“…what was most important was to sit closely beside the survivors and to “listen and receive this,” as if it were part of you and that the act of taking and showing that you were available was itself playing some useful role.”

Richard Kearney on Helen Bamber

“Helen Bamber was both a founding member of Amnesty International and one of the first counselors to enter the concentration camps after the war. Her goal was to encourage survivors of torture and horror to somehow convert their trauma into stories and thereby find some release from their mute and immutable paralysis. In Bergen-Belsen, Bamber encountered ‘impossible stories’ which had to be told. She describes this narrative paradox-of telling the untellable.

Eventually, Bamber realized that what was most important was to sit closely beside the survivors and to “listen and receive this,” as if it were part of you and that the act of taking and showing that you were available was itself playing some useful role. A sort of mourning beneath and beyond tears: “it wasn’t so much grief as a pouring out of some ghastly vomit like a kind of horror.”

“If we possess narrative compassion we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love. The loving is in the healing, in the cathartic balancing of what Joyce called “identification with the sufferer” and knowledge of “the hidden cause.” We might say, in conclusion, that narrative catharsis, performed by a listener-narrator, offers a singular mix of empathy and distance, whereby we experience the pain of other beings -patients,  strangers, victims- ‘as if ‘ we were them.

Cathartic healing involves the narrating of past wounds both as they happened and as if they happened in this way or that. And it is precisely this double response of truth (as) and fiction (as if) that emancipates us from our habitual protection and denial mechanisms. One suddenly experiences oneself as another and the other as oneself- and thereby begins to apprehend otherwise unapprehendable pain.

Note: These are extracts from Richard Kearney’s chapter, “The hermeneutics of wounds” in the 2018 book “Unconscious Incarnations: Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Perspectives of the Body”, edited by Brian W Becker, John Panteleimon Manoussakis, and David M Goodman, pp. 29 -36.