So, back from France. Felt like I was never away. Straight back into work and straight back into avoiding my dissertation...
Interestingly, my first plane out of Geneva got struck by lightning and we had to go back to the airport. I was sitting in the aisle near one of the engines when there was a big blue flash and the guy behind me jumped out of his seat. I thought it looked like lightning or maybe that an engine had gone squiffy but then nothing happened and no one said anything so I just thought 'nah, couldn't have been'. The woman next to me was looking pretty freaked but I just kept on reading because the more I thought about that blue flash the more panicky I felt. Then ten minutes later the captain gets on the intercom and says, in his lovely calm Swiss German accent, "You may have noticed that we were hit by lightning a little while back and we've decided to divert back to Geneva just to make sure everything is ok etc etc". But what was quite funny is how calm everyone was. I think we were all just a bit confused and trying hard not to entertain thoughts of a fiery death with a bunch of strangers. I know thats what I was thinking. The turbulence was shocking as well so that didn't help. Nor did it help that I've recently developed a bit of neurosis around flying. I've been flying all about the place my whole life and never had a problem but recently I've begun to get panicky at take off. It always hits me as we start ascending that there is sweet f-a between me and a very far away ground. It only really lasts during take off, once we're flying I'm fine. Its almost like a vertigo, the way I feel when I'm up high somewhere and no barrier, no matter how thick or sturdy, is good enough for me. Anyway, all fine obviously. Except waiting around for the next flight. They gave us a 5 france voucher, which buys you bugger all. In my case, half a beer. So I bought make up in duty free, just for the shits and kicks.
Another oddity from my time in the land of the French was my reaction to a novel my mother lent me. Trauma by Patrick McGrath, obviously perfect for me as the main character is a psychiatrist working with Vietnam vets before PTSD was even thought of. The guys a bit of an emotional wreck himself, alchoholic and depressed mother, asshole brother, absent father, failed marriage etc. His take on combat trauma was straight out of the work of an American psychiatrist, Jonathan Shay, who works with veterans with chronic PTSD. He wrote a wonderful book Achilles in Vietnam, that I would recommend to anyone interested in combat related traumatic illness. However this book did strike a few chords with me and I got very distressed when I finished it. There were some things about the main character's past that I very much identified with and won;t go into on a public blog, but it was just weird how desolate I felt after reading it. It threw up a lot of problems I've been having with my dissertation. Obviuosly I have no way of identifying with combat PTSD but all the reading I've been doing on trauma and memory has been digging up nasty little problems that I thought I'd dealt with and obviously haven't....
The gist of my problem? How to put this without sounding like a complete self obsessed neurotic...What I'm looking at is how memory is used in a culture like ours is as a form of identity. We have come to see ourselves as defined by what we remember, and in the case of traumatic memeory, what we forget or repress/suppress/ignore. The goal is to have a coherent narrative of our lives, a storybook that describes who we are and how we came to be. The problem being that memory is not that simple. It isn't coherent, or even that tied to time and place. Ian Hacking has described the medicalization of memory as a 'rewriting of the soul', an attempt to take what is beyond medicine and science, the soul (however you understand that) and make it scientific, and that was done through the memory. Such that what could be argued to be culturally defined responses to stress are medicalized and pathologized and interventions are deemed necessary. From this we get illnesses like Dissociative Identity Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as well as the old school hysteria. The intervention consists of putting the traumatic memory(ies) into their alloted place and creating a narrative that generally ends up making a victim of the interventionee. I'll not go in to all the problems I have with this approach. Suffice it to say that what is said about memory and the way that it is seen as a medical problem and not a social one is close to me. A big upheaval that I had recently was a trauma of a sort. It wasn;t huge and it didn't physically invade me but it did destroy the life I'd lived up to that point. Everything I trusted and believed in, and importantly, the grounds that I'd built my sense of self upon were gone, very suddenly. With that went my memories, everything I remembered about my past, the story I told about myself in other words, contained this person and they had gone suddenly sour. I couldn't think about them as it hurt. At the same time, the thought of a life without this person was horrific. So I was stuck. I couldn't look back or forward and I was in pain. And I didn't know how to explain it, I couldn't find the words to describe what they had done and what it meant to me. Eventually I realized that those around me didn;t really care and they didn;t really want to know so I 'made my peace'. Supposedly. Now, getting to the point finally. Everything I described above are the classic symptoms of traumatic illnesses. First thing, I don;t think I'm traumatized, I know I'm not. What happened to me is tiny from the outside but it was a personal trauma, I suppose. A mini earthquake inside me I suppose you could say. Anyway, it made me see that I never made my peace I just pushed it under and every now and then it bubbles up in odd ways. Like breaking down because of a novel. or just suddenly crying and not knowing why etc etc. BUT! Another received wisdom of trauma is its contagiousness. Those who work with the traumatized often come to identify so closely that they begin to display signs of trauma themsleves. So am I actually needing to deal with something I thought I'd dealt with, or have I caught the 'trauma bug' as it were, from my work with the veterans, which didn;t go too well itself?
