Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History

by Cathy Caruth

"If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet."—from the Introduction

In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth proposes that in the "widespread and bewildering experience of trauma" in our century—both in its occurrence and in our attempt to understand it—we can recognize the possibility of a history no longer based on simple models of straightforward experience and reference. Through the notion of trauma, she contends, we come to a new understanding that permits history to arise where immediate understanding is impossible. In her wide-ranging discussion, Caruth engages Freud's theory of trauma as outlined in Moses and Monotheism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle; the notion of reference and the figure of the falling body in de Man, Kleist, and Kant; the narratives of personal catastrophe in Hiroshima mon amour; and the traumatic address in Lecompte's reinterpretation of Freud's narrative of the dream of the burning child.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Research

168 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1996

About the author

Cathy Caruth (born 1955) is Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University and is appointed in the departments of English and Comparative Literature. She taught previously at Yale and at Emory University, where she helped build the Department of Comparative Literature. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1988 and is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud (Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) and Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996); she is also editor of Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1995) and with Deborash Esch of Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing (Rutgers University Press, 1995).

Reviews

[Jess · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much of the book had little relevance to my work with trauma narratives, howeever it is essential I read Caruths work. I enjoyed it for the most part, but have to admit to skimming most of the last chapter on Lacan, Freud, and memory due to the circuitous nature of the argument that caruth was laying out. More than anything, it was a fine example of how you can actually say the same thing 20 different ways.

I look forward to reading her other works on trauma.

[Amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

way too much of Freud in it, a good resource book nonetheless to understand trauma.

[Swathi Muthu · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a difficult read. The book tries to connect the theories of trauma from various schools of thought. Heavily drawing from Freud, this book can be understood only if one has some knowledge on Freud, Lacan, and the Poststructuralists. No wonder, I found this a bit daunting. The writing was complex and circuitous. After days of reading this book, I felt that the essence of the entire book could've been presented in just a couple of paragraphs. Maybe it was a point that Caruth was trying to make of the repetitive nature of traumatic thinking. I think I would've appreciated this book more if I was a bit more sound in lit theory.

[Leanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read Cathy Caruth’s book Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History for a research project I’m working on. The author is well known for her work on trauma theory.

According to Caruth, “the term trauma is understood as a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (3). “In its most general definition, trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena” (11). Caruth applies trauma theory to works by Freud, Kant, and Lacan, among others.

The most interesting part of Unclaimed, though, is not found in the book itself. One chapter analyzes the French film Hiroshima mon amour in terms of trauma theory. Naturally, I immediately had to rent and watch the movie for myself.

Filmed in 1959, Hiroshima follows a French actress making a movie about “peace” in Hiroshima. She has a brief and intense sexual encounter with a Japanese man. The relationship releases the traumatic experiences both endure because of the war: the woman’s German lover is killed, and she is ostracized; the man’s family perishes in Hiroshima while he is away fighting in the war.

Perhaps the most moving element of the film, though, is the actual footage of bombing victims. I could only weep at the images of mangled, burned, and dying children.

For someone so obsessed with atrocities committed in Europe during WWII, I am ashamed for practically ignoring the carnage perpetrated by Americans. If only Caruth could tell me how to reconcile myself with this part of my own history, with the trauma inflicted by American hands.

[Noha · Rating 1 out of 5]

Caruth's style of writing goes like this: A is not B, and not C, but the very un-D, and precisely E. OVER AND OVER AGAIN. It's so confusing and frustrating, given that she's an important contributor to trauma theory. Just don't start your reading with this book.

[Saumya Tripathi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the single most important book on Trauma, Memory and History. It is one of the main texts for my Phd dissertation and I can't recommend it enough to people who are interested in research areas relating to Trauma.

[Mai Nguyễn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very helpful for my understanding of the effect of trauma and PTSD on the victims of the Vietnam War. It is an essential book for my PhD research.

[Lidiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting analysis of the idea of trauma as represented throughout history and narrative. The author's writing sometimes is a bit too repetitive, it almost seems like the book is a collection of articles published separately. But over all it is a great philosophical and theoretical work.

Read: Spring 2017 / MLL 621

[Jay Shelat · Rating 2 out of 5]

While helpful in understanding Freudian and Lacanian ideas about trauma, Caruth’s book is ultimately ridden with theoretical gaps and leaps that take for granted the experiences of trauma victims. Additionally, Caruth blatantly ignores the traumas of people of color.

