Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History

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Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History

Editorial Review

"If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet."--from the Introduction

In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the "widespread and bewildering experience of trauma" in our century--both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it--we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and reference. Through the notion of trauma, she contends, we come to a new understanding that permits history to arise where immediate understanding is impossible. In her wide-ranging discussion, Caruth engages Freud's theory of trauma as outlined in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle; the notion of reference and the figure of the falling body in de Man, Kleist, and Kant; the narratives of personal catastrophe in Hiroshima mon amour; and the traumatic address in Lecompte's reinterpretation of Freud's narrative of the dream of the burning child.

"Unclaimed Experience is a splendid work, written with admirable clarity, power, and economy. The book has importance for a number of different fields: for psychoanalysis, for trauma theory or theory of 'post-traumatic stress disorder,' for literary study, for literary theory for cultural and historical studies, and for ethical theory. Each chapter is a classic essay on its topic."--J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

"Cathy Caruth has emerged as one of our most innovative scholars on what we call trauma, and on our ways of perceiving and conceptualizing that still mysterious phenomenon."--Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., author of Hiroshima in America and The Protean Self

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 3.0 / 5.0
• Essential reading for Trauma Studies
  If you want to understand the state of trauma studies in their relation to the humanities, you absolutely must be familiar with Caruth's work. This book and her collection of edited essays were in large part responsible for the work on trauma within literature, film, and cultural studies since 1990.
  It is important to recognize that Caruth is neither a clinician nor a psychiatrist. She is working on analyzing written and filmed texts ranging from Freud's theories in "The Interpretation of Dreams,"... more info
• Comment on Feb. review
  The previous reviewer lists three psychiatrists/neuroscientists, Daniel Schacter, Joseph Ledoux, and Richard McNally, that are very important to trauma studies; however, his or her claim that Caruth "ignored" the work of these scientists is misleading and unfair.
  Her book was published in 1996, while the majority of these men's work on trauma appeared in the late 1990s and the 2000s. Schacter, who has been publishing longer that the other two, did have a book published in 1994 on memory. However,... more info
• Canonized substandard scholarship
  Were it not for the outspoken protection of Shoshana Felman (founder of "trauma studies" in the Humanities) and Caruth's own clique-ish entente with Doctors Dori Laub and Bessel Van der Kolk (trauma experts of choice among Humanistic scholars), this book would have never come to light. The book has been widely and uncritically acclaimed by literary scholars, though anyone expecting to draw any insight from it would do better reading chapter 8 of Ruth Leys's "Trauma. A Genealogy".
  The book blatantly... more info
• Good, but no enough
  This book is a collection of excelent essays by Cathy Caruth, but it is not clearly tagged as such. The problem is that some concepts, and sometimes entire phrases are repeated from chapter to chapter. This is specially true for the sections about Freud's notions about history and trauma, where the interpretation of Moses and Monotheism is read time and time again.

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