Those Who Come After by Stephen Frosh (Palgrave Macmillan, £64.99)
I started reading this book with a certain amount of wariness. It seemed to be a technical, psychoanalytic examination of a well-travelled field, with references I thought I might not understand.
How wrong I was. This is an absolute firecracker of a book. Frosh discusses — as few do — the question of what right he has to look at issues “to which I have had very limited exposure and of which I have no direct experience.”
He continues by arguing — rightly, in my view — that “a prohibition on speaking for others is dangerous in its own way and has its own ethical complexities.” Exactly so. When we think about the Macpherson Report and its conclusion that it is up to the victims of racism — at least to some extent — to describe its nature and characteristics, we accept to some extent that those who experience it need to define it.
But that does not mean that only the victims of racist attacks can decide whether or not an attack is racist. It suggests that they have an experience which gives it a different flavour — and, in the Macpherson case, that should inform policing. Just so for psychoanalysis and the discussion of trauma.
One does not have to have experienced it, but those who have experienced it have an essential lived experience and an immediacy to add to the discussion.
And that matters. Personal experience, personal testimony, has a rare power. But it does not necessarily always lead those who share that experience to the same conclusions. Frosh uses the example of Martin Heidegger, the great philosopher and Nazi sympathiser. Hannah Arendt, another great, finds it in herself to forgive him, though she walks away after an affair with him.
Emmanuel Levinas cannot forgive — he regards it as impossible, given Heidegger’s standing and importance, even though he was the greatest influence on Levinas who nevertheless felt Heidegger should have had a greater sense of moral responsibility.
And so it goes on. Suzanne Hommel, in the 2011 film Rendez-vous chez Lacan, tells of Lacan touching her gently (would that be allowed now?) to stroke away a memory of horror, of being born in Germany in 1938, of the memory of hunger, the guilt, the association.
Can psychoanalysis remove the pain? Frosh writes: “No one would claim as much; it is not magic.” But can it help face up to trauma, face down demons, reposition oneself to live with post-memory? Arguably, from this book, it can. And I ended the book moved beyond anything I had expected. No over-arching claims. No cure-all tendencies. Only a quiet, careful look at trauma and post-memory, and an exploration of how we might learn to live with it and even gain from it. Bravo!
Baroness Julia Neuberger is senior rabbi at West London Synagogue
