Trauma and Narration in David Cronenberg's Spider

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abstract

Trauma points to the Real, to that which - for instance, in the shape of an overwhelming situation capable of flooding its victim with pain and panic - fractures the integrity of reason and of the psychic shell. It quite literally wounds the order of the Symbolic. This wounding of the Symbolic, however, is productive, insofar as it leads to repeatedly generating narratives and representations which try to make this that withstands the possibility of full representation disappear. However, the screen memories fail to achieve this, they always remain false memories. Trauma, then, through which the 'real' breaches into the net of the symbolic, also functions as a …