Found in Translation: Discussion of Galdi and Cohen
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FOUND IN TRANSLATION: DISCUSSION OF GALDI AND COHEN Robert Prince
Papers by Galdi and Cohen are appreciated and discussed. Trauma is seen as occurring in a culturally based matrix of meanings. Galdi and Cohen’s case material is discussed in terms of the cultural symmetry and contrast between patient and therapist. The assault of trauma on meaning through mechanisms of dissociation, alienation and psychic numbing is explored. Therapy is examined as the restoration of meaning through the creation of a relationship through the shared language of empathy.
KEY WORDS: trauma; culture; immigration; countertransference; empathy; dissociation; enactment; mutuality. DOI:10.1057/palgrave.ajp.3350004
It is a privilege to discuss these two rich, beautiful and courageous papers which explore the bi-directional relationship of culture and trauma. Both writers enter the worlds of their clients and in so doing expose themselves to them and to us. The aphorism about supervision applies here: “It could have been done differently but not better.” And, of course, the point is that it would have to be done differently. The price of entry into world of the people who have been pierced, that is, the Greek root of the word trauma, is to remain irreducibly oneself, uniquely stamping the interaction with one’s personal and cultural identity while simultaneously being changed by that interaction. These are papers about building bridges between worlds, personal and cultural. On first reading each of these papers, I found I had no idea of what to say: furthermore, the more upsetting details from the lives described going right over my head. This is the nitty-gritty of trauma. Confrontation with trauma, either as an acute shock or steadily over time, cumulatively as it has been called, in a wide register of magnitudes from the massive and Robert Prince, Ph.D., ABPP, is Faculty, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Address correspondence to Robert Prince, Ph.D., 48 Beverly Road, Great Neck, NY 11021; e-mail: [email protected]
FOUND IN TRANSLATION
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overwhelming to middle ranges such as loss to the fine-tuned such as punctuated ruptures of empathy, and confrontation with trauma—as survivor, as therapist, as audience—is inherently destabilizing, challenging everything that one knows about the world and viscerally feels to be true about oneself, first flooding and then leading to what Boulanger (2002) so aptly terms thoughtlessness. The experience of being (at least a triple entendre) thoughtless, without thoughts, desymbolized; inconsiderate, unempathic; and unable to think the unthinkable is the key to thinking about trauma and characterizes the relationships it leaves in its wake. One of the most important of these is the relationship to culture which I understand through the anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn’s (1949) metaphor: It is like water to a fish, the fish is not ever aware of it, but just try to take the fish. These are complex papers. Consider the fluid boundaries and narrative twists
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