This paper tries to investigate trauma from a psychoanalytic perspective of Jacques Lacan. Succeeding Sigmund Freud’s analysis of traumatic neurosis through the linguistic mechanism of condensation and displacement, Lacan explorers trauma by the linguistic structure, proposing the system of three registers, the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Lacan supposes that the trauma cannot be articulated and comprehended by the symbolic. The traumatic event and its memory have a fundamental lack which fails any attempt to represent them in language. But ironically the impossibility to speak and write out trauma activates the drive for jouissance to see through the hole of the traumatic memory and encounter the incomprehensible truth of trauma. With this respect, I think Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of trauma suggests the ethical approach to trauma and promises some kind of healing by embracing the unspeakable truth of trauma.
1. Introduction
2. Trauma as a Trace of the Real
3. Conclusion
Works Cited