Offering: January 7, 2023
Behavior as testimony to unspeakable things
Image description: A hand is holding a Tarot card, The High Priestess, by Pamela Colman Smith. In the image, a person is dressed in a blue cape and robe, the latter which appears to be made of water. She is seated in front of a curtain printed with pomegranates, wearing a cross pendant—not a crucifix—around her neck, and a crown made of three moons, two crescents and one full. She is holding a scroll that says TORA. On either side of her is a column, one black and one white with the letters B and J inscribed on them. At her feet is a crescent moon. Behind the curtain, there appears to be a body of water.
Spoiler alert & content warning: Scenes from seasons one & two of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, mention of sexual abuse
I’m watching Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. I’m late to the party, and I know it. I’m also late to the party of reading Judith Herman’s seminal book, Trauma and Recovery. But I’m glad I’m watching and reading them together because they’re dovetailing.
Judith Herman’s first task is to name that the serious study of psychological trauma has always coincided with a social movement. Movements for women’s rights or against war, for instance, have provided the social scaffolding necessary to reckon with what’s often found when trauma is truly interrogated; its roots tend to be inextricably linked with oppressive social structures.
Through his work with women who had symptoms of what was then called hysteria—a term overwhelmingly ascribed to women and named for its early associations with the uterus—Sigmund Freud discovered and claimed that hysteria was rooted in childhood sexual abuse. To implicate men and patriarchal society in the rampant psychological suffering of women and girls was a risk, and it was the truth. A truth which Freud later recanted (2015).
To assert the need for radical social change in the absence of adequate collective consciousness around the issue was in fact a risk. Not only was Freud’s reputation on the line, but also his privileged position as a man in a society that relied on the active subordination of women and the continued denial of that subordination, to survive.
According to Herman, Freud’s recanting of that statement coincided with the retreat of widespread public interest in the serious study of psychological trauma. An interest that would resurface again later, with the rise of what was then called “shell shock,” post-traumatic symptoms in men returning from combat in World War I. Rising public interest in pushing back against war culture would support a serious reckoning with the suffering of men in a way that it hadn’t been ready to push back on violence against women and girls.
From the start of Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, the emotional lives of women and girls are at the center. Viewers are immediately introduced to a diverse community of Neapolitan femmes who are coping with their circumstances in all kinds of ways. What has struck me from the start is the degree to which the personalities of the girls and women are so evidently shaped by the violence they endure at the hands of men—brothers, fathers, schoolmates, elders and the very structure of a patriarchal community.
Lila, one of the main characters who we meet as a young girl, is very tough from very early. At one point, her father throws her out a second story window, breaking her arm. She stands up and reflexively says to her concerned friend, “I’m not hurt,” which is not only an act of saving face, but of care taking. It is an image of the double-consciousness that many abused people know well.
The other main character, Elena, has a mother, who is raising several children without sufficient resources. Elena’s mother is understandably angry, and aims her anger at her daughter who’s privileged to have a life outside the home; she goes to school and even takes a summer vacation to the island of Ischia, which actually is quite idyllic, until teenaged Elena is sexually assaulted by a much older man.
And then there’s Lila’s mother, who copes with her husband’s brutality through collapse. Even though the love for her children feels more evident than it does with Elena’s mother, because passivity is how she survives, Lila’s mother is no more capable of protecting her daughter from violence.
All of these characters are examples of how—in cultures that are dependent on denial—trauma still speaks for itself, albeit coded inside of behavior. In her introduction to Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman writes that “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness,” and yet, these things “refuse to be buried.” They come as ghosts, she writes (2015).
In an environment that will not bear witness, the personality post-trauma is in a certain sense possessed. Saddled with the task of testifying to what one has endured—often through behavior and what became necessary to survive—life ceases to be on its own terms. And while it’s probably foolish to imagine that any of our lives are ever really anything but responsive, there is something particular about a life forged in response to violence.
What I expect Herman to say in the remainder of her book is that it doesn’t have to be that way, to the degree that a community is willing to share the burden of testimony and witness with its victims.