Post-Traumatic Repetition Compulsion
Since the 1990s, scholars have explored trauma’s relation to narrative and imagery, in many cases taking their cue from psychiatric and psychoanalytic traditions from around the turn of the 20th century.
We argue that early work on the repetitive nature of traumatic “neuroses,” when approached critically and supplemented with recent insights from the humanities, can help to illuminate the uses of reenactment in the documentary films discussed below. Particularly influential on recent debates about trauma has been the work of Pierre Janet, a physician at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, who distinguished what he called narrative memory from traumatic memory. The former denoted a memory of an experience that, having been integrated into available cognitive structures and thus voluntarily accessible, could be recounted coherently in words. By contrast, traumatic memory, as conceived by Janet, was really an inherent contradiction. It referred to the indelible imprints of unprecedented experiences so frightening that they could not be integrated within existing mental structures. Janet’s traumatic memory was dissociated from conscious awareness and consequently remained unavailable for narrative meaning-making. Typically, the recalling of such experiences was triggered by situations that were somehow analogous to the distressing events at their source so that the patient would mentally relive or behaviorally reproduce the trauma (van der Kolk and van der Hart, 1991, p. 163).As Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart explain, Sigmund Freud often failed to sufficiently recognize his debt to the work at Salpetriere, which he had visited as a student in 1885. In close alignment with Janet, Freud intuited that “the crucial factor that determines the repetition of trauma is the presence of mute, unsymbolized, and unintegrated experiences” (van der Kolk and van der Hart, 1991, p.
167). Freud came to regard this unassimilated psychic material in terms of repression, an ambivalent notion that in certain cases was conceptualized as akin to what Janet described as involuntary dissociation, while in others was read as an active process that pushed away forbidden desires and primitive instincts (van der Kolk and van der Hart, 1991). In any case, Freud suggested that it was precisely the unprocessed and inaccessible nature of trauma that determined patients’ repetition compulsion, which manifested itself in a tendency to belatedly relive, repeat, or reenact—in nightmares, hallucinations, and neurotic behavior—the horrors they had suffered.But Freud’s interpretation of these traumatic repetitions is not unequivocal, as evinced by his seminal essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In a famous passage, Freud describes his eighteen-month-old grandson’s game of flinging and retrieving a toy while uttering sounds approximating the words fort (away) and da (there). Freud hypothesizes that the game was the boy’s attempt to gain mastery over the painful experience of having his mother leave him to go out for hours at a time. Yet the analysis grows more complex when Freud compares the game’s dynamics to the repetition compulsion suffered by victims of trauma in combat, a compulsion that, he implies, serves both as an uncontrolled reenactment of distressing experiences and as a neurotic attempt to achieve psychic control over them.
As the philosopher of history Dominick LaCapra underscores, the contradiction of the post-traumatic repetition compulsion, then, is that it functions both as an instance of acting out in which the traumatic past “is repeated as if it were fully enacted, fully literalized” (2001, p. 148) and as part of a process of “working through,” that is, as an attempt to cognitively master a disturbing personal or (as LaCapra adds) historical event (p. 143). The repetitive reenactment of traumatic experiences is thus traumatizing in itself—as it is involuntary, visceral, and direct, often throwing the patient back into a moment of overwhelming pain or fright—yet is simultaneously oriented toward integrating the experience into one’s conceptions of meaning and time, into what Janet called narrative memory.1
The ambiguous status of the repetition compulsion, as involved in the nonbinary processes of acting out and working through (LaCapra, 2001, p.
63), is important to our discussion of reenactment in historical documentary film. In the cases discussed here, the reenactment of atrocious historical episodes is employed to question the possibility of cognitive mastery over the past, an ideal which is securely anchored in a documentary tradition that emphasizes literalness and truthfulness. To be clear, we do not approach our case-study documentaries as instances of involuntary traumatic repetition by directors or subjects. Rather, we treat the cinematic use of reenactment as a deliberate strategy for exploring how one might make sense of events that, in their horror, seem to elude yet demand understanding. In this respect, this chapter follows Ernst van Alphen, whose “Playing the Holocaust” (2001) discusses several artworks that consciously mobilize play and drama to cultivate new approaches to the history of the Holocaust. Van Alphen proposes that these works—ranging from David Levinthal’s staged photography to Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO concentration camp set—eschew the widespread imperative to cognitively grasp Holocaust history through education and remembrance. He stresses that one should not regard these works as mere reflections of individual artists’ psychic realities. Rather, they solicit from their audience “a production of knowledge that is first of all affective instead of cognitive” (van Alphen, 2001, p. 77). Although they do not deny the importance of historical accuracy, these artworks remind us that confrontation with a traumatic past need not, and should not, be limited to a cerebral understanding of the events.