More importantly, have I made any sense, or has this just been a case of navel gazing par excellence? Am I just a bit of a neurotic? For those of you still reading, god bless you and I salute your patience and fortitude!
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5 commentaires:
Whoa, that's scary, your plane being struck by lightning. :s The most unnerving experience I've had with flying is when my plane made a sudden rollercoaster-esque dip due to turbulence. It wasn't a very big dip, but a woman sort of screamed, and me being something like 14 at the time was probably more prone to paranoia than I am now. Spent the rest of the flight with my hands clamped to the arm rest and eyes fixed on the inflight entertainment screen. Haha.
Hmmm. That's the thing with matters concerning the mind - our brains already have all the shit that they contain, and yet they continue to constantly take in all these influences and external stimuli that definitely have an effect on the shit that's already in it, and it all accumulates, and who knows exactly what's triggering what we're currently experiencing and how we perceive it. If that made any sense at all. >.>
I enjoyed reading what you said about how memory, identity, and the medicalisation of it all. Didn't come across this last year. Just as (if not more) likely to be because I didn't do the readings as because they weren't on the list. I don't think traumatic memories, no matter how small, ever truly go away.
Oh, could I ask what you meant by this sentence?
The intervention consists of putting the traumatic memory(ies) into their alloted place and creating a narrative that generally ends up making a victim of the interventionee.
Especially what "their alloted place" is.
(Gosh, what a geek I am!)
Hey hey, if you want some readings on the topic I can compile my own reading list just for you!! The whole lightning thing just seems so surreal now...
As to that sentence (it was a bit of gobbledegook!). When someone is diagnosed with a traumatic illness then its usually because they are unable to remember or deal with the traumatic memory. The received wisdom concerning memory, in the 'West' anyway, is that memories form a coherent contiuum within time and space and are stored in a part of the brain where they are easily recalled. Yet it is believed that traumatic memories are not 'recorded' and stored in the same way and there is a theory that they are even stored in another part of the brain. That is why they produce things like flashbacks and nightmares, which in turn are not considered memories as such. In the case of repressed memories (forgotten memories, usually linked to childhood abuse) what is forgotten is what causes the pathology. In both cases what the intervention, in the form of psychiatric care, consists of is either bringing forward the forgotten memory, or taking the pathogenic memory and putting it into a narrative of the past. Traumatic memories are lived in the present, when someone has a flashback they are not remembering what happened, they are re-living it. So the goal is to make it part of the past, put it in its proper place and make it a 'proper' memory. We in the 'west' feel that the way we know ourselves is through the narrative, the story, of our lives- through memory. So the appropriate place is in the right time/space of someones life story.
Does that make sense? did it answer the question? or do you have more now?!
Argh, having a plane get struck by lightning doesn't sound overly fun. I think I'd have the same reaction as you to a situation like that, think "Oh crap, I wonder if something bad happens? Hmm, maybe if I ignore it and read my book I won't have to do anything about it..."
The voice from behind me informs me that lightning isn't dangerous for a plane. I don't know, it doesn't seem all that safe to me!
Calm people bearing bad news are amusing. Funny how everyone on the plane was acting all calm... Crazy Europeans with their sense of propriety.
In terms of memory, I think I had a fairly similar experience to you (although not the same situation). It definitely calls up questions about our understanding of memory and shows how non-static memory truly is. If it wasn't then it wouldn't be possibly for memories to 'sour'; for something we've enjoyed remembering to suddenly become painful to think of.
What you've described is something that, I think, people go through to greater or lesser extents in their lives repeatedly. I'm as suspicious as you are about the medicalized definition of illness, there isn't a dividing line between personal 'traumas' (if that is the right word) and some kind of "serious" identity disorder, except I guess for severity and coping mechanisms.
Personally I don't really think that anyone deals all that well with their personal traumas, although that might just be indicative of the fact that I have the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone, and annoyingly there doesn't seem to be an instruction manual for doing so. All there really seems to be is awareness/confrontation/acceptance, and then the clearly very sensible step of burying it and ignoring it until it goes away.
So in my experience everyone (human) does the over-identifying with a book (or TV show or film or just a character or indeed a real person) or ends up weepy for no tangible reason etc thang. I don't think you sound neurotic at all!
Of course what you're saying about the congatiousness of trauma makes sense, but I think that that just plays upon your ability to empathise with people in general, and if you're a fairly empathetic person then you're probably more likely to be the kind of person who identifies with, and is upset by, such a book anyway...
I think you're wrong in your assertion that the people around you don't care and/or don't want to know though. Huggles.
Certainly this made sense! It was really interesting to read (have you been turned into a blog-convert already? gasp gasp!), and, you evil thing, you've got me wanting to do an MA in medical anthropology again when I thought I'd narrowed the choices down to anthropology of media, creative writing or librarianship. Dammit.
Struck by lightening! You were so luckey. Someone looking after everyone. How many went down in that air lightening disappearance ten days ago, over 250 people!
Come back Lyca! Anne and I miss you very much. I also mean to keep messaging you. Hope you're well.
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