Beyond the ordinary - Psychotherapy with a Senior Scholar-Analyst
This is where our journey begins. Get to know our practice and its underlying theories. We're glad you're here to tell your story.
Main Feature Article from Recent Research
When History is Trauma: Unlocking the Psychoanalytic Secrets of an Ancient Satire
An example of how many practitioners routinely misinterpret and overlook normal human reactions and denounce them as "mental illness"....
By Gary I. Lilienthal, PhD
How does the human mind process the unprocessable? How do we narrate an event so shattering that it defies language and logic? For answers, we often turn to modern clinical case studies or cutting-edge neurobiology. But what if one of the most profound maps of the traumatized psyche was written not in our century, or the last, but in the 2nd century BCE?
A groundbreaking new analysis argues precisely this. The key lies in a seemingly unlikely source: How to Write History, a satirical treatise by the Greek writer Lucian of Samosata. For centuries, this work has been appreciated for its rhetorical wit, mocking the historians of his day for their flattery, falsifications, and grandiose styles. Yet, when read through the lens of psychoanalytic trauma theory—specifically the framework of Jacques Lacan—Lucian’s gallery of grotesque examples transforms into a startlingly accurate dramatization of psychic trauma.
This isn't just an academic exercise. It reveals a fundamental truth: the struggle to write a true history is structurally identical to the struggle to process a traumatic experience. Both are besieged by the same defensive mechanisms, the same narrative collapses, and the same desperate, often bizarre, attempts to regain coherence.
The Lacanian Real: The Unassimilable Shock
To understand this connection, we must first grasp the Lacanian concept of the Real (le réel). This is not "reality" as we conventionally know it—the consensual, observable world. Instead, the Real is "that which is unassimilable by the symbolic order." It is a traumatic kernel, an internal limitation that defines and perpetually disrupts the fabric of human experience.
The Real is:
1. Trauma: An encounter for which we are utterly unprepared, which our symbolic mind cannot integrate. It returns repeatedly to haunt the subject.
2. Impossibility: The central point around which our reality is structured, but which itself can never be fully symbolized or represented.
3. Extimacy: A blend of "exterior" and "intimacy," the Real is an uncanny foreign body located at the most inaccessible core of our own being.
When the Real irrupts, it shatters our personal narrative. What follows is the psychic fallout that Lucian, perhaps unintentionally, catalogues with brilliant clarity.
Lucian’s Casebook: Trauma Symptoms in Historical Garb
Lucian’s satire is a parade of bad historians, each embodying a different psychological defense against an encounter with the unmanageable Real.
· The Compulsion to Repeat: The Abderite Epidemic
Lucian opens with the tale of Abdera, where citizens, after a devastating fever, become compulsively “stage-struck,” endlessly reciting lines from Euripides’ Andromeda. This is a perfect allegory for trauma’s repetition compulsion. The townspeople cannot integrate the traumatic fever; instead, they are haunted by it, acting it out through fragmented lines of tragedy, much like a survivor relives a catastrophic event through flashbacks or nightmares. The content is symbolic, but the repetitive structure is the unmistakable echo of unprocessed suffering.
· Avoidance and Displacement: Diogenes’ Tub and the Moorish Trooper
Feeling useless during Corinth's military preparations, the philosopher Diogenes rolls his tub up and down a hill simply to appear busy. Similarly, Lucian describes a historian who, instead of narrating the horrific Battle of Europus, devotes twenty pages to a trivial anecdote about a Moorish trooper buying fish. Both are classic examples of avoidance. When the core trauma (the battle, the exclusion) is too overwhelming, the psyche displaces anxiety onto meaningless or banal activities, creating a safe but irrelevant narrative digression to avoid the terrifying core.
· Distortion and Fantasy: Fabricated Duels and Battle Dragons
Lucian scorns historians who invent heroic deeds, like Aristobulus fabricating a duel for Alexander the Great, or a "eyewitness" who describes the Parthians deploying giant, man-eating dragons. These aren't just lies; they are traumatic fantasies. When reality is too horrific or humiliating, the psyche compensates by constructing heroic or monstrous distortions. The fantasy defends against feelings of powerlessness, transforming the unrepresentable horror of battle into a mythic, manageable (though absurd) story.
· Identity Disturbance: The Historian with an Inflated Ego
Trauma shatters the stable sense of self. Lucian captures this in historians who borrow legitimacy through grandiose comparisons, pretentious titles, or by slavishly imitating the prose of Thucydides. This oscillation between voices—from lofty poetic diction to vulgar slang in the same passage—reflects a fragmented identity. The traumatized self, unmoored, desperately tries on borrowed personas to compensate for its inner fragility and lack of a coherent narrative voice.
