Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History

Caruth speaks to the reader in broad terms and skillfully weaves Freudian concepts to frame the experience of trauma. Time is a pesky construct in this reality. A reverberating sentence is, "the threat is recognized one moment too late." The surprise of trauma is when one survives and doesn't know it. One claims their own survival. These perspectives added a richness to my nursing research on trauma patients.

Although the book is written with a fairly academic narrative, the theory put forward is profound. If one has ever wondered why it is that an individual who is traumatized mysteriously finds themselves traumatized again in life (different time, different circumstances), this book is for them. The phrase "history of trauma" is not a chronology of how we learned of the subject. Instead, it refers to how the "history" of a traumatic event within a person's life remains that person's "history" until it is "claimed." This book was referred to me by a professor during my UCLA journey and to this day, I think back to how it expanded my mind on trauma. I'm in the process of finishing my own book (Speaking Truths, fiction, released April 2010) wherein the prtoagonist must resolve his own trauma. There is no doubt this book contributed significantly to how I outlined my character's journey.

The best book on trauma in existence--brilliant theory anchored in a series of concrete, eloquent, insightfully demonstrative, illuminating and compelling literary analyses. Pathbreaking book, foundational for the field of Trauma Studies as well as literature and literary theory, in their relation to psychoanalysis on the one hand, and to philosophy on the other.

While I find the read interesting and great at presenting otherwise unthought of ideas, it is not to my taste. However, the book came after about two weeks, exterior looks new, and has a few easily erasable pencil marks in it.

From an academic perspective this book was very enlightening. It compelled me to look at trauma through an ethical and historical lens.

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," "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" and "Moses and Monotheism" to Paul de Man's post-structuralist literary theory to Alain Resnais's film "Hiroshima Mon Amour" to understand how these texts theorize trauma. She is interested in the discourse that has developed around trauma, the written record that affects how we--as literary scholars AND as psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians--currently conceive of trauma.

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, "trauma" does not even appear in the index. While the work of pschyiatrists and neuroscientists can illuminate other, more literarially-minded trauma theorists today, most of these sources were not available to Caruth.

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.

Fantastic read. I relied on this heavily throughout my degree.

This is a classic for the study of trauma in literatureThe author has a great styleI would highly recommend it.