The Lacanian Concept of the Real and the Psychoanalytical Take on Trauma

Abstract

In Le Désir Foudroyé, French psychoanalyst Sonia Chiriaco (2012) clarifies the specificities of the Lacanian psychoanalytical approach to trauma by means of a series of clinical case studies. She argues that the strength of this framework lies in its unique emphasis on the presence of a subject behind the victim of trauma. Going against the grain of contemporary trauma theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis does not exclusively focus on the traumatic event in itself, but rather on what the (unconscious) subject has done with it or made of it. During the analysis, the subject must attempt to articulate the real that was encountered in all its brutality and senselessness. In the diversity of case studies discussed, Chiriaco makes visible that the subjective experience of a trauma is always singular, and that the psychoanalytical experience aims at the invention of a unique solution to exit the traumatic impasse. Psychoanalysis holds that even in trauma, there is a certain implication of the subject in its suffering. Acknowledging this gives back a minimal form of responsibility and agency to the subject, the road to revive the desire which was ‘struck down as if by lightning’ (foudroyé) by the trauma.