:

The way we humans use language—with its remarkable limitations—offers a different and unique way to understand the impact of traumas like these. In pursuing this perspective, I rely primarily upon French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s (1988, 2008) ideas. Readers who have experienced serious trauma or, interestingly, those who practice meditation, ingest psychedelic substances, or otherwise venture into mystical states, should find the following concepts engaging. In brief, traumatized individuals suffer from excessive exposure to what Lacan calls the Real.

In fact, Lacan directly links the concept of the Real with anxiety resulting from exposure to trauma. Trauma lacks any capacity for symbolization or imagination—themes I explain below. These language-related ideas cannot “mediate” the trauma. Lacan (1988) writes of the Real as:

The essential object which isn't an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence. (p. 164).

Typical of French intellectuals, Lacan writes in an unnecessarily obscure manner. By “object” he means any traumatic experience. (But notice how even the word object is almost like the use of x or y in mathematical equations; it only stands for something). The examples I offered above qualify as such objects.

For Lacan, we humans perceive the world through three registers. The first one, easy to understand, is called the Symbolic. It consists of language, namely the words, sentences, paragraphs, and such that we use to describe our experiences; it includes stop signs, green lights, and those strange little pictures of deer appearing on yellow signs (which mean, presumably, watch out for deer crossing).

The Symbolic also includes the realm of “radical alterity,” which Lacan calls “the Other.” He uses the “alter” in “alterity” to mean alternate or other. His phrase brings to mind Hegel’s (1807/1977) reflections on the struggle intimacy requires. At the age of four or five, children realize they are interacting with others. Their prior sense of themselves as the center of the universe falls away, replaced by an acknowledgment, often painful, that they exist in a social context. If mature, they understand these others have needs, feelings, and thoughts different from theirs.

Once encountering them, the endless dance of interpersonal relating—with its adjustments, accommodations, and negotiations—begins. Hegel uses the phrase, “wrestling unto death” to describe what follows. In other words, relating to others in an ethical way requires constant adjustment. It is a dynamic process, always morphing over time, never static, and requiring constant communication.

The group of these “others” constitutes what Lacan calls the Big Other, which constitutes culture. Culture is essentially a collection of Big Other dictates: Get dressed before you leave the house, comb your hair, drive in your freeway lane, be nice, avoid engaging in fist-a-cuffs at work, and so on. The entirety of the legal system resides within the realm of the Symbolic.

But here’s the rub:

Much of our experience escapes our capacities to symbolize, describe, or put into language.

Consider a day in which you feel sad. You decide to tell your friend about it. Sadness is a complex emotion. You might feel a tightness in your chest when you feel sad, or perhaps you feel “on the edge of crying.” The types of words you might use to describe the feeling are finite; they will never completely capture your personal experience of sadness. There’s always a gap, a void, in communication.

A second significant realm, also limited, is call the Imaginary. Here is where dreams, nightmares, day dreams, fantasies (of the mind, of literature, of film) exist. Much like how Freud (1930/1993) (wrongly) thought successful psychoanalysis resulted in the relinquishing of infantile wishes, Lacan believed it should marginalize, if not eliminate, the imaginary. Only the symbolic can be effective in dislodging the types of fantasies that can haunt us like: Why wasn’t I more successful? Why did I lose my hair? Why can’t I afford a house? And so on, ad infinitum.

Theologists ranging from Catholics to Buddhists agree that much of human suffering results from the human capacity for imagination. We imagine an illness-free life only to feel shocked, for example, when we, or someone we love, develops a serious illness or dies in an automobile accident. But notice how fantasies also deliver joy. It makes life worth living. Much happiness comes from from, for example, thinking about an upcoming vacation, or a wedding, or a romantic date.

