The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma

277 Pages·2007·1.18 MB·English

by  Annie Rogers

Also by Annie G. Rogers
A Shining Affliction: A Story of Harm
and Healing in Psychotherapy

To Ide B. O'Carroll, grä mo chroi; Mary Rogers, my sister; and
Meg Turner and Pierre Johannet, my guides
Contents
Introduction
Part One: JOAN OF ARC
Part Two: THE UNSAYABLE
Part Three: SURPRISING SOUNDS
Part Four: REPETITION
Part Five: TOWARD DESIRE
A Note to My Colleagues
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The wheels made music through the long morning. Sunshine, a hazy, lazy stream of
light, filtered into the train. The cars rocked from side to side. The moist air smelled
faintly of air freshener, and more convincingly of cigarettes and fried chicken. A small
black girl dropped a deck of cards in the aisle. They slipped and spilled under bags and
packed sandwiches, fell and slid over men's loafers and women's pumps. I gathered
them, crawling toward the child. She moved quickly, leaping from pile to pile. I was
nineteen years old, and this was a fine diversion, this slipping of cards, cascading of
expectations. Our eyes met and she started to laugh. I took it up and we giggled,
breaking the silence. Alesha was eight years old, traveling with her grandmother. We
played cards: war, hearts, war, hearts, and double solitaire. We ran through the cars the
length of the train—fourteen cars to the front. Then we ran four cars to the dining area,
and two cars beyond that to the caboose. When we returned, Alesha's grandmother
brought out iced tea from a cooler and thick ham and mustard sandwiches for all three
of us. All afternoon we played. We were taking a three-day journey from St. Louis to
New York City.
The funny thing was that Alesha didn't say much. In fact, she hardly spoke at all, only
things like “C'mon” or “Your turn now,” little hints about how to navigate the train and
her games with her. In the evening she and I stood out on a little “porch” behind the
caboose, the tracks trailing out behind us. Here the wind was wild, taking out long
strands from my braids, roughly tousling her short tight curls. Night gathered in the
houses and silos and barns and animals from the fields, pulled the horizon in tight,
tighter. We sang whatever songs came to mind; her Baptist church songs, my summer
camp songs, and a few Christmas carols we both knew filled the warm July night. Her
voice was unbroken, and I tuned my singing to her vocal range, leaving the highest
notes to her. Down came the blue bowl of sky, a colander studded with bits of light. Far
away and high up—the cosmos was peering in, listening.
Alesha told me that her parents had died in a car wreck, and that she was going to
New York to live with her auntie, whom she'd never met. I didn't have any idea why she
told me this, unless it's that children, too, find in a stranger on a journey someone to
whom it's possible to speak. I told her my father died when I was a child, and then we
didn't say anything. When we began to sing again, all of our songs sounded like laments,
even the joyful ones, even the funny camp songs.
I fell asleep beside Alesha and traveled through the Arctic in a small canoe that
rocked in the water. It was light all day and all night and you couldn't tell time because
time had stopped—as it does in a dream, as it does in trauma, and always in madness.
From the shore, Eskimos called out in a tongue I didn't know. When I went ashore, one
of the women was serving hot, strong tea. I didn't know the language and couldn't even
thank her. A small raccoon, drinking tea, asked in English, “Where are we going?”
“Out, out into the cosmos,” I answered.
I wakened to the clanking of the wheels. Alesha's grandmother was reading an old
National Geographic, an ancient one, circa 1966. Beside her sat Alesha and beside Alesha
a stuffed raccoon (I must have noticed it) and beside the raccoon a grape Nehi soda,
unopened and cold—you could tell by the amount of sweat on the aluminum. Alesha's
grandmother handed me the can and a straw and went back to reading. In forty-eight
hours we were in New York City. I never saw them again.
I wasn't a child therapist when I met Alesha. I was emerging from a second mental
breakdown and hospitalization, traveling with the wary permission of my mother and
my doctors. That meeting with Alesha made a connection to another human being that
was beyond my voices and visions. Perhaps because she didn't talk much, Alesha had a
lot to “say” to me; I had a feeling about her, even before she told me her parents had
died and she was moving to meet her auntie now. In some sense we were both living
between worlds. We were each going “out, out into the cosmos,” she to an unknown
relative and I to look at an art school and see friends in New York. We each carried our
private anguish on that train, and yet those few hours together changed something, if
only lightly, slightly, also memorably, at least for me.
I later became a child therapist, a college professor, and a writer. I became, in short,
what I was becoming already: someone who liked to draw and paint, someone for
whom time could hold still in the presence of voices, someone who heard certain stories
of suffering with a sense of awe for the child speaking.
This book grows out of twenty years of treating children and follows my development as
a psychotherapist. Some of the children I met eventually spoke directly about a story of
suffering, as Alesha did, and yet their stories remained beyond their words. Most of the
children I saw did not speak plainly to me, and many had to find another avenue,
another expression, to discover their way into speech. Almost from the beginning I
heard something more puzzling in their words— an unconscious plea or signal for help,