· Despair and Self-Destruction: The Glass Shard and Theatrical Suicide
Finally, trauma can culminate in despair. Lucian recounts the invented story of Severian, who kills himself not with a sword but with a shard of his own shattered glass. This is a powerful metaphor for fragmentation: the subject is destroyed by splinters of their own existence. In another anecdote, Afranius Silo delivers a bombastic funeral oration and then dramatically kills himself at the graveside. This mirrors Freud’s melancholia, where the ego, unable to mourn healthily, identifies with the lost object and annihilates itself in a performative act of unresolved grief.
From Trauma to Testimony: The Path to Working-Through
Amidst the satire, Lucian offers a glimpse of hope—a model for what psychoanalysis calls "working-through." He tells the story of Sostratus, the architect of the great Pharos lighthouse. Sostratus inscribed his own name in the stone but covered it with plaster bearing the king’s name, knowing that over time, the plaster would fall away and reveal the true architect.
This is the ethical stance of both the good historian and the healing trauma survivor: the preservation of truth, even if its recognition is deferred. It is an act of faith in the future, a commitment to testimony over immediate flattery or comfort. It represents the slow, difficult process of integrating the Real rather than being shattered by it.
Conclusion: History as a Mirror of the Mind
Lucian of Samosata aimed to teach us how to write history. In doing so, he inadvertently provided a profound lesson on how the mind copes with catastrophe. His treatise demonstrates that historical falsification and the psychic consequences of trauma are two sides of the same coin. A collapsing coherence of truth, a retreat into mythologized or fractured narratives—these are the hallmarks of both a culture that cannot confront its past and an individual who cannot process their pain.
For clinicians, writers, historians, and anyone seeking to understand the profound impact of trauma, Lucian’s ancient text remains urgently relevant. It reminds us that the journey toward truth—whether in a history book or a therapy session—requires the courage to face the unassimilable Real, and the patience to inscribe our authentic story, layer by layer, for a future that is ready to understand it.
This research is now fully incorporated into our practice.
Navigating the Labyrinth of the Mind: Trauma, Memory, and the Protective Fiction of the Self
By Dr. Gary I. Lilienthal
What if the foundation of your personal history—your most cherished or vivid childhood memories—is not a stable record, but a dynamic, defensive construct? Psychoanalytic theory presents a compelling and provocative argument: what we experience as memory is often a complex negotiation between truth and psychological survival. This article explores the intricate relationship between psychological trauma and the phenomenon of the “screen memory,” a concept that challenges our most basic assumptions about autobiography and identity.
The Genesis of the Screen Memory: A Psychic Compromise
The term “screen memory” was originated by Sigmund Freud in his seminal 1899 paper. He observed that our earliest memories are often fragmented and paradoxically centered on trivial events, while momentous occasions—like the death of a sibling—are forgotten or only recalled in a displaced form.
Freud theorized that this occurs due to a conflict between two psychical forces. One force strives to remember important experiences, while the other—a powerful resistance—works to suppress anything too painful or unacceptable. These forces do not cancel each other out; instead, they forge a compromise.
The result is that “instead of the mnemic image which would have been justified by the original event, another is produced which has been to some degree associatively displaced from the former one.” In simpler terms, the mind creates a stand-in memory—the screen memory—that is psychologically linked to the trauma but stripped of its distressing content. This benign memory “screens” or protects the conscious mind from the raw, traumatic material lying beneath.
Trauma as the Rupture in the Protective Shield
But what is the nature of this hidden trauma? Freud provided a standard description: we describe as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the mind’s “protective shield.” Trauma, in this view, is a rupture in the psyche’s basic defense against overwhelming stimuli.
Jacques Lacan further refined this concept, noting that “trauma” functions as a point de capiton (an “upholstery button” or “anchoring point”). This is a signifier that everyone uses, creating the illusion of a shared meaning, yet it lacks a fixed, universal definition. Its power lies in its function: to temporarily stop the endless slippage of meaning in our internal narrative, creating a stable—though illusory—point around which our understanding of a distressing event can coalesce.
The Myth of Ariadne: Trauma and the Broken Path to Recollection
A powerful analogy for this process can be found in the Greek myth of Ariadne’s thread. To slay the Minotaur in the heart of the Labyrinth, Theseus used a ball of thread given to him by Ariadne to trace his path back to safety.
