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The Lacanian theory of trauma

From Bruce Fink’s The Lacanian Subject loc 19662:

One of the faces of the real that we deal with in psychoanalysis is trauma. If we think of the real as everything that has yet to be symbolized, language no doubt never completely transforms the real, never drains all of the real into the symbolic order; a residuum is always left. In analysis, we are not interested in just any old residuum, but in that residual experience that has become a stumbling block to the patient. The goal of analysis is not to exhaustively symbolize every last drop of the real, for that would make of analysis a truly infinite process, but rather to focus on those scraps of the real which can be considered to have been traumatic. By getting an analysand to dream, daydream, and talk, however incoherently, about a traumatic “event,” we make him or her connect it up with words, bring it into relation with ever more signifiers.

What I found interesting about this was fixity reflecting a lack of symbolisation, rather than something diffuse and free-flowing being fixed in place through language. As Fink puts it, “Fixation always involves something which is not symbolized, language being that which allows for substitution and displacement-the very antithesis of fixation”.

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