[Viktor · Rating 3 out of 5]

every time i enjoy a non-fiction book like this there’s always gotta be a random chapter on De Man and Kant that absolutely discombobulates my ass

every interpretation of Freud i read though shows me time and again that y’all are wrong for hating on my man

anyway, master’s thesis soon finished, stay tuned

[Sierra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, let's be real, anything that draws heavily on Lacan and Freud is going to be an instant dislike for me because I just don't buy much of their analysis. This text works with Freud's observation of the fort-da game in his grandchild, which apparently without any actual science he interprets to represent grappling with the absence of the maternal figure. I used to think that psychoanalysis was at least maybe partially scientific, but I'm now 100% convinced that it is literally just made-up projections of Freud's own arbitrary thoughts onto other people. No science here!

Beyond that, I think this book is obviously foundational, but for me more interesting in that I need to understand the criticism of this book to move forward with critical trauma studies. Caruth's argument is circuitous, repetitive, and frankly, very difficult to connect with what is ostensibly her central thesis about traumatic memory.

Glad it has been read, not glad I had to read it.

[Kitty Golden · Rating 1 out of 5]

Most of it is just explaining Freud’s arguments about trauma theory. Should just have read Freud really

[wasteland baby]

not a fave t b h

but it did put "Hiroshima, mon amour" on my radar, so that's something! will try to check out that movie, sounds interesting

[Rachel Edney]

Not me getting into another niche field--trauma literary theory

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted this book to be so much more. The introduction had me by the throat. Honestly, this introduction is one of the best things I've read all year. I had heard a little about trauma theory, but I never had any way to contextualize or conceptualize it. "Trauma" as a word unfortunately has been so politicized that I used to scoff when people seemingly labelled everything trauma. I think the word "stress" sometimes works better, because that allows for a wider range of experiences and a larger range of painfulness experienced. Since reading that introduction, I would see myself and others reacting to stress in various ways, and the increased awareness made me much more empathetic.

So what is trauma theory? Caruth explains using the etymology of "trauma," which is a wounding, a bodily injury left open and not healing. This is a great metaphor for trauma: it's something that is torn open and isn't so easily understood (and thus not readily healed). The story of Tancred further elaborates what she means:

Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest
which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard
complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again.

Thus trauma is something that recurs. It pulsates, it returns, time and time again. It's like being chained to an event, but the chain is rubbery and pulls you back at unexpected times. It's rubbery like the sinews of the body, because it's embedded in unexpected places. I used to scoff at the idea of trauma being stored in the body, but now I understand much better what is meant by that. Knowledge isn't just something abstract and rational; so much of it is something instinctual, something that becomes unconscious, like practicing an instrument or sport or skill so much that it becomes "second nature;" in other words, you don't need to think about it to do it. In fact, at that point, actively thinking about it often messes you up, prevents you from fluidly and convincingly enacting the thing.

The other thing about trauma, besides its repetition, is its rippling effect, throughout your life and the lives that you touch. It doesn't stay contained in the one person who experienced it, but they often displace it onto others. Gabor Mate argues that this is precisely what the Jews in Israel are doing right now with Gaza, and I think he might be onto something. The Jews have defined themselves as the persecuted group throughout history, and it's really remarkable that they're still even alive despite it all. But now, in a moment where they finally hold power over another, they enact the same sort of traumatic violence that they so often endured throughout the centuries. It's something so depressingly ironic that you can't even laugh if you wanted to.

Trauma is a lot like history in that you can really only understand it after mulling it over years after the fact. It's not something immediately evident, and that's why it continually recurs to the mind. The repeated failure to circumscribe the event causes a dangerous mixture of fascination and frustration which can destroy a person. In another parallel, you can "know" the bare facts of the history (or the trauma), such as terrorists attacking the US on 9/11, but you can't fully understand the ramifications until it has been properly digested. It might take years, whole wars, before it is digested. Perhaps the most disturbing realization Caruth has in the introduction is that trauma might not be a terror of facing death, but rather the experience of surviving death. Usually people will say things like "I shouldn't have survived," yet here they are, in the calm after the storm. The disconnect between the violent experience and the quiet aftermath causes tension, a tension which the body expects but isn't experiencing.

The first chapter brought up a notion I learned from poetry, namely that we must "permit... history to arise where immediate understanding may not." Often, I read a poem and don't have any clue what it "means;" all I really know is that I enjoyed or didn't enjoy it, and I can pick out specific phrases which shoot sparks in my mind. Other than that, I don't even attempt much in the way of linear comprehension. On subsequent returns to the poetry, I slowly understand it more and more intimately, treating it as a relationship that I'm developing, something as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. I'm convinced that if more people treated others as poems rather than games to "play" or puzzles to "solve," we'd be a much happier society.

