In recent years a polarized debate, often polemical and vitriolic, has seized the attention of psychotherapists and the lay public. Some authorities have ascribed a crucial importance to the influence of repressed or dissociated memories of childhood trauma in the etiology of adult psychopathology and distress, while others have attempted to cast doubt on the possibility that true childhood trauma can be banished from memory or later recovered, either spontaneously or in the course of therapy. "... Freyd's betrayal theory is capable of generating numerous testable hypotheses..." One the one hand, voices have been raised to claim that memories of childhood traumatization should be assumed to be accurate unless proven otherwise, while on the other hand, there has been a clamor that recovered memories are almost if not always inaccurate, necessitating that psychotherapists consider such claims unlikely a priori. Furthermore, many researchers and some clinicians who claim that genuine memories are

Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse

This thesis examines, from an affective and art historical perspective, the sculptural practice of Berlinde De Bruyckere, positioning her fragmented figures in the context of contemporary art debates and exploring the role of the artist in changing the visual representation of the body fragment.

De Bruyckere’s fragmented figures, often inspired by actual events and problems, reflect on art, as well as on what transcends it, in order to highlight deeper issues within humanity. Therefore, I argue that through the capacity of the body fragment, as a way of magnifying and drawing attention to the edge of the human condition, Berlinde De Bruyckere’s sculptures convey both the fluidity between the psychological inner life and the physical exteriority, as well as other existential concerns.

By looking closely at De Bruyckere’s artwork from 2004-2013, this research shows how the viewers’ reception of the body fragments presented in De Bruyckere’s sculptures, is particularly related to an embodied form of perception, evoking a multitude of physical and emotional reactions. De Bruyckere’s representations of the body as vulnerable and fragmented, engage the spectator through abjection as well as through compassionate empathy, which in turn heightens intra-subjective awareness through affective knowledge. The investigation highlights the profound influence that feminist scholars and artists had in opening up the opportunities available to artists today. I will particularly focus upon feminism’s impact in shaping the representation and perception of the body, as well as the important, yet often forgotten, contribution of female artists in shaping contemporary art discourses through materiality.

The fragmented body and the artwork of Berlinde De Bruyckere

'French like the others': Colonial Migrants in Wartime France, 1939-1947

This thesis examines the theme of women’s madness in the 1960s and 1970s through the works of four English and French writers and film-makers: Chantal Akerman, Emma Santos, Jane Arden and Mary Barnes. It examines how these four writers and film-makers inscribe madness into their texts from a sociological angle, presenting the texts and films discussed as socio-historical artefacts while analysing each writer and film-maker’s representation of women’s madness. 
Inspired by psychologist Phyllis Chesler, who argues that madness is tied to socially defined gender roles and used to demarcate violations of expected gendered behaviour, this research analyses various manifestations of ‘madness’ from the everyday madness of Chantal Akerman, to psychiatrically incarcerated madness in the texts of Emma Santos, to madness influenced by anti-psychiatry through the works of Jane Arden, to complete immersion in anti-psychiatry with Mary Barnes. The interdisciplinary and cross-cultural nature of this thesis combines fields from both English and French studies, from the study of female writers and film-makers, psychoanalytic theory, the history of psychiatry and how they intersect with gender combined with contemporary feminist writings of philosophy, psychology, and theology.

Madness, psychiatry and anti-psychiatry in English and French women’s writing and film

Poets, belief and calamitous times

This special issue explores different representations of cultural memory in France since the Holocaust, a period overshadowed by historical trauma (wars, decolonization, genocide), in which memory has become an increasingly dominant cultural obsession. Contested representations of cultural memory have given rise to important critical and philosophical debates, which pivot on the relation between memory and history, the individual and the collective. Covering a broad range of spheres including literature, cultural history and theory, psychoanalysis and film, the essays collected here draw on and contribute to these critical debates in analyses that seek to rethink the relation between memory and representation. Where recent critical work on cultural memory has tended to emphasize its failures and frustrations, these essays highlight a different model of memory as innovation and creative representation. Central to all the essays is the idea that memories are constructed and mediated via specific culturally constructed frames, within which individual memory is irrevocably and sometimes troublingly bound up with collective modes of remembering. Yet the representations of memory examined here show how memory can work productively in and through tensions such as the relation between the individual and the collective without trying to overcome them: these tensions remain as crucial elements in the quest to find new forms of representation of memory.

Memory and Innovation in Post-Holocaust France

Preface: Writing Wounds Introduction: The Story of Trauma in "Trauma Theory" Hysterical Heroines: From "Dora" to Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire and Autrement dit Writing (through) the body : Helene Cixous's Dedans and "Stigmata" "Perdre pied": The Inscription of Sexual Abuse in Beatrice de Jurquet's Autobiographical Fiction Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir : Survival, Departure and Bearing Witness Choking on Words : Sarah Kofman's Autobiographical Writings Ghost-writing the Holocaust: Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz et apres Conclusion: Re-Reading the Wound Works Cited

Writing Wounds: The Inscription of Trauma in Post-1968 French Women's Life-Writing

Chapter 1 Introduction Part 2 Monuments and Memory Chapter 3 Taj Angkor: Enshrining l'Inde in le Cambodge Chapter 4 Representing Indochinese Sacrifice: The Temple du Souvenir Indochinois of Nogent-sur-Marne Part 5 Transport Networks Chapter 6 Lines of Communication in: The Thematics of Direction and Strategies of Narration in Colonial Indochina Chapter 7 Automobiles and Anomie in French Colonial Indochina Part 8 Tropical Angst? Chapter 9 Disturbing the Colonial Order: Dystopia and Disillusionment in Indochina Chapter 10 Of le Cafard and Other Tropical Threats: Disease and White Colonial Culture in Indochina Part 11 Women in and against Empire Chapter 12 French Women and the Empire Chapter 13 Vietnamese New Women and the Fashioning of Modernity Part 14 Screening Indochina Chapter 15 Camille's Breasts: The Evolution of the Fantasy Native in Regis Wargnier's Indochine Chapter 16 Tranh Anh Hung as Diasporic Filmaker Part 17 Writing Indochina Chapter 18 From Incest to Exile: Linda Le and the Incestuous Vietnamese Immigrants Chapter 19 "Cholen, la capitale chinoise de l'Indochine francaise": Rereading Marguerite Duras's (Indo)Chinese Space Chapter 20 Playing Hardball: Linda Le's Les Trois Parques Chapter 21 Jean Hougron's Indochina: Fantasy and Disillusionment

France and 'Indochina': Cultural Representations

The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.

Kathryn Robson

Papers

Memory and Innovation in Post-Holocaust France

Writing Wounds: The Inscription of Trauma in Post-1968 French Women's Life-Writing

France and 'Indochina': Cultural Representations

Curative fictions: The ‘narrative cure’ in Judith Herman's trauma and recovery and Chantal Chawaf's Le Manteau noir

Bodily detours: Sarah Kofman's narratives of childhood trauma