We can think of a coherent life narrative as Ariadne’s thread, allowing us to navigate the labyrinth of our past. Psychological trauma is analogous to a break in that thread. The individual becomes trapped in the maze, unable to retrace their steps to the origin of their pain. The trauma itself disrupts the linear path of recollection, leaving only disjointed fragments and the enduring anxiety of being lost.
In a profound insight, theorist J. Hillis Miller noted that in the myth, the line of the thread and the labyrinth are co-dependent; each is the point of origin for the other. This suggests that the trauma is not just an event in the labyrinth, but is itself the labyrinth—its retraced narrative is inseparable from its existence.
The Role of Phantasy: Weaving a New Narrative
If the direct path to the trauma is broken, how does the mind cope? Lacan argued that it is the function of phantasy (the unconscious form of conscious “fantasy”) to provide the required meaning. The mind, unable to tolerate the meaningless horror of the traumatic event, sets to work constructing a story.
The subject does not recall nothing; they always recall something, but it is not an objective account. As Lacan stated, “phantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinant in the function of repetition.” The screen memory, supported by unconscious phantasy, becomes a “useful and defensive escape from the entrapment of a severed Ariadne’s thread,” offering an illusion of coherence where there is none.
Freud’s Radical Conclusion: The Storyteller of the Self
Through a detailed analysis of his own “screen memory” involving a meadow, yellow flowers, and bread, Freud demonstrated how adult desires and conflicts are retroactively projected onto childhood scenes. He showed that what we recall is not an emerging truth from the past, but a narrative formed at a later date to serve contemporary psychological needs.
This leads to one of psychoanalysis’s most radical propositions: “It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess.”
Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were, but as they appeared at later periods when the memories were aroused. They are compromise formations, shaped by adult desires and unconscious wishes. In this light, memory is not a faithful historian but a creative storyteller—a trickster narrating a past we can bear to live with.
Implications for Understanding the Self
This perspective does not render our past meaningless. Instead, it invites a more nuanced and sophisticated self-awareness. It suggests that:
· Our identity is narrative-driven: The stories we tell about ourselves are fundamental to our psyche, even if they are not historically precise.
· Resilience is creative: The mind possesses a remarkable capacity to protect itself through creative reconstruction, using fantasy and narrative as healing tools.
· Certainty is an illusion: Recognizing the constructed nature of memory encourages intellectual humility and a deeper empathy for the complex, hidden struggles of others.
By understanding the screen memory, we begin to appreciate the profound and ongoing authorship of our own lives. We are not merely scribes recording events, but authors constantly drafting and redrafting the story of who we are.
Beyond the Wordless Nothing: How Bakhtin's Dialogic Speech Can Restore Narrative After Trauma
GARY I. LILIENTHAL, PHD
Trauma shatters more than just bones and sense of safety; it shatters language itself. Survivors often find themselves trapped in what scholar Elaine Scarry identified as a profound "resistance to language," where physical and psychological pain "does not simply resist language but actually destroys it." This leaves a void that Arthur Frank later termed a "wordless nothing" and a "hole in the telling."
For therapists, caregivers, and anyone supporting a trauma survivor, this linguistic collapse presents a fundamental challenge: How do you help someone narrate an experience that has annihilated the very tools of narration?
Our research into narrative and trauma suggests a powerful, if unexpected, source of insight: the work of Russian literary philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. By reimagining the very architecture of human communication, Bakhtin provides a revolutionary framework for understanding traumatic silence and guiding the journey back to speech.
The Bakhtinian Shift: From Inert Subject to Active Hero
To appreciate Bakhtin’s contribution, we must first understand the model he sought to revise. Since Aristotle, communication has often been visualized as a triangle consisting of three points:
· The Speaker: The one who creates the message.
· The Subject: The topic being discussed.
· The Listener: The one who receives the message.
In this conventional model, the "Subject" is an inert, passive object to be described, analyzed, or reported on. Bakhtin made a crucial alteration. He retained the Speaker and Listener, but replaced the passive "Subject" with an active, powerful "Hero."
This is not merely a semantic change; it is a philosophical earthquake.
In Bakhtin’s new paradigm, the Speaker (the trauma survivor) and the Listener (the therapist) do not simply talk about a traumatic event. Instead, they engage in a dynamic, three-way dialogue with the "Hero." This "Hero" can be the trauma itself, the survivor's journey through it, or the transformed self that emerges. This Hero is not a passive topic but a forceful participant that shapes the discourse, dictates the available language, and influences the very form of the utterance.
