scholarly journals THE UNSPEAKABLE: TRAUMA AFFECTED NARRATIVES

c i n d e r ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorinda Tang

This paper explores questions for writers who are depicting traumatised characters in their creative practice. As a literary trope, ‘the unspeakable’ has been relied on as a shorthand for traumatic experience and the ongoing affects of trauma. This paper asks whether the unspeakable is adequate to convey the lived experience of trauma, or does it minimise or sideline trauma? Does recourse to the notion of the unspeakable prevent misappropriation of stories or does it lead instead to other kinds of misrepresentation and marginalisation? How can writers, appreciating the complexities raised by the notion of unspeakability, still convey truth and inspire empathic readings when speaking about trauma?

2021 ◽  
pp. 153270862110199
Author(s):  
Pengfei Zhao

This autoethnographic writing documents how a family of Chinese descent spent their first 100 hours after the Atlanta Shooting on March 16, 2021, in which a White gunman killed eight people, including six Asian women. It bears witness to the rise of the anti-Asian racism in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic and offers a snapshot of the private life of a family of Asian descent in the dawn of the Stop Asian Hate Movement. Drawing on Korean American poet Cathy Park Hong’s term minor feelings, this essay explores how emotions, rooted in racialized lived experience and triggered by the mass shooting, evolved, shifted, and fueled the sentiments that gave rise to the Stop Asian Hate Movement. Compared with the more visible violence against Asians and Asian Americans displayed on social media, it interrogates the less visible traumatic experience that haunts Asian and Asian American communities.


1970 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Les Horvat

While the interdisciplinary field of memory studies is burgeoning, the relationship between creative practice, memory, and landscape, remains open to debate, especially when considered in terms of its validity as anthropological data for ethnographers and social scientists. This article calls for a new approach to landscape and memory that remains sensitive to the notion that photography is able to provide a relevant platform for the re-examination of lived experience. Landscape is positioned as a site for memory and forgetting, and as a cultural construct resonant with the fabric of who we are, who we have been in the past, and offering an indication of who we may be in the future. The importance of creative practice through its many forms is suggested as a well-credentialed means of interpreting lived experience, leading to the proposition that photography has an important role to play in furthering our understanding of cultural history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Austin Kigunda Muriithi

This paper presents outcomes of a phenomenological study conducted to explore the lived experience of refugee musicians. Purposive and snowball sampling methods were used to identify six musicians who performed in the cities of Phoenix and Tucson and had been involved in music prior to entering the United States. The primary data gathering method was structured and unstructured interviews, but observations were made for the musicians who performed in public events during the study period. Audio and video recordings were made and photographs taken during these performances. Study outcomes show that the musicians have persisted in music performance as their primary method of healing trauma and negative emotions. Traumatic experience resulted in their fleeing from their homes and seeking refuge in other countries. After being resettled in the United States, they continue to suffer from the experience of loss, need to adapt and change, and struggle with trauma and negative emotions. Music is their method of healing trauma and facilitating integration. Music produces healing through 1) like a painkiller, enabling them to forget problems that result in distress, 2) being their means to communicate a message of hope, and 3) enabling integration, thus reducing isolation and loneliness.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 74
Author(s):  
Norhidayah Daud ◽  
Faizah Abd Ghani

Stressful early life experiences may cause traumatic experience across the lifespan. The aim of this study was to explore a CSA female victim’s lived-experience. Interviews were conducted with this 13-year-old girl, N, using a case study approach. N was still a young child (seven years old) when her uncle started to rape her, and when she was 10 years old, her father raped her. Since her childhood, she has experienced complex and widespread consequences such as vaginal and abdominal pain, shivering, sleeping problems, digestive problems, back problems, emotional and cognitive problems such as she was thinking to commit suicide, scared that her uncle and father will come to her, dissociation, study problems and isolation. N’s situation, might reflect similar problems in other female CSA victims.


Author(s):  
Peter Capretto

Trauma theorists have thoroughly named the impossibility of adequately witnessing to the traumatic experience of others. Yet the demand of trauma researchers to study and advocate on behalf of survivors leaves them in a double bind, wherein lowering the ethical standards of their social relation appears not only tempting, but necessary. Through examinations of Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of the psychic economy of trauma and Heidegger’s phenomenological critique of the concept of lived experience, this chapter argues that trauma theorists in philosophy and religion must be attentive to the fetishization of the traumatic lived experience of others, specifically as a libidinal symptom of our inevitable failure to satisfy the impossible demands of witnessing. This more quotidian attention to our psychic motivation supplements the transcendent task of conceptually understanding the psychic exteriority of others in trauma, thereby elevating the ethical standards the continental philosophy of religion sets for social research into trauma.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonia Saunokonoko ◽  
Michelle Mars ◽  
Werner Sattmann-Frese

