Trauma, history and memory
Trauma, history and memory

Brexit as trauma narrative

In my previous post on Brexit I made reference to what Samuel Hynes has described as the ‘Myth of the (Great) War’.  This is the now widely accepted idea that one of the main legacies of the First World War was a lost, disillusioned and traumatised generation for whom all …

The Poetics of the Great War

Introduction: a war imagined In the introduction to his book on the First World War and English Culture Samuel Hynes briefly but succinctly summaries what he calls the Myth of the War: A brief sketch of that collective narrative of significance would go something like this: a generation of innocent …

History becomes myth

In a number of writings I have made reference to Samuel Hynes’ idea of the ‘Myth of the War’.[1] By this term he was referring to the way the events of the First World War (the Great War) have been reworked through art, literature, poetry, film, and by historical narratives …

In search of lost time

The concept of Nachträglichkeit is probably one of the most misunderstood of a long list of Freud’s misunderstood concepts, not helped by Strachey’s mistranslation of the German word as ‘deferred action’.  At the same time I would argue that it is probably one of Freud’s most radical ideas, and perhaps …

Freud’s trauma

In the end it all goes back to Freud.  Not that he invented the term ‘trauma,’ far from it.  In fact, it’s instructive to look at how Laplanche and Pontalis introduce the topic of trauma in their entry on the subject in The Language of Psychoanalysis: ‘Trauma’ is a term …

The Real of everyday life

It’s often tempting to think of the Real as something mysterious and esoteric; something that is transcendental or even, in some way, supernatural or occult.  However, I think this is to completely misrecognise the Real.  Or rather, although it’s actually very easy to misrecognise the Real, this is not because …

Trauma and the Real

In my post on Lacan’s concept of the Real I highlighted the fact that the Real can be seen as an effect of the Symbolic order as opposed to being ‘outside’ of it, which still seems to be a commonly held notion amongst many Lacanians.1 But how does this relate …

Restless ghosts: the psychopathology of Brexit (part 2):

Is Brexit  the manifestation of a right-wing populism?  Certainly, some of the key motivations that appear to stand behind Brexit, which include concerns about immigration, a desire to see Britain ‘great’ again, xenophobia (especially towards ‘Europeans’), a distrust of (liberal) political elites, social conservatism veering towards authoritarianism, and so on, …

The theatrics of war

The latest US-led air strike on Syria, purportedly as punishment for Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on the town of Douma last week, reminds me of Baudrillard’s short book of essays on the first Gulf War The Gulf War did not take place.1  The third essay, which bears the …