Memory and Healing in Patrick McGrath’s Trauma

Set in New York, at the close of the 1970s, a broken city awash with criminals but also with the mentally ill and narrated by its protagonist, a psychiatrist specialised in treating the traumatised Vietnam veterans, Trauma subtly interwines a dark chapter of America’s history with the private history of a man forced to confront his demons. Drawing on Freud’s definition of trauma as one of latent memory, an experience which makes itself known by its unsummoned, recurring presence long after the traumatic event is over, and on Caruth’s claim that trauma’s peculiarity is its original inaccessibility and delayed recognition, I argue that McGrath’s novel is not only the story of the narrator’s traumatic memories, but the ways in which trauma may be induced by the perception of another’s wound, by the existence of another’s traumatic story. McGrath problematises the issues of survival, reconstruction and revelation underlying trauma, and its intrinsic aporetic nature –its simultanous call for articulation and representational elusiveness– by having his story told by an over-critical, guilt-ridden and impaired Manhattan psychiatrist who, while maintaining an empathic stance toward the victims of trauma and their tragedies, increasingly finds himself suffering from the same defense mechanisms pathologies he diagnoses in his patients: depression, dissociation, repetition compulsion, and primarily displacement. As the narrative, appropriately punctuated by flashbacks and dreams, reaches its dénouement in a Victorian asylum where the psychistrist has withdrawn and where the source of his unspeakable trauma is finally brought to light, it appears clear the healing function of both therapy and writing as equal enterprises in recovering memories and thus giving meaning and shape to suffering.