The painful examples of an illness or a lethal accident return us to the central concept for today, namely how trauma always involves venturing into realms of mystery, of the Real. Trigger warnings, in my view, keep the American public infantilized. That being noted, I want to prepare you readers for a scene I shall describe next. I observed it perhaps 20 years ago, and even thinking about writing about it makes me tighten up.

A friend and I were walking to a nearby restaurant when we heard a woman scream out across the street. The road was quite busy, with two lanes going each direction. I saw a dog dart across the street, heard the woman scream again, and then watched as the dog was run over by the immense tires of a Metro bus. The dog shrieked as its abdomen was cut open and its intestines spilled out onto the street. The bus driver pulled over, the dog owner rushed to look at her dog, and other onlookers gathered. It was an absolutely horrible scene filled with frightening sounds, gory scenes, and emotional pain.

No way exists, no matter how many paragraphs, pages, or books I could write, to completely describe the episode or to fully innumerate my experience of it, or my friend’s experience of it. The idea of death itself is often used to exemplify the Real. But this scene serves the same purpose. No one “understands” death. In like manner, that horrible moment in which that dog died (quickly at least) extends beyond the capacity of symbols or even the imagination to represent.

Lacan talked about the Real as lying outside of language or imagination. He also referred to it as “the impossible” because it cannot be imagined, symbolized, or accessed in any way. Its inaccessible nature renders it central to trauma. I hope and trust that, by this point, I’ve made the relationship between trauma and the mysterious evident. Let me end by offering another example from my practice years ago, and one which, per usual, is anonymized.

I once met with a man whose wife of 30 years had left him days before. He’d returned from work for city government as usual, only to find his wife standing by a large pile of boxes and suitcases. She told him she was leaving him, moving into an apartment in a neighboring town. According to this man, she’d never aired any significant complaints about their marriage. He asked her to consider marriage counseling, and she refused. For lack of a better word (and here the limitations of language emerge), he was dumbfounded. He spent most of the first few sessions weeping uncontrollably. He appeared to be in a state of psychophysiological shock. In a word, he’d encountered the Real—a situation he could neither fully describe nor had he ever imagined. (See Karbelnig [2018] for more ideas on trauma and language).

Lacan’s phrase, “the grimace of the real,” seems relevant (although itself necessarily incomplete) here. I am reminded of people who will obsess about actions that might have prevented a friend’s death in an accident. What if he’d left the restaurant later? What if she’d not jaywalked. What if he’d taken the train rather than driving? These common and normal questions represent ways people try to fill in the terrible gap left by any encounter with the Real.

And just in case those tiny hairs on the back of your head are still in place, imagine (pun intended) how the Real is always around us. Quantum physicists question the concept of the space-time continuum; astrophysicists tell us the universe contains as many as two trillion galaxies. These realms seem to not only challenge our abilities to symbolize or imagine, they might also represent areas extending beyond our cognitive capacities.

Furthermore, and in case these ideas cause a tingle up your spine, remember how inadequately you’d be able to speak of it. We’re always walking around a kind of bottomless pit, a chasm, a vast expanse of space. Every idea we think, every feeling we experience, every attitude we express contains emptiness. We human beings are, in many ways, marching around with blinders on, unable to comprehend the unthinkable or unimaginable areas of our experiences.

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*I repeat a dark joke from contemporary Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek: Life is a sexually-transmitted, terminal disease.

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References

Chu B, Marwaha K, Sanvictores T, et al. (2024). Physiological Stress Reactions. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK541120/

Evans, D. (1996). Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Freud, S. (1993). Civilization and its Discontents. Standard Edition, 21: 57-146. (Original work published in 1930).

Hegel, G.W.F. (1977). Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press. (Original work published in 1807).

Karbelnig, A. M. (2018). A perilous high wire act: framing psychoanalytic relationships with severely traumatized patients. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 87:3, 443-478.

Lacan, J. (1988). The Seminar, Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. S. Tomaselli. Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press.

Van Der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking Press.

Žižek, S. (2012). Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. New York, NY: Verso.