Trauma, Abuse, and the Church

At Catholic World Report you can read my latest thoughts about several new books I had a chance to read over the Christmas break, some of which I will discuss in more detail on here in the coming days.

I would especially recommend to you Judith Herman's landmark 1992 book Trauma and Recovery. Unlike a lot of other books in the social and medical sciences, this one is wonderfully cogent, clearly written, and blessedly free of a lot of horrid jargon. It brings together a wide body of literature in a compelling way that never loses its focus on understanding and helping people.

For some engagement of trauma theologically, I have already drawn attention to Marcus Pound, but will do so again, especially for his focus on the liturgy as itself a therapeutic not just individually or as an adjunct to clinical therapy, but collectively for us all. Others who have recently written theologically on trauma tend to be Protestant, but Pound writes explicitly as a Catholic grounded in Thomist thought.

Gabriele Schwab, whom I didn't mention, deserves to be read as well. Her book Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma is especially valuable for Eastern Christians still marked by and grappling with the legacy of Soviet brutality, violence, and trauma--as well as earlier traumas like the Armenian Genocide, or more recent ones like the Russian war against Ukraine.

About this book we are told this by the publisher (Columbia University Press, 2010):

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships.

Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's Still Alive and Marguerite Duras's La Douleur; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's W, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and Philippe Grimbert's Secret; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz, Sabine Reichel's What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, and Ursula Duba's Tales from a Child of the Enemy. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory. Schwab concludes with a bracing look at issues of responsibility, reparation, and forgiveness across the victim/perpetrator divide.

A Theological Comedy about Contemporary Politics

I've previously drawn attention to Marcus Pound's very learned and suggestive study linking Lacanian psychoanalytic thought with eucharistic and liturgical practices.

He has a new book coming out this fall, Theology, Comedy, Politics (Fortress, 2019), 120pp. It sounds very interesting indeed, not least in the Trump era when I've never understood the endless wailing and moaning about him from people who make the mistake of taking him, or any other, politician, seriously. If you regard him and them--of any party, in any country, at any point in history--as absurd figures, as jumped-up monkeys at best, and politics as nothing more than an opéra bouffe, then at the very least you don't need to self-medicate as much when you read the headlines.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

What relevance has comedy for the global crises of late-modernity and the theological critique thereof? Coming out of the experience of war, a generation of modern theologians such as Donald MacKinnon, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and, more recently, Rowan Williams, in their accommodation to literature, choose tragedy as the paradigm for theological understanding and ethics. By contrast, this book develops recent philosophical, anthropological, and psychoanalytical studies of humor to develop a theology of comedy. By deconstructing secular accounts of comedy it advances the argument that comedy is not only participatory of the divine, but that it should inform our thinking about liturgical, sacramental, and ecclesial life if we are to respond to the postmodern age in which having fun is an ideological imperative of market forces.

Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

The Greek Orthodox scholar and priest John Panteleimon Manoussakis, whom I interviewed here about his recent splendid book, posted something to Facebook recently about a book I had not read, but which he was finding profitable: Marcus Pound, Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma (SCM Press London: 2007), 210pp.

Psychoanalytic thought is not entirely foreign to Eastern Christianity, though scholarly efforts to study and integrate it are not nearly as frequent or far advanced as for psychoanalysis and Western Christianity, not least in Jungian terms. I noted here a recent scholarly monograph, and gave some fuller thoughts here to the uses and abuses of Freud.

About this book by Pound the publisher tells us:

Marcus Pound's book develops a specifically theological form of psychotherapy rooted in liturgy and arising from engagement with postmodern psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacans claim that the unconscious is structured like a language radically challenged psychoanalysis and Pound uses this as the basis for his work in this volume. Postmodern psychoanalysis has been anticipated by theology, and Pound goes further in this claim to argue there has been a return to theology in psychoanalysis.

I returned to Freud this year in writing my lecture for last month's OTSA conference at Fordham, where I took up the uses and abuses of "forgetting" in various forms as an integral part of how Christian tradition develops, not least in the history of Catholic-Orthodox estrangement and reconciliation. As I think we have all learned by now thanks to him and modern psychology, not all forms of forgetting are regrettable, and not all forms of remembering are commendable.

So I went back to Freud, especially his short essays "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through" as well as "Motivated Forgetting" from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (The Standard Edition).


I also found two other works very insightful and helpful here, beginning with Paul Ricoeur's  Memory, History, Forgetting. Ricoeur is of course no stranger to Freud, having engaged him for decades, not least in his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation.

Even more than Ricoeur the work of a contemporary scholar is very suggestive and illuminating: Bradford Vivian of Syracuse University's  Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again is an interesting and suggestive work that argues about how, when it comes to such things as cultural conflicts and reconciliation, deliberate forgetting can be as beneficial ritualized remembrance. In witness of this, consider recent debates over what to do with the Confederate flag in the south. The move to have it removed from official public display suggests that culturally many people are understandably prepared to "forget" that history instead of seeking ad perpetuam rei memoriam.

The importance of forgetting remains an important and under-appreciated one for Catholics and Orthodox still struggling to come to terms with our dolorous and divisive past. We remember and repeat, Freud showed, in order to work through--or (as we say today), "move on." Let it be so, and soon.