Kenny Ranches
Lit 193.30

In dealing with trauma, people have had different perceptions of trying to handle their situation. Some people think that they tend to face things as it is. It’s as if they are boldly charging into a hurricane of feelings and memories without anything shielding them or holding them down to the ground. Mostly, these people think of things as if they just want to get things over with. Treating memories as if it’s an object, people makes the most out of memories and then simply throws it away as if it’s something useless or dilapidated. Others try to suppress whatever memory they kept as if burying a time capsule, in a place they seldom go to, hoping that the time capsule won’t resurface by itself as time passes by. Contrary to what people usually think, memory and trauma are not objects that can be disposed; memory and trauma are things that stick to us, become dormant and subtly resurfaces in different ways. From the material, ”Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” we see concepts the repeating and working through as ways of dealing remembering memories, especially trauma.

Diving into the paper, just like familiarizing one’s self with a map, it’s best to discuss the terms that are going to be the main points before using it again and again in the paper. Repression is the conscious (or unconscious) suppression of a memory. In simpler terms, we try to hide memories, bury it and try to seal it mostly because the memory being hid is a trauma that we experienced. Resistance is the blocking of memory from conscious memory. As the term implies, we resist a memory from being “stored” into our conscious memory, thus avoiding the chance of a memory being remembered as time passes by. Repeating is repetition without conscious knowledge of action and reason behind the action. (Freud, 150) It’s like admitting from our part, subconsciously, that a memory has affected us. This effect has then radiated itself in our actions and decisions even though we are not aware that we have been altered by a certain memory. The effect has become a paradigm for people who have had an experience that they wanted to resist. Ironically, the more that people resist a memory, the more they tend to repeat it. Lastly, Working Through is the act of laboring against resistance – getting acquainted with a memory rather than resisting, working through it in a literal sense up until a patient or a person can recover from that resisted memory. (Freud, 155) The terms will be the tools that will be used elaborated even more in an example.

In a more practical sense, the terms can be easier to identify with by using an example. The concepts are mainly used by therapists to a patient that went through a traumatic experience. The experience, is thus, transferred into a traumatic memory. With the incident not being nice, since it’s a trauma, it was kept away by the person. For the sake of this example, let’s say a person went through a car accident which took away important people from his life. As he recovers from the accident, the person who experienced the traumatic experience will do repression of the memory. It’s a way for the person to deal with the traumatic experience and trying to hide away any sort of pain that they might feel. As the person continues to resist the memory that tries to resurface, little does he know that he has been affected by the experience that his subconscious has been affecting his actions and decisions. It can be in simple decisions like not getting into a car or even driving slower so as to have more time to react and decide if anything does come up in the road. The change of the person’s paradigm has become a repeating instance. The change is mainly because of the car accident that the person went through. Dealing with the experience passively may do little or no help at all to the person itself. Thus, in the end, the way for a person to deal with trauma is by working through it. The term also suggest a person in struggling with the memory itself as they get acquainted with it. By continuing to get one’s self close with the repressed memory, they get to destroy their boundaries and in the end, fully recover from the traumatic experience they went through.

