notes on a class on trauma

Jump to Comments

this semester i taught a class on trauma theory. i had a small group of eight students, four men and four women. from the first, the class was tremendously challenging. i must premise this by saying that i was coming from a difficult personal space. i had not taught anything the previous semester because numbing, paralyzing exhaustion had kept me nailed to the couch for months — all summer, all fall. in addition to that, in september i started seeing a new therapist and the intensity of the work has been draining me dry. therapy has proven not only incredibly exhausting for my already exhausted body (among other things, it’s totally altered my sleep cycle), but also mentally, intellectually, and psychologically disruptive. it has thrown me — hard — into a powerful psychic eddy. i’m not complaining. i consider myself lucky. everyone should be offered the opportunity to do deep work with someone who is profoundly competent and engaged. all i’m saying is that teaching this class was going to be demanding on me in a way in which no class has ever been demanding on me — even before the class started.

i think i underestimated the impact of the topic on me. when i prepared for the class in the summer i felt nothing special. i read the books with great passion and interest but without more emotional involvement than i expected and could comfortably handle. it’s one thing, though, to read these books in isolation, and another to share them with a classroom of young people. this story is about a class on trauma that turned out to be a semester-long, semi-controlled reenactment of traumatic and post-traumatic dynamics both for the students and for myself, albeit in different ways (shoshana felman describes a similar pedagogical experience in her book testimony).

i was really excited about this class, but the students immediately dampened my enthusiasm. after our first session, a sizeable number of students disappeared. those who remained proved stubbornly determined to misunderstand the texts. class discussions were like pulling teeth, not because, as often happens, the students were reluctant to talk, but because they talked too much. in fact, they talked about everything except what was in the texts we were reading. words and lines reminded them of other things, and soon the whole class was engaged in a full-out chat about a topic that was only marginally related and not infrequently entirely unrelated to the text we were discussing. even when the conversation was about the text, the students seemed unable to get, and engage with, the text’s point. there was a lot of personal sharing, little anecdotes the text had called to mind but were not pertinent, interesting, or deep. the students talked on top of each other. the stories they told suggested other stories. if i had not intervened, they would have chatted away the whole class.

i know because i tried. at first i would steer them back to the text, only to find myself having to do it again a few minutes later. i tried a different approach and let them talk themselves out, without intervening (i had nothing to say). i thought, they’ll come back. but they didn’t. unlike in any other class i taught, the students poignantly ignored my presence and talked among themselves. since we were arranged in a circle i could not imagine that they weren’t actually noticing me and my frustration. yet that’s exactly the way it looked. i went back to reeling them in, over and over, all to unsatisfactory results.

halfway through the semester i decided to change approach yet again and deliver straight lectures, something that is quite alien to my teaching style. i was worried that the students seemed to be learning nothing. i felt a professional responsibility to make sure they got some good value out of the class. the first text with which i practiced my new approach was freud’s the aetiology of hysteria. this is early freud and it contains theories that freud later revised. i chose it because freud gave these lectures when he was freshly enthusiastic about the realization that listening to patients was a better, more fruitful approach to healing them than, say, prodding them after hypnotizing them, as his teacher charcot did. that patients need to be listened to and deeply engaged with has always seemed to me one of the greatest contributions of psychoanalysis to civilization. also, freud wrote the aetiology of hysteria before rejecting his groundbreaking seduction theory, i.e. the belief that a staggering number of children endure sexual abuse and that it is these early experiences that lead to the development of neurotic and psychotic symptoms, and replacing it with his elaborate theory about incest fantasies. freud’s writings from the time when he still fully believed his patients’, in particular his female patients’, stories are rather moving to me.

so i lectured. i didn’t leave room for discussion except for focused questions which i addressed directly, without encouraging the whole class to participate in the finding of the answer, as i generally do. later, the students told me that the class became most interesting when we started looking at trauma theory proper. and, true, until then we had covered historical trauma through testimonies, fiction, poetry, and essays, but had not yet done the nuts and bolt of trauma theory. it is possible that immersion in various theoretical analyses of the phenomenology of trauma focused the class. it is possible that my taking the class in hand, corralling it into a more rigid, less permissive structure did it. or it is possible that something matured in the students.

