Bearing Witness to the Witness examines the different methods of testimony given by trauma victims and the ways in which these can enrich or undermine the ability of the reader to witness them. Years of listening to both direct and indirect testimonies on trauma have lead Dana Amir to identify four modes of witnessing trauma: The “metaphoric mode”, the “metonymic mode,” the “excessive mode”, and the “Muselmann mode.” The author thus demonstrates the importance of testimony in understanding the nature of trauma, and therefore how to respond to trauma more generally in a clinical psychoanalytic setting. In order to follow these four modes of interaction with the traumatic memory, the various chapters of the book present a close reading of three genres of traumatic witnessing: Literary accounts by Holocaust survivors, memoirs (situated between autobiographic recollection and fiction) and ‘raw’ testimonies given by Holocaust survivors. Since every traumatic testimonial narrative contains a combination of all four modes with various shifts between them, it is of crucial importance to identify the singular combination of modes that characterize each traumatic narrative, focusing on the specific areas within which a shift occurs from one mode to another. Such a focus is extremely important, as illustrated and analysed throughout this book, to the rehabilitation of the psychic metabolic system which conditions the digestion of traumatic materials, allowing a metaphoric working through of traumatic zones that were so far only accessible to repetition and evacuation.

CLEFT TONGUE is an attempt to think through the psychic language and its diverse forms and modes of expression, both within psychic structure as well as in the inter-personal realm. Wilfred Bion (1977), in his paper on the caesura, argues that in order to hear what happens inside it, one has to listen beyond the sound of spoken words. The type of attention he proposes is very reminiscent of the kind of listening to musical `overtones`. This listening identifies something that is not only beyond tones but beyond tonality as such: it is located outside the music scale though it emerges from it and is related to it. This kind of attention picks up what is hidden inside tonality but lacking any formal representation. At stake here are the floating elements, those that use another frequency and hence also require a different mode of reception. It is the overtones of the various musical instruments that are responsible for their vocal and tonal singularity. In analytic listening, as in listening to music, the ear must attend closely to the distinctive, singular core. It is this type of listening that the present chapters, dealing with the diverse psychic idioms, address. The author`s intention is not only to outline the dialectic far-end textures, that is, to describe the paradigmatic instances of each psychic category, but also to identify these typical syntactic zones in their simple, everyday manifestations in ordinary language and in the non-pathological personality

Two distinct theories, each developed by an important theoretician in the field of psychoanalysis, constitute the theoretical starting point of this book. Donald Winnicott described the dialectic between two modalities of experience, the subjective and the objective, as creating a potential space. Wilfred Bion, from a totally different standpoint, considered the possible effects of destructive relations between an emergent aspect and a continuous aspect of human very being, believing that the interaction between them was central to the existence of a healthy and dynamic self. Bion thus assumed not only the simultaneous existence of two forms of perception, but also the existence of dynamic relationships between them. The aim of this book is to go one stage beyond these theories, and to describe the specific significance of different types of interaction between the two aspects of the self, as defined by Bion, by examining the influence of the integration between them on Winnicott’s potential space. For this purpose I expand Bion’s definition of these two elements: The term ‘emergent self’ embraces that aspect of the self which experiences the world of objects as constantly changing, discontinuous, impossible to grasp and explain, and not cumulative in terms of past and future or cause and effect. As against this, the term ‘continuous self’ embraces that aspect of the self which is responsible for the experience of continuity, for the ability to make deductions, and for the ability to remember and thereby to accumulate objects in terms of the laws of common reality: causality, time and space. In this context I show that every mental event, whether it is located in consciousness or in the unconscious, in a dream or in memory, contains these two modalities. Every mental event has an emergent aspect – which marks it as a unique, private event, inexplicable and unforeseeable – as well as a continuous aspect that simultaneously locates that same event as part of a sequence of causality and memory. The nature of the interaction between the emergent and the continuous aspects determines the possible degree of integration between them, which creates what I designate as the ‘lyrical dimension of potential space’: the dimension which transforms human mind from a flat expanse to a three-dimensional space. The manner in which the lyrical dimension of mental space makes it possible to extract the a priori potential from within the boundaries of actual existence is described as explaining the human capacity to mourn, to know and to love. The book analyzes several major literary works, such as T.S Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphe”, as well as Israeli writers (H.N. Bialik, Amos Oz, A.B. Yohoshua), that either describe or else enact different variations on the theme of the lyrical dimension.