But I'm not happy, at least not with how the book continued after the introduction. The book wasn't badly written per se, because Caruth wrote with care and included lots of background information and contextualization. The problem I have is that she tried salvaging Freud's Moses and Monotheism, which, if her summary is at all accurate, sounds like one of the stupider things Freud has written (and that's saying a lot). Rather than relying on any historical or textual evidence, Freud quite literally makes up a story about the "original" Moses getting killed off, then the Israelites inventing monotheism as a way to grieve for the "original" Moses (who has since been replaced with another guy named Moses?). Freud has a bad track record of simply making up things whole cloth to support his theories, and here it becomes especially evident.

Rarely have I started a book so enthusiastically but struggled to badly to finish it once started. The only other example I can think of was Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, which set my skull on fire at the start, but put out the flames about halfway through. With this book, all of the ideas were stretched out for far too long, and ironically there was too much repetition. Too much mulling over the same small blades of grass. What seemed to me to be massive at the start was whittled down to a nub by the end, and that was a shame. For example, when reading the intro I thought of so many parallels between Christianity and trauma theory, but the one time that Caruth brings the two together, it's in the stupidest way imaginable:

Indeed, Freud says, when Paul interprets the death of Christ as the atonement for an original sin, he is belatedly and unconsciously remembering the murder of Moses, which still, in the history of the Jews, remains buried in unconsciousness. In belatedly atoning, as sons, for the father’s murder, Christians feel Oedipal rivalry with their Jewish older brothers; a lingering castration anxiety, brought out by Jewish circumcision; and finally a complaint that the Jews will not admit the
guilt that the Christians, in their recognition of Christ’s death, have admitted.

Thus, as Derrida complained, Caruth "uses psychoanalysis to find psychoanalysis," and as a result says nothing interesting about the many fascinating links between trauma theory and Christianity. Nothing at all about the repeated re-telling of the story of Christ's death, the trauma of the cross, the encounter with death that's survived (the resurrection), the repeated (3) synoptic gospels plus the Johannine gospel (four gospel accounts rather than one), the trauma of martyrdom being inscribed into the early church, etc. None of that.

The second chapter does bring up the valuable question of who has the right to tell what stories; this was a dilemma we brought up in our reading of Just Above My Head by James Baldwin, and Caruth uses a belabored example in the movie Hiroshima mon amor (1959) to explore it. Similarly in the Baldwin class, this brought up the question of what being a "witness" (martyr!) means; does it imply that you have to literally have witnessed it? What about "blessed are they who have not seen, yet still believe?" Furthermore, the trauma of the two nukes meant different things for the French and Japanese characters in the movie; for the French woman it meant the end of the war (the end of suffering), but for the Japanese man it meant much more, a beginning of humiliation, a new tragedy, a new way of dying, a new method of defeat.

The third chapter expounded on the idea of trauma being an experience that enters the psyche/memory unmediated, in other words indigestible, something so foreign that the mind doesn't know how to reject it or ingest it, like a bodkin arrow left in the wound. Perhaps the best part of the chapter was this quote:

These dreams are endeavoring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis.

In other words, a traumatic experience is one that you aren't ready for and could never have been ready for, so your mind keeps bringing it back up in an effort to see how to prepare for it. It's like re-attempting a high-five until you get a solid connection, but instead of something as banal as a high-five it's watching your buddies get blown up in war or being sexually assaulted by someone you love. It's an "attempt to master what was never fully grasped in the first place. Not having truly known the threat of death in the past, the survivor is forced, continually, to confront it over and over again."

The fourth chapter of the book simply does not belong in it, because it doesn't talk at all about trauma. Instead, it belabors some discussion of referentiality and other unresolvable paradoxes in linguistics. On one level that sort of stuff is deeply interesting (because so paradoxical and mysterious), but at the same time it didn't add anything to the book so I skimmed it heavily.

The fifth chapter dwelt on the classic "burning child" dream and Freud's vs Lacan's vs Caruth's approaches to it, which were each only slightly different. As a result, I got very little from this chapter. Here's the classic dream:

A father had been watching beside his child’s sick-bed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see
from his bedroom into the room in which his child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing round it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: “Father, don’t you see I’m burning?” He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen on them.

I'm still trying to figure out what I think about trauma theory, but I find it a really promising direction to move (in spite of, not because of its indebtedness to Freud). I'd love to see it divorce itself from him or more fully mature and move on from his tendency to just make up stuff, but we'll see how that goes.