As Bakhtin scholar Charles Schuster noted, in this model, the Hero is "just as powerful a determining factor... as would be the speaker or the listener." Sometimes, the Hero is the dominating influence in the conversation.
The Therapeutic Implications: Making Sense of Silence and Speech
Bakhtin’s triad offers profound explanations for the struggles trauma survivors face and charts a path forward.
1. It Explains the Silence: The Crisis of Speech Genres
Bakhtin introduced the concept of "speech genres"—the stable, cultural templates we use for communication (e.g., a joke, a medical consultation, a wedding vow). We instinctively choose a genre that fits the situation and our listener.
Trauma, by its very nature, exists outside of ordinary experience. There is no ready-made "speech genre" for the chaos of assault, the horror of torture, or the profound disruption of loss. When no suitable speech genre is available, Bakhtin argues, speech can be eliminated altogether. The experience remains a "wordless nothing" because our cultural toolkit provides no words for it. The "Hero" of the trauma is so powerful and unique that it refuses to be forced into an inadequate, pre-existing narrative box.
2. It Charts a Path to Narration: The Hero's Journey as a Narrative Template
If the lack of a speech genre causes silence, the creation of one can facilitate speech. Here, we can integrate Joseph Campbell's monomyth of the "Hero's Journey" as a potential narrative template.
In our analysis, we applied this framework to Lloyd Alexander's novel Taran Wanderer, tracing the protagonist’s path from a confused youth to a self-aware adult. His journey—through a "Call to Adventure," "Road of Trials," "Apotheosis," and "Return"—provides a narrative structure that makes sense of his struggles and growth.
Similarly, the therapeutic process can help a survivor frame their own experience not as a failure to speak, but as a heroic quest for self-knowledge and integration. The trauma becomes the "Belly of the Whale," the struggle to cope becomes the "Road of Trials," and the hard-won recovery becomes the "Ultimate Boon." This external framework can provide the missing "speech genre," allowing the survivor to begin structuring their chaos into a coherent narrative. The goal is to "complete the Hero's Journey," thereby allowing the elided knowledge and language to emerge.
3. It Empowers the Survivor: Dialogue Over Monologue
In the traditional model, a survivor is often positioned as a passive reporter on a past event. In Bakhtin’s dialogic model, the survivor is the active Speaker, engaged in a dynamic exchange with both a supportive Listener (the therapist) and the powerful Hero (their traumatic journey).
This transforms therapy from a fact-finding mission into a collaborative, meaning-making dialogue. The survivor is not broken, but is on a quest. The therapist is not an interrogator, but a guide and witness. Together, in a "rhetorical circle" rather than a triangle, they work to bring the powerful, often silent, Hero into a dialogue that can finally be spoken and heard.
Conclusion: A New Map for a Known Territory of Silence
Bakhtin’s theories do not offer a simple therapeutic technique, but something potentially more valuable: a new conceptual map. By recognizing that communication, especially about trauma, is a dynamic, three-way dialogue—between Speaker, Listener, and Hero—we can move beyond frustration at a survivor's silence.
We can begin to see that silence not as a refusal to speak, but as a testament to the overwhelming power of the "Hero" they are grappling with. By respectfully engaging with that Hero, and by offering robust narrative frameworks like the Hero's Journey, we can help survivors find the words that trauma stole, transforming the "wordless nothing" back into a story they can own and live with.
The Axioms of the Unconscious: How Lacan and Boole Decoded the Logic of Trauma
by Gary I. Lilienthal, PhD
When we experience profound trauma, how does the mind process the unbearable? While we often think of coping mechanisms as psychological reactions, what if they were governed by a deeper, more formal logic—a kind of mental algebra that structures our inner world?
Groundbreaking research synthesizing the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and mathematician George Boole presents a compelling answer. It explores the concept of “phantasy” (distinguished from common “fantasy” by its spelling with a ‘ph’) not as a mere daydream, but as a sophisticated, axiomatic system that protects the psyche from trauma. This perspective suggests that our most profound defensive structures operate with the precision of a logical equation.
Phantasy as a Protective Shield
In the psychoanalytic tradition, phantasy is not an escape from reality, but a fundamental scaffold for it. Lacan emphasized its protective function. He compared it to a frozen image on a cinematic screen. Just as a film can be paused to avoid showing a traumatic scene that follows, the scene of phantasy acts as a defence. It creates a stable, albeit static, narrative that veils the terrifying void of what Lacan termed the "Real"—the impossible-to-symbolize kernel of trauma that resists integration into our conscious story.