A good literary piece to view from the lens of the mentioned concepts is Watchmen by Alan Moore. The graphic novel was about an alternate reality about history where there were masked vigilantes that made a difference, where Dr. Manhattan, a god-like figure was made into reality because of a freak accident that occurred in a science laboratory and where President Nixon was elected for a third term. The plot started when Edward Blake, aka the Comedian, was murdered-- one of the masked vigilantes that made a difference especially for the side of America. In a sense, he was a soldier that followed any order and accomplished any mission in any means possible. His murder was one that was conspicuous because The Comedian was one that can be easily killed -- it took at least another masked crusader to execute the job of killing Edward Blake. Through this comes in Walter Kovacs, aka Rorschach, the investigator in the characters. As the story progressed, a plot to kill millions so as to bring world peace was uncovered by Rorschach, a plan which was plotted by Ozymandias, another of the caped crusaders. In the end, the plan was executed, which killed millions of people and left the masked vigilantes to a new life where they were seemed to be not needed anymore.
The discussion about trauma will revolve around the experience of Rorschach where he “failed” to save a girl from a serial killer. Walter Kovacs was a hardworking vigilante who did his best to do the right thing, or serve for the greater good of things. He never seemed to compromise his work for anything. The only thing he didn’t do before a pivotal event in his life was that he kept the people that he perpetuated alive. One day, during a case where he was supposed to find a girl and bring her back to her family, she went to a suspect’s place seeing the underwear inside the house and seeing the dogs of the suspect mauling over a human’s bone. The suspect was supposed to be one of the criminals that Rorschach supposedly kept alive because of his principles then. This event, then, altered Rorschach’s decision making from then on. He brutally killed the suspect and the dogs of the suspect.
As a flashback that determined a pivotal change in Rorschach’s life, the event can be said as a traumatic memory. Since it wasn’t brought up a lot by Rorschach in the novel, adding the rigidity of Rorschach’s personality, we can see that he repressed a lot of his memories to the point that he identified himself with his mask. As seen in page 28 of issue 5, as the police takes of his mask, Rorschach exclaimed, “No! My face! Give it back!” His supposed alter ego has become his only personality. Due to the changes that his traumatic memory engaged in him, Rorschach changed from the mild mannered masked crusader that wanted to perpetuate criminals into a radical and brutal perpetuator that sees things as black and white. He has repeatedly acted brutal in the graphic novel, not giving a second chance to any of the criminals as much as possible. His brutality has become a form of resistance in trying to mend himself and thus has become a habit of repeating his actions and decisions again and again as he faces any situation. In the end, Walter Kovacs wasn’t able to work through his traumatic experience because of his rigidity to other people: he never wanted to discuss his history or experiences to other people. For him, there was only the next work he had to accomplish. In the end, his characteristic of being black and white cost him his life. His passion for doing the right thing, and doing it radically, sprouted from a traumatic experience that literally changed him. As he resisted working through his memory of that traumatic experience, Rorschach became more and more rigid, and in a literal sense lost his old self as time passed by.
More than being depicted in fiction, we can say that trauma is very real and can happen even to normal people. Classifying the terms and diving into examples can help us understand the terms more and be more practical about it as we encounter new situations. The added knowledge helps us deal with whatever trauma we may face in our lives. The reading, “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” helps us deal with trauma as we encounter them, especially in trying to deal with trauma after it has passed one’s life.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmun. “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through”. Standard Edition. Volume 12. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.

Moore, Alan, and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: Warner Books, 1987. Print.

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[ 1 ]. Repeating is considered as a treatment in psychoanalysis. It’s done to let things recur as a patient is being interviewed. Rather than considering memory as opening a flood of emotions, it considers memory as layered where a non-meditated answer is more often to repeat, whether the response is an action or a decision.
[ 2 ]. Working through is like the culminating activity of dealing with trauma. One gets acquainted with memory, rather than resisting it. The term becomes literal in laboring with the memory so as to find a way to let the traumatic experience go, rather than keeping it in.
[ 3 ]. Dr. Jon Osterman was a simple man until a freak accident in the laboratory where he was working in. People thought he was vaporized, but, days later, he reemerged as a glowing blue man. Since then, he became a “real life superhero” in the novel. He, then, changed his name to Dr. Manhattan. His power can be really compared to a God but, Dr. Manhattan, after being a superhero, became an employee of the US Government.
[ 4 ]. Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, was one of the masked vigilantes in the graphic novel. When the Keene Act, that prohibited the actions of the masked vigilantes, Adrian Veidt focused his efforts in his enterprises. Seen as the smartest man on earth, with the fastest reflexes, he was one of the more powerful and most influential people in the graphic novel.