[Al waleed Kerdie · Rating 3 out of 5]

كتاب نفسي يحلل اضطراب ما بعد الصدمة في سضوء أفكار فروبد في كتابيه "موسى والتوحيد" و"ما وراء اللذة" بإلإضافة للاعتماد على تحلي فيلم "Hiroshima mon amour”

[DAN D.S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was happy to meet Cathy in person. I have heard her brilliant lecture “Human Rights: Literature and Trauma”- she felt a great passion for what she was doing. That was when I decided to read this book and I was not disappointed.
Trauma has two sides: inescapability and survival – that is the key to the understanding of this great book.
I like Cathy’s analysis of Freud's works and "Hiroshima mon amour" film. Especially, when I watched the film after reading, I noticed their laughter at the beginning. This reminded me of the old line from "The way we were" - "What's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget...".
I recommend this one for everybody who loves reading and analyze.

[Ai Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was really just okay, but I'm giving the third star out of the benefit of the doubt that Caruth's work reflects what she wanted to do, and that just because it wasn't a book that I found interesting or particularly useful doesn't mean it's a bad book per se. It just was way more focused on the actual text of Freud's work rather than the way I understand using trauma to talk about history, which is fine and fair and actually this book is what has made me decide I need to actually read more Freud, but I didn't connect with her claims nor did I feel like the essays connected or supported any kind of overarching conclusion at all.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this served as a useful first book about theorizing trauma, it left a lot of unanswered questions. So much of it is based on one or two example from Freud, I wonder if Caruth's conclusions are applicable to a larger set of experiences. Part of my confusion, however, may stem from the de Man essay that felt forced into the book. While I understand that this is a collection of progressive essays, a little more connection between the Freud essays and those about de Man and the idea of falling would have been helpful.

[loafingcactus · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is chapters which are stand-alone essays (as so many books are these days...), each explaining the gap between experience and knowledge that is trauma through the analysis of a particular work of fiction.

It is very dense and very theoretical and I wouldn't have gotten anywhere with it if I had not already read much more accessible work both on humanity and on psychology. It actually seems like a very narrow work as well, as it doesn't reach very far into either of those topics to really develop the place of this topic in relation.

A quick read anyway.

[Joanne Gass · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I was hoping for help in understanding trauma theory as something other than a very intricate explication of Freud's dream of the burning bed. Too much emphasis on Freud and not enough exploration of the narrative impulse.

[connie · Rating 2 out of 5]

cathy caruth wrote 'In other words, one might eleborate' and that's all you really need to know about her writing style. if i have to read 'that is/that is to say' as an interjection ever again it'll be too soon.

[steds · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pivotal moment in trauma studies in 1990s. Feels dated, focuses on lit/film critique - not my lens.

[l · Rating 2 out of 5]

FATHER DON'T YOU SEE I'M BURNING?!

I hate Freud. Quite devotedly.

[Suzette Kunz · Rating 2 out of 5]

More scintillating reading for the PhD.

[Marian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some decent ideas and resonant bits scattered around, mostly in early chapters, but for my taste too dry, opaque, and belabored overall. Looking for other works on these themes.

[Joe Kraus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am way late to call this remarkable book to other people’s attention. As it is, I read the 20th anniversary edition, and even that was published eight years ago.

So, yeah, this is a classic. At least I can confirm that.

Caruth essentially theorizes (maybe before anyone else, maybe just better than others who came before her – I’m still new to the waters of trauma theory and haven’t figured that out yet) how to discuss trauma as it expresses itself (or takes form in) literature.

She begins by reading Freud – through Lacan – as asserting that trauma is a present-tense experience. By its nature, trauma is so overwhelming that the mind can’t comprehend it. Trauma comes as a surprise, as something the mind couldn’t/cannot prepare itself for. As a consequence, the survivor is called unconsciously to reenact some part of the traumatic experience as a way of making sufficient sense of it to defend itself.

One of Freud’s famous examples is his observation of his young grandson who played “fort”/“da” as a reenactment of his sense that his mother would leave him and then return. Another is his reading of Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered in which Tancred, the Crusader knight, has inadvertently killed his beloved, Clorinda. When he finds himself in an enchanted wood, he strikes at a tree and hears her voice. That is, he could not understand the trauma of killing her when it took place, but he could begin to comprehend the experience – to hear a literal voice explaining what had happened – only after he reenacted the original killing.

From my perspective – which is as someone working through my Vonnegut project – her greatest insight is the sense that, because trauma is unresolved, it exists for the survivor as a timeless experience. Trauma, that is, disrupts chronology, flattening everything into a perpetual present. Trauma WAS, but it also IS, and likely WILL BE.

