Trauma

Trauma occurs when an experience or event is so strong, that it escapes understanding because it doesn’t fit into any known frame of reference (both symbolic and empirical). When an event ‘makes no sense’ it can’t really be remembered, understood or even truly experienced. Without concrete frames of reference that give cognitive distance a person constantly reenacts the event, repeats it in direct experience. When the human psyche tries to process a traumatic event it will endlessly replay it, struggling to find meaning, or resolution through the replay. In this sense re-visits it rather then remembers. This visitation has nothing to do with memory, whereas memory needs distance, separation from actuality in order to re-present the event, trauma melts reality with representation, diminishes all the differences between them – the event becomes the representation or in the words -although used in an entirely different context – of Norman Bryson: The representation absorbs the house. This is explicitly evident for example in Cambodia’s Genocide Museum where the excavation and uncovering of the history of the Khmer Rouge Regime was done simultaneous with showing it, as the museum opened for the public only three months after its discovery.