This phantasy is a staged scenario where our unconscious desires are both expressed and contained. It’s a compromise formation: it allows a glimpse of desire while simultaneously protecting the subject from its overwhelming and often traumatic full force, such as the anxiety of "castration" or radical loss.
The Grammatical Structure of the Inner World
A key insight from Lacan is that the unconscious is structured like a language. Phantasy, however, is structured in a narrower, more specific way: it is grammatical. It takes the form of a foundational sentence in the psyche.
The classic example is the Freudian phantasy, “Ein Kind ist geschlagen” (“A child is being beaten”). This isn't just a random thought; it's a complex grammatical "montage" with distinct phases and shifting subjective positions (Is it me? Is it another child? Who is beating them?).
· The subject moves from active to passive.
· Love converges with guilt.
· Punishment becomes a substitute for a forbidden relationship.
These complexities, reversals, and inversions are not chaotic. The research argues they are ordered by a deep, underlying logic—a set of rules that govern how these elements can be combined, negated, and transformed, much like the grammatical rules that govern a sentence.
The Boolean Bridge: Axioms of the Psyche
This is where the 19th-century mathematician George Boole enters the psychoanalytic conversation. Boole, in his work The Laws of Thought, sought to formalize the principles of logic into an algebraic system. He established a set of axioms—self-evident truths—like the Identity Law (X AND True = X), the Commutative Law (X AND Y = Y AND X), and the Distributive Law.
The revolutionary proposal of this research is that the unconscious logic of phantasy operates according to its own set of Boolean-like axioms. The seemingly irrational world of trauma and desire is governed by a strict, formal logic.
For instance:
· Identity & Complementation: The phantasy maintains a core, stable identity (“I am the one who is loved/beaten/harmed”) even as its elements are negated or reversed. It creates a closed system where a statement and its negation are defined, much like Boole’s law that “X OR NOT X” is always true.
· Domination: A single, traumatic truth (a "false" or impossible reality) can dominate and reconfigure the entire psychic structure, similar to how “X AND False” is always false.
· Distribution & Association: The elements of a phantasy (father, child, beating, love) can be regrouped and distributed across different scenarios and relationships without losing their fundamental logical connection.
In this view, the phantasy is a logical structure that allows the subject to manage the impossible contradictions of trauma and desire through a pre-conscious system of rules.
The "Universe of Discourse" and the Elusive Subject
Lacan critically links this to Boole’s concept of the "Universe of Discourse"—the defined set of all subjects or elements being discussed. However, Lacan argues that because language itself is inherently open and incomplete, it can never form a truly closed "Universe of Discourse." There is always an excess, a leftover.
This means there is no final, stable "subject" of the discourse. The subject is always divided, and this very lack is what desire circles around. The axiomatic logic of phantasy steps in to fill this void. It creates a provisional, logical framework—a "bubble," as Lacan calls it, whose surface is named both "desire" and "reality"—that gives the subject a coherent, if fictional, place to stand.
Implications for Analysis and Treatment
This synthesis of Lacan and Boole has profound implications for psychoanalytic practice. If phantasy is a logical, axiomatic system, then the analyst’s role is not to challenge its "truth" head-on. Tearing down a patient’s primary phantasy would be like removing a load-bearing wall without understanding the building's engineering.
Instead, the analyst’s work is to investigate the logic of the phantasy—its structure, its transformations, and its points of inversion. The focus shifts from the content of the phantasy to its function. The analyst must avoid getting caught in the "imaginary" coupling with the patient's narrative and instead intervene at the "symbolic" level, exploring its manifestations in transference, acting out, and slips of the tongue.
The goal is not to destroy the phantasy but to understand the laws of transformation that govern it. By mapping this internal logic, the subject can gradually achieve a different relationship to their desire and trauma, moving from being lived by their phantasy to understanding its protective and structuring role.
Conclusion: The Logic of Resilience
Ultimately, this research reveals a stunning aspect of human resilience. Faced with the unthinkable, the psyche does not simply break. It builds. It constructs intricate, logical narratives—axiomatic systems of phantasy—that allow us to contain the unbearable and continue to function. Understanding that these processes are not random but follow a deep, structural logic opens up new avenues for compassionately deciphering the human experience of trauma and the profound, mathematical elegance of the mind’s defences.