Harald Weilnböck

The concept of psycho-trauma has gained widespread currency in poststructuralist literary theory. Yet what might be sign of hope for a more interdisciplinary approach to psycho-trauma on closer inspection turns out to be ambiguous, according Harald Weilnböck. Literary theory, he writes, often distorts what psycho-trauma means in clinical terms and, while gaining interdisciplinary cachet, repeats patterns of self-protection and transference. In the third and final instalment of this long essay, the author draws some troubling conclusions from Dr Goodheart’s excusrsus into poststructuralist trauma theory. Could it be that the poststructuralist interest in ensuring that “the trauma remains inaccessible to memory” is affiliated to institutional structures of power, control, and exclusion?

The concept of psycho-trauma has gained widespread currency in literary theory in recent years. Yet what might be sign of hope for a more interdisciplinary approach to psycho-trauma on closer inspection turns out to be ambiguous, according Harald Weilnböck. Literary theory, he writes, often distorts what psycho-trauma means in clinical terms and, while gaining interdisciplinary cachet, repeats patterns of self-protection and transference. In part two of this long essay, the fictional Dr Goodheart is confronted with an example of “trauma-therapy bashing” that makes him suspect that the humanities’ take on trauma is actually more than just innocuous nonsense: perhaps it’s even harmful.

The concept of psycho-trauma has gained widespread currency in literary theory in recent years. Yet what might be sign of hope for a more interdisciplinary approach to psycho-trauma on closer inspection turns out to be ambiguous, according Harald Weilnböck. Literary theory, he writes, often distorts what psycho-trauma means in clinical terms and, while gaining interdisciplinary cachet, repeats patterns of self-protection and transference. In the first instalment of this long and thought-provoking essay, the fictional Dr Goodheart puzzles over Manfred Weinberg’s assertion that “trauma must remain inaccessible to memory”. Such statements contradict Dr Goodheart’s clinical experience that enabling patients to access their memory is essential to successful therapy. Reading Elisabeth Bronfen’s essay on Hitchcock’s Marnie, Dr Goodheart’s consternation grows. Bronfen, he suspects, romanticises psycho-trauma in order to provoke the given gender order and, in linking trauma with pleasure, implicitly licences the acting out of destructive patterns of interaction.