That sharpening of Freud into literary theory works perfectly for Vonnegut who, after all, declared of the protagonist of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse Five that “Billy Pilgrim had become unstuck in time.” For Billy, indeed for the entire alien race of Trafalmadorans, time is a dimension as navigable as space. They can move forward and backward in it, choosing to linger in one or another place.

So, Caruth gives me with this the exact theory for understanding trauma that I have sense was out there but had yet to encounter.

All that said, I’m struck by a defensiveness of her part.

In the original text, we get a lengthy chapter that wrestles with deconstructionist champion (and fascist apologist) Paul deMan. There are some fresh extensions to her central work, but Caruth seems intent on showing that what she is doing squares with the literary theory of the time. I can largely forgive her since she was a Yale grad student under that crew (Hillis Miller blurbs the book on back). I still hope to impress my graduate mentors, and I wouldn’t want to write something that seemed to cross them.

Then, in the afterword to the 20th anniversary edition, she spends most of her time addressing critics that her work – derived from Freud and depending so centrally on a metaphor taken from a work valorizing the Crusades – insufficiently privileges a Western perspective.

Fair enough, I suppose – and I find her answer persuasive. Still, I’d have preferred more of a victory lap afterword, more of a reflection on how trauma theory has helped shape the lit-crit discourse of the last couple decades. I believe it has, and I’d (selfishly) like to have seen her discuss that here so I’d know more of where to read next.

Impressive work, though, and I am grateful for it.

[Hollis]

One doesn't need to be especially invested in psychoanalysis to get something out of one (or multiple) of Cathy Caruth's chapters discussing the impact of trauma studies on conceptualizations of history, dreaming, philosophy, and more. I especially enjoyed the first and third chapters. In the First, in conversation with Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Caruth claims that “in the equally widespread and bewildering encounter with trauma” we “can begin to recognize the possibility of a history that is no longer straightforwardly referential” and that “a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (11).

Later, she goes on the suggest that “[f]or history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs; or to put it somewhat differently, that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence” (18). Her emphasis on history as that which those of the present are unable to access is fascinating and intriguing as it calls into question the many supposable ways we have to represent and discuss the past. Perhaps Caruth is too bold in her claim, but in overreaching, she nonetheless provokes deep reflection as to what unsettles when one attempts to understand one of many historical episodes.

Chapter Three continues this theme with the statement that “trauma is not simply an effect of destruction but also, fundamentally, an enigma of survival” and that “[i]t is only by recognizing traumatic experiences as a paradoxical relation between destructiveness and survival that we can also recognize the legacy of incomprehensibility at the heart of catastrophic experience” (58). In this chapter, Caruth argues that it is not death so much as survival that consciousness struggles to come to terms with.

Some of Caruth's claims echo what is commonly regarded in conversations around survivor's guilt and other aspects of trauma that I assume are more popularly understood now compared to when she was originally writing. Where Caruth's writing differs is in the emphasis on problems of representing these ideas, which leads her to engage many philosophical excerpts from Freud, Kant, Lacan, and more. It's a brief book, and one that, despite its age, continues to present challenging and interesting ideas.

[E. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very rarely do I manage to finish books on literary theory in a single day, but it happened with this book. It is written very lucidly, and discusses exactly what it sets out to discuss: trauma, narrative, and history. The most important readings (for me) were of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the burning child dream (and Lacan's rereading in Seminar XI), and Freud's writing on Moses. The focus is on the temporary of the traumatic event and the role of history in the subject's reconciliation with it. The argument is not that much more than what a psychoanalytically informed reader will expect, and has quite a bit of repetitions (perhaps because most of the chapters are already published elsewhere). The only truly eye-opening reading is the interpretation of awakening as the intrusion of the Real in the final chapter, and that little bit about ethics. The readings do not really adhere to a clear theoretical framework (except the final chapter, maybe) and problems of language, which is an important, recurring theme, is not really addressed at a philosophical level. The defense against postcolonialists in the epilogue of the 20th anniversary edition is just sad to read.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally fascinating book that I read for my dissertation. Some of the arguments about poststructuralism vs Lacan go over my head, but the bits about Freud are eye-opening.

Even though I don't think she mentions it, this book seems key to understanding MacBeth, and I clearly need to read Freud's Beyond The Pleasure Principle.

Moses and Monotheism, however, seems slightly mad (I don't think there's any evidence that the ancient Hebrews murdered Moses and replaced him with another man of the same name, but maybe I'm missing something: isn't Moses a legendary figure anyway, so any historical evidence for his existence is written down five centuries after his death?).

Last chapter, on Freud and Lacan's not-mentioning of their children's early deaths, is powerful and moving.