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Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. x + 154 pp. $33.50; $14.95 paper.
Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. xiii + 230 pp. $35.00; $14.95 paper.
Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture 95. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. x + 2% pp. $54.95; $18.95 paper.
With the publication of three important new books on the psychoanalytic concept of trauma as it intersects with literature, literary theory, historiography, and contemporary culture, it is worth asking why, at this moment, trauma should attract such attention and become a pivotal subject connecting so many disciplines.1 Of course, looking at contemporary American culture and at the history of this century, one might well ask how trauma could not be a primary concern, and why it has taken so long to elaborate the three suggestions for traumatic theory put forward by Freud.
Freud's earliest idea, in Studies in Hysteria, concerned the dynamics of trauma, repression, and symptom formation. Freud held that an overpowering event, unacceptable to consciousness, can be forgotten and yet return in the form of somatic symptoms or compulsive, repetitive behaviors. This initial theory of trauma and symptom became problematic for Freud when he concluded that neurotic symptoms were more often the result of repressed drives and desires than of traumatic events. Freud returned to the theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a work which originated in his treatment of World War I combat veterans who suffered from repeated nightmares and other symptoms of their wartime experiences. Here, the traumatic event and its aftermath again became central to psychoanalysis, but again Freud shifted his emphasis from the event to what he considered a more comprehensive frame, in this case a biological urge toward equilibrium which he then theorized as the "death drive." Finally, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud attempted a theory of trauma that would account for the historical development of entire cultures. Especially valuable in this work is his elaboration of the concept of "latency," of how memory of a traumatic event can be lost over time but...