Adam Phillips’ mixed-genre collection Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature works to delineate the science of psychoanalysis from its pragmatics, suggesting we not use psychoanalysis to discover the answers to all life’s questions, but instead as a language through which to articulate the stories of who we are.
A trauma is that which is beyond, or resistant to psychic transformation. (53)
So, which is it—“beyond, or resistant to”—and where’s the second comma after “or resistant to”? What can this sentence tell us about the possibilities and limitations of trauma and psychic transformation as Phillips imagines them?
If “trauma is that which is beyond . . . psychic transformation,” trauma’s otherworldliness or temporal advantage relieves it from resistance; trauma which is beyond needn’t engage psychic transformation at all, even when the sentence puts them in relationship like this, whereas “a trauma . . . which is . . . resistant to psychic transformation,” must resist. It’s not that it could if only it wanted or needed to, but that trauma imperatively and insistently resists, that its reason for being is to do just that. Choosing to believe that trauma is “resistant to” psychic transformation turns all the momentum of “beyond” back onto itself so that trauma is no longer this space out there at a distance from psychic transformation, but a force of attack right here, pushing through psychic transformation’s barricades. “Resistant to” circumscribes psychic transformation as finite space, but now its boundaries push toward a trauma that actively engages it. A trauma that is beyond is a much less hostile trauma than one that is resistant to.
Whether trauma is “beyond” or “resistant to” also determines the possibilities and limitations of “psychic transformation.” “Beyond” catapults “trauma” into other dimensions depending on the definition one applies. In one sense, “beyond” situates psychic transformation as finite space which is in relationship to another space, trauma. The limit or end of the space of psychic transformation does not extend to the trauma out there, a trauma ostensibly the least bit concerned with psychic transformation or with testing its boundaries, as a trauma “resistant to” must do. “Beyond” in this sense puts an indefinable space between psychic transformation and trauma. In another sense, “beyond” indicates a temporality in motion. It can mean “Of time: past, later than.” If trauma is “beyond” psychic transformation in time, then trauma takes place in the always-thereafter of psychic transformation. This sense of “beyond” puts a space in time between psychic transformation and trauma. A third sense of “beyond” implies a superlative attitude: trauma is greater than, exceeds, or is superior in degree to psychic transformation—yet again calling attention to their distance from one another. Finally, “beyond” could indicate an afterlife, as in a Great Beyond, “that which lies beyond one’s present life or experience,” trauma as the clarion call from a great distance.
However you look at it, “beyond” puts distance between trauma and psychic transformation while “resistant to” puts the two into hostile contact with one another. Choosing either phrase relegates “psychic transformation” to the predicate object (of a preposition) and to a rather passive entity on the one hand or a tireless combatant on the other. The sentence, on the surface of things, suggests nothing of the paradox that it sets up. One might skate right by and never notice that the sentence does not offer a simple choice between interchangeable or substitutable terms; rather, the choice it offers positions the reader into the space between trauma and psychic transformation and asks her to determine what relationship the two will have.
The weird comma in the middle of the sentence, just after “beyond" (beyond beyond?), is intriguing. It is as though the comma and the option of “or resistant to”—the only things standing between “beyond” and “psychic transformation”—impedes the trauma “beyond” from gaining immediate access to “psychic transformation.” The phrase “resistant to” has sentence-level access to “psychic transformation”—trauma on the front lines, directly engaging psychic transformation. I’d love to read this comma as an Evel Knievel ramp that “beyond” might use to go beyond the sentence, elevating trauma to its promised “beyond” so that it needn’t interact with “psychic transformation” at the street level because it has been lifted above the fray.
Is trauma the great beyond that we should all be seeking, past the confinement of psychic transformation? Is it a volatile force against which we muster the weapons of psychic transformation?
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“You never puzzle out a Phillips sentence; you reread because you were pleased the first time.” – From an Amazon.com book review
Well, the easy answer to your question about the comma is that it is British style. the more complex answer is found along the lines of how do we read this or translate it? Which is of course what you chart. I wonder how you read "resistant" in light of Kalyan's posting.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little concerned that your reading tends to take on trauma definitionally, as an entity, rather than as a limit (as it seems to me the sentence is doing, and thereby reworking trauma into something different from what we might have initially supposed). But you're right to turn your attention to the balance the sentence strikes on the fulcrum of beyond/resistant, and you do a nice job of proliferating the possible readings of each. I'm not sure how, finally, you can adjudicate that "A trauma that is beyond is a much less hostile trauma than one that is resistant to" because it's simply less in entfernung or de-distancing contact than the resistant one.
I'm stumped by your notion of a "predicate object". Do you mean predicate nominative? do you mean object of a preposition?
I love your postscript. I reread it several times.