when things were still all scattered and unfocused i had turned to a friend to discuss my pedagogical frustration. she asked me whether it was possible that the students were unconsciously rejecting my request that they confront the reality of trauma. i said no, i didn’t think so. the texts we were doing were not particularly traumatic; in fact, most of them dealt with historical circumstances that the students, because of their background, could not easily identify with. now, though, i question this. the students’ pointed refusal to take my presence into account and their noticeable reaction to my taking the class in hand suggest to me that they might have mounted a challenge of sorts for me. during the whole time (more than a month) in which they pretty much refused to discuss the topics assigned and developed unrelated side-conversations instead, i refused to get involved in the distraction. i didn’t participate. i stayed focused. i insisted on returning to the text even though the students clearly didn’t want to. on one particular occasion, the students vociferously expressed their intense dislike for a poetry collection we were reading. i had a distinct feeling of being ganged up against. i tried very hard not to become defensive. whether i managed or not i do not know. but i was very firm about the value of the collection (which is uniformly considered a masterpiece). even though i was tempted to throw my arms up and say, okay, let’s give up on this book and move on to another, i held my ground and continued teaching it as though the students had not expressed such animosity towards it.

i really thought the students disliked me, but it turns out they felt very close to me. i genuinely had no idea. after the lectures on freud, when the class had recongealed and detours into banter had almost disappeared, a deep cohesion was born in class. the students started hanging out after class. they began to call me by my first name. a male student developed a quasi-transferential attachment. he clearly sought my affection: insisted on sitting next to me, pouted if i wasn’t paying attention to him, was shy if we were alone, etc.

since i was going through an intense transference reaction towards my own therapist, i was deeply aware of the nuances of this student’s feelings towards me, and particularly sensitive to my handling of them. i tried to be towards him the way i would have wanted another (my therapist?) to be towards me under the same circumstances.

the second half of the semester was deeply gratifying to me. the students worked hard and engaged seriously with the texts. they read carefully and came to class full of questions. they did non-required research and brought what they found to class. they clearly started behaving as if they owned the class. at the same time, they stopped ignoring me. i became the referential point of all class discussions.

i closed the semester with the only direct testimony to personal trauma in the course, a harrowing book-length narrative of incest and rape. at the time when the book was assigned i became sick and had to miss a couple of classes. i later learned that the students decided to meet to discuss the book on their own (not something that has happened to any of my classes before).

i left the last two weeks for free-writing exercises. i had noticed that the students were beginning to suffer from trauma fatigue and i wanted them to have a chance to work together through the pain to which they had been so relentlessly exposed before the semester came to an end and everyone scattered for the summer. on the suggestion of a friend and colleague from another university i used as my first writing exercise an entirely free collaborative effort based on the french surrealist technique exquisite corpse. the students could write anything they wanted. since the exercise lends itself, as one might expect, to surrealist outcomes, the poems were fun and funny. after a bit i proposed that we use the same technique but talk about things that had emerged in the course of the semester. the quality of the poems plummeted. the students became unimaginative and heavy in their choice of imagery and their creative voices. the poems contained immobilizing sadness. i asked them what had happened and they all said that they felt saddened by our last reading. we repeated these writing exercises for the remaining class sessions, and i assigned a similar collective exercise to be done as their final assignment for the class. i told the students they could do whatever they wanted, but they had to do it together. they consulted over a series of days and finally decided on stringing together a series of direct quotes from the texts we had read and answering them, some as themselves, in the first person, some as the perpetrator of the abuse, some as a fellow victim or survivor, some as a visual witness, some as a family member, etc.

the result is stunning. by interacting directly — publicly and in writing — with the “characters” of the course the students testify to the characters’ trauma. they take upon themselves the physical task of acknowledging these people’s pain, making it heard. in this way, they remove themselves from the passive, paralyzing, and traumatic role of the helpless observer and become activists and protagonists. at the same time, as the authors of the responses, they testify to their own discomfort. by voicing their distress in this communal space, they become each other’s witnesses and reach higher, dryer ground together.

what is most striking to me is the depth of understanding this writing shows. these students who at first seemed so refractory show such a nuanced understanding of the complexity of personal and collective trauma that i cannot but feel that the course was a success. we went through trauma together and emerged safely on the other side. i am confident that these eight people are stronger, better integrated, more attentive, more compassionate human beings for it. i know i am.

6 Comments

Filed under books, pain, sadness, teaching, the pain of others, therapy, trauma

Tags: academia, freud, psychoanalysis, trauma theory