\u201dMany writers are also wounded healers. In the case of [James] Joyce, we find someone who wrote books in order to transform personal and collective trauma into art. The personal traumas related to the death of Joyce’s young brother (alluded to in the first of his famous ‘Epiphanies’) and a brutal mugging\u00a0 in Dublin in\u00a0 1904. The collective trauma related primarily, I believe, to the Irish famine. When Joyce visited Carl Jung in Zurich – hoping he would cure his daughter, Lucea-Jung replied that he could not cure Lucea’s madness and that Joyce had only managed to cure his own by writing Ulysses! In short, Joyce is Stephen Dedalus “writing the book of himself ‘ in order to save himself from melancholy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shakespeare\nwrote Hamlet the year his son, Hamnet, died and his own father, John\nShakespeare, was dying. The play is about the transmission of mortal trauma\nbetween fathers and sons. In short, Shakespeare wrote ”the book of himself ‘\nin order to avoid the madness of melancholy, that is, in order to properly\nmourn his father and his son in a way that he was unable to do in real life.\nThe play itself thus serves as a symbolic ‘working through’ of an otherwise\nirresoluble crisis in which a father (King Hamlet) commands his son (Prince\nHamlet) to do something impossible: that is, to remember what cannot be\nremembered! To tell something that cannot be told. A double injunction. An\nunbearable burden. An impossible story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stories\nbecome cathartic to the extent that they combine empathic imagination with a\ncertain acknowledgment of the cause and context of the suffering, thereby\noffering a wider lens to review insufferable pain. The degree of detachment\nafforded by the narrative representation may be small indeed, but without it\none would be smothered by trauma to the point of numbness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wounded healers are those, in sum, who maintain such equilibrium in a subtle interplay of word and touch, narrativity and tactility, effect and affect. To have the ‘healing touch’ means knowing when it is time to listen and when it is time to speak. When to draw close and when to draw back. When to hold and when to withhold. In the final analysis, it’s a matter of tact.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note:\nThese are extracts from Richard Kearney\u2019s chapter, \u201cThe hermeneutics of wounds\u201d\nin the 2018 book \u201cUnconscious Incarnations: Psychoanalytical and Philosophical\nPerspectives of the Body\u201d, edited by Brian W Becker, John Panteleimon\nManoussakis, and David M Goodman, pp. 29 -36.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201dMany writers are also wounded healers. In the case of [James] Joyce, we find someone who wrote books in order to transform personal and collective trauma into art. The personal traumas related to the death of Joyce’s young brother (alluded to in the first of his famous ‘Epiphanies’) and a brutal mugging\u00a0 in Dublin in\u00a0 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":399,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":403,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}