The Traumatic Experience Analysis

Fayoum University
Faculty of Arts
Department of English Language and Literature

The Analytic Poetic Images as a Reflection to The Traumatic Experience in The Selected Poems of Robert Bly and Alice Walker

Proposal for Ph.D. degree in English literature (poetry)

Submitted by
Islam Ibrahim Mohamed

To

The Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Arts

2015

INTRODUCTION

As the mainly study title is concerned with the poetic images as a result to the traumatic experience in the poetry of Bly and Walker in view of poetic analytical approaches. Accordingly, this study bases its analysis on the three basic issues that are proposed in the title thesis which are the traumatic experience, Alice walker

Trauma is often overcome through healing, in some cases, this is often achieved by recreating or revisiting the origin of the trauma under more psychologically safe atmosphere such as writing creative works poetry, novels and dramas (Situational Trauma, 7).

Cathy Caruth in her book “unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History'' argues “if Freud turns to literature describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psycho analysis, 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 the traumatic experience and the language of literature meet (Introduction, 1996, 1).

For Freud, language is a means to transform the expressed unconscious fantasy into conscious awareness. That is why his psychoanalytic treatment using the free association technique depends on language as a means of revealing what is hidden experience in the unconscious. The Freudian view of language, thus demonstrates the ability of language as a means to achieve psychic growth. This is what happens in the case of Bly and Walker when they use the psychic images in poetry as way to achieve

To complete the idea of traumatic experience