"And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud's mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark."
— Halberstam, Jack [Judith] (b. 1961)
Date
July 5, 2014
Metaphor
"And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud's mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark."
Metaphor in Context
Claims about being triggered work off literalist notions of emotional pain and cast traumatic events as barely buried hurt that can easily resurface in relation to any kind of representation or association that resembles or even merely represents the theme of the original painful experience. And so, while in the past, we turned to Freud's mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material under layers of inscription, now we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark. Where once we saw traumatic recall as a set of enigmatic symptoms moving through the body, now people reduce the resurfacing of a painful memory to the catch all term of "trigger," imagining that emotional pain is somehow similar to a pulled muscle--as something that hurts whenever it is deployed, and as an injury that requires protection.
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Jack Halberstam, "You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma" Bully Bloggers (July 5, 2014). <Link to bullybloggers.wordpress.com>
Date of Entry
07/17/2014
