기억, 트라우마, 정신분석학 - 도미니크 라카프라와 홀로코스트

Memory, Trauma, and Psychoanalysis: Dominick LaCapra and Theory of Holocaust

&nbsp;&nbsp;The article aims to understand, analyse, and criticize Dominick LaCapra&quot;s interpretations of the Holocaust by closely examining four of his publications-Representing the Holocaust (1994), History and Memory After Auschwitz (1998), Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), and History in Transit (2004). As one of the most renowned intellectual historians and influential theorists in historical methodology in the U. S. A., LaCapra had been the leading advocate of the so-called &quot;linguistic turn in history.&quot; While continuing to call for dialogical interaction between text and context, he recently shifted his scholarship from textual criticism to the theory of historical trauma, that is, the Holocaust.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;LaCapra is confident that the Holocaust, as subject-matter, is located at a crossroad where the complex and problematic relationships among memory, trauma, and historical writings can be carefully explored and critically reevaluated. He is interested in how the remembrance of the past is sometimes repressed, distorted, exaggerated, and/or politicized according to the subject-positions of those who are involved. For the purpose of illustrating how victims, predators, bystanders, and collaborators differently exploited the memories of the past, LaCapra borrowed from psychoanalysis such conceptions as transference, acting out, and working through, and applied them to the study of the Holocaust. He emphasizes the important and indispensable roles of &quot;primary memories&quot; cherished by the survivors, which testify to experiential evidence of particular traumas. LaCapra is very convinced that an empathetic narration of the past is not only possible but also ideal in which historians can combine a documentary/positivistic research model with a radical/post-modern constructivism.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The author expresses some uneasy concerns regarding LaCapra&quot;s theoretical positions on the Holocaust. First, LaCapra&quot;s insistence on jumping to an &quot;ethical tum&quot; (via trauma studies, skipping a &quot;cultural turn&quot;) in historical writings may result in another example of &quot;theoretism(theory for theory&quot;s sake)&quot;, unless it accompanies concrete and persuasive case studies. Second, the author challenges the universal validity and applicability of LaCapra&quot;s conceptual (especially psychoanalystic) tools to other historical traumas. He thus concludes the article by inviting his fellow historians to test whether LaCapra&quot;s theory of the Holocaust may be useful to the case of the massacre of American Indians and/or &quot;Korean military comfort women&quot; during the Japanese colonial era.