as if these children were crying out urgently to be heard. And it seemed to me that this
cry was muted: difficult or impossible for adults to discern.
In my first ten years as a psychotherapist I saw children who had been abandoned,
who had been physically and sexually abused; these were children who were nearly
unreachable, children who were trying to enter time and were called “developmentally
delayed.” I saw boys as well as girls, and my earliest psychoanalytic work was with
young boys. I remember an eleven-year-old who burned down a barn with horses in it, a
boy who told outrageous lies, to convey the horror of his sexual abuse. There was
another little boy who ran away twenty-two times before the age of eight—and the first
of these times he was just three—to escape being raped by an uncle who was a priest. At
nine this child couldn't stop running. Sometimes we went outside so that he could run
the bases of an invisible diamond, yelling “Home run, home run!” But was he running
toward home or away from it? The stories I tell in this book are not unique to girls, and
yet I focus on girls.
In my meetings with both boys and girls, I tried many ways of listening and
responding. I began working with teenagers, trying to give them a means of expression,
a voice, through the creative process of making things. I also treated children and
adolescents in individual psychotherapy, using a psychoanalytic approach that was
fairly eclectic and included a focus on trauma. I learned about an unspeakable and
lasting terror through the details of my relationship with each of my young patients.
Gradually, finding a limit in this relational approach, I turned to something new—a
particular form of psychoanalysis and a structure for listening created by the French
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Lacan was a brilliant psychoanalyst who lived in Paris from 1901 to 1981, but few
people in America, including psychoanalysts, understand his work. He is far better
known in Europe and South America. This is due, in part, to the fact that he draws from
French philosophical and cultural traditions, as well as surrealist art, the classics of
antiquity, and linguistics—and refers to all of these ideas as though his listener is also
familiar with them. He makes a radical return to Freud in his work, and many American
psychoanalysts, trained in ego psychology, object relations, or relational psychoanalysis,
find this peculiar. Finally, Lacan's writing (drawn from oral presentations) is itself a play
with language, including multiple references, puns, and word resonances best
appreciated in French. Until recently few translations were available.
It is hard to know where to begin. I suppose the best place is how I came to Lacan. I
had been interested in Freud and in psychoanalysis since I was an adolescent. My
doctoral clinical internship was supervised by a child analyst, although the rest of my
training was not psychoanalytic (this intellectual tradition has all but died out in
psychology departments). In the course of treating traumatized children and adolescents
I became interested in that quality of knowing that is present in speech, and also eludes
recognition or elaboration. In my attempts to understand this dimension of language I
began to read literary theory and, through a network of references, found my way to
Lacan. Two of my closest friends and colleagues, Meg Turner and Pierre Johannet, were
my first guides into his texts. One does not simply sit down, read, and understand
Lacan! When I came to the sentence “The unconscious is structured like a language,” I
was enthralled. I had searched the world of literary criticism for ideas about how to
name what I'd been hearing in sessions with children, but here was someone who had a
way of explaining it to me in psychoanalytic terms! In this book I tell stories of learning
to listen in a Lacanian way, albeit in my own particular and peculiar way.
While the stories in this book are true, I have changed the names of my young
patients and their families and friends, as well as any identifying details about them.
This book reveals specific aspects of my work toward one end: to write history where
silence reigned, where silence was broken by an undeciphered cry that went unheard.
When all the traces of history have been erased and the body itself is inscribed with an
unknown language, how does a child begin to speak? How is it possible to listen so that
the child comes to know something vital, and speaking freely becomes possible, so that
living inside one's own body is no longer a nightmare? These are the questions that
would guide my listening.
This book carries stories of terrible anguish girls have lived. They are stories of how
something real impinges on us and marks us in our bodies. This thing—I'll call it trauma
—enters our speech as if by stealth, through the back door, in the night. Then it sounds
as though we are speaking in code to one another and to ourselves, and that code is
both the mark of trauma and is, itself, traumatizing. Why girls? In no small measure
because “our” is not a turn of phrase for me. While each story I heard was unique to a
single girl, the lines crossed with my story; a pattern formed, as though it was written in
plurality on our bodies. This book includes my story, not only as a psychotherapist, but
also as an adolescent girl who was hospitalized twice.
Although some see me as an “expert” on trauma, I'm not. Trauma is bigger than
expertise of any sort—it's in our midst, in our language, our wars, even the ways we try
to love, repeating, repeating. No one is an expert on trauma. And I'm not an authority
on girls either, though I've been construed this way, too. The knowledge girls have of
themselves is the only real ground of their own authority, which for me always remains