Meeting the spirit in despair : exploring discourses and practices that shape therapeutic work with survivors of trauma

Abstract

This thesis analyses the ways in which notions of transformation and viability (Butler 2004a) can be articulated within therapy after traumatic life events or circumstances. It draws together discursive threads from psychology, therapy, neuroscience and spirituality, to examine what makes for the viability of a life after overwhelming life events. In penetrating the dialogue between what is presently understood as "the scientific truth" about traumatic experience and the embodied experience of trauma, this thesis also argues that it is not enough to simply view psychology or biology as "complicated effects of discursive processes" (Blackman, 2001, p. 230). It examines subjectivity in the interface between biological and psychological processes. Therapeutic work with survivors of trauma is based on the act of "perfect listening". It attempts to move traumatic events into language and into autobiographical memory to make for a viable life. The notion that listening is enough suggests that what is unbearable is within the person, who, with such help, can overcome any obstacle. A traumatised person's transformation relies on neurobiological concepts to account for the positive change. However trauma work is not that simple. It is mostly challenging, exhausting, long-term and often "messy", when interventions that 'should' work, don't, or the unexpected arises. Explanations and life-enhancing changes that fit at one stage of a person's life or during a course of therapy do not appear to be easily sustained over time in the lives of many trauma sufferers. However therapy may be one domain, when understood as a 'relational cure', where subjects can be recognised and called into being. Understood systemically, therapy "" and research "" is also domains in which to explore how it is that subjects may continue to be recognised and interpolated as viable subjects, by themselves and others.

Date of Award	2009
Original language	English