Abstract Background: It is known that complex traumatic experience contributes to the emergence of bulimia nervosa (BN). Yet cognitive behavioural therapy, with or without medication, remains the western medical model’s treatment of choice, regardless of its poor long-term outcomes. Incidence of BN is rising, whilst treatment success eludes most sufferers. This research set out to dig deep into the lived experience of BN in order to uncover new clues linking BN’s aetiology to treatment options; and the research argues for the adoption of trauma-informed protocols for BN, as these fit more effectively with causation. Taking the previously under-researched, but known-to-be significant father-daughter relationship as its starting point, the research reveals a raft of new findings pointing to the pervasive consequences of subtle attachment trauma in this relationship. In light of this, the research informs a clear recommendation for a trauma-informed treatment approach and provides hope for those living with the condition. Methods: A hermeneutic phenomenological, detail-rich study of women in recovery from BN was carried out. A qualitative study was considered to be in sufficient contrast to existing research approaches as to offer up the greatest possibility of new insights into BN. Results: Subtle attachment failures, present in the father-daughter relationship, strongly contribute to complex traumatic experience and are instrumental in the development of BN. Many of these attachment failures lack the overtly dramatic nature of abuses such as physical violence, yet create powerful pre-conditions for the development of bulimic symptomatology. They are rooted in safety-seeking and survival aspects of the attachment bond, causing confusion in aspects of self-worth and anxiety about belonging. The resulting uncertain search for secure nurturing is directly reflected in the push-pull dynamic of the binge/compensation cycle of BN. Conclusions: BN arises in response to complex traumatic experience as a survival mechanism aimed at ensuring psychological and physical protection. Complex traumatic experience is, however, a multi-faceted concept in which subtle breaks in father-daughter attachment play a pivotal role. Therefore, adopting a staged, multi-modal complex trauma treatment model, aimed at building safety, agency and relationship skills for those seeking help, may offer hope for more successful treatment outcomes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (16) ◽  
pp. 104-129
Author(s):  
Mirian Pino

The literature of the children of forced disappeared victims, including that of Raquel Robles and Josefina Giglio, who went through the traumatic experience of the last Argentine civic-military ecclesial business dictatorship in 1976, has been the subject of multiple approaches by vernacular critics (Reati, Domínguez, Basile), or foreign (García Díaz, Bolte, Gatti, et al). In this study, I name the group as lowercase in order to displace the institutional character that, although important, can reduce the perspective that I am trying to display. This perspective focuses on questioning what the writing of children of the disappeared contributes in terms of complexity to literary studies within the framework of memory-literature articulation. Thus, I notice an accumulation of writings, whether in the multiple arc of narrative or poetry, where the assumption of the voice that enunciates, in some cases, works the experience in the first person from styles already registered in literature, although the experiences of the authors enhance writings that are difficult to place in literary trends. As if literature were to make visible the very tension that its politicity implies from the narrative voices with one foot in the lived experience and the other in the creative laboratory; It is also necessary to point out that this experience places state politics as the central node since it reconfigured the life not only of the authors but of all society, in this case Argentina. In the selected novels we are faced with what Jacques Rancière (2015, 2011) understands as a principle of action, from which neither literature nor readers can be far from a new ethos. From this it is possible to connect with certain experiences that emerge in this case from both novels and that affect our perception of reality and history. Argentine literature, born in the very bosom of the nation-state, is not the same after the sons once they intervened in the street in the second half of the 90s of the last century to demand justice, they speak in the new millennium and write experiences that affect us all, and that reshape the ways of thinking politics, literature and history.


2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 224-238
Author(s):  
Tony Williams

Abstract Creative writing happens in and alongside the writer’s everyday life, but little attention has been paid to the relationship between the two and the contribution made by everyday activities in enabling and shaping creative practice. The work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold supports the argument that creative writing research must consider the bodily lived experience of the writer in order fully to understand and develop creative practice. Dog-walking is one activity which shapes my own creative practice, both by its influence on my social and cultural identity and by providing a time and space for specific acts instrumental to the writing process to occur. The complex socio-cultural context of rural dog-walking may be examined both through critical reflection and creative work. The use of dog-walking for reflection and unconscious creative thought is considered in relation to Romantic models of writing and walking through landscape. While dog-walking is a specific activity with its own peculiarities, the study provides a case study for creative writers to use in developing their own practice in relation to other everyday activities from running and swimming to shopping, gardening and washing up.


2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 259-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eelco Olde ◽  
Rolf J. Kleber ◽  
Onno van der Hart ◽  
Victor J.M. Pop

Childbirth has been identified as a possible traumatic experience, leading to traumatic stress responses and even to the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The current study investigated the psychometric properties of the Dutch version of the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) in a group of women who recently gave birth (N = 435). In addition, a comparison was made between the original IES and the IES-R. The scale showed high internal consistency (α = 0.88). Using confirmatory factor analysis no support was found for a three-factor structure of an intrusion, an avoidance, and a hyperarousal factor. Goodness of fit was only reasonable, even after fitting one intrusion item on the hyperarousal scale. The IES-R correlated significantly with scores on depression and anxiety self-rating scales, as well as with scores on a self-rating scale of posttraumatic stress disorder. Although the IES-R can be used for studying posttraumatic stress reactions in women who recently gave birth, the original IES proved to be a better instrument compared to the IES-R. It is concluded that adding the hyperarousal scale to the IES-R did not make the scale stronger.


1996 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-85
Author(s):  
Terri Gullickson ◽  
Pamela Ramser
Keyword(s):  

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