Routledge Bearing Witness to the Witness: A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Four Modes of Traumatic Testimony (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)

Product Description Bearing Witness to the Witness examines the different methods of testimony given by trauma victims and the ways in which these can enrich or undermine the ability of the reader to witness them. Years of listening to both direct and indirect testimonies on trauma has lead Dana Amir to identify four modes of witnessing trauma: the "metaphoric mode", the "metonymic mode," the "excessive mode" and the "Muselmann mode." In doing so, the author demonstrates the importance of testimony in understanding the nature of trauma, and therefore how to respond to trauma more adequately in a clinical psychoanalytic setting. To follow these four modes of interaction with the traumatic memory, the various chapters of the book present a close reading of three genres of traumatic witnessing: literary accounts by Holocaust survivors, memoirs (located between autobiographic recollection and fiction) and "raw" testimonies taken from Holocaust survivors. Since every traumatic testimonial narrative contains a combination of all four modes with various shifts between them, it is of crucial importance to identify the singular combination of modes that characterizes each traumatic narrative, focusing on the specific areas within which a shift occurs from one mode to another. Such a focus is extremely important, as illustrated and analyzed throughout this book, to the rehabilitation of the psychic metabolic system which conditions the digestion of traumatic materials, allowing a metaphoric working through of traumatic zones that were so far only accessible to repetition and evacuation. Bearing Witness to the Witness will appeal to trauma researchers of all research areas, including psychologists, psychoanalysts, literary scholars as well as philosophers of language and philosophers of the mind. The book will also be of interest and relevance to clinical psychologists, psychoanalytic candidates and graduate students in literary theory and criticism. Review "Taking Dana Amir’s approach as a model, a new line of inquiry, that of reconstructing the mental processes that led to the phenomena observed in the testimonies, will become evident, leading to a much deeper understanding of the experience of survival and of its aftermath. Her book is written in a prose that is almost poetry and in a language that is both strong as well as daring and imaginative."-Professor Dori Laub, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, USA About the Author Dana Amir is Faculty member at Haifa University, a clinical psychologist, training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society, poetess and literature researcher. She is the author of six poetry books and two psychoanalytic books, and the winner of many national as well as four distinguished international prizes. Her papers have been published in many journals and presented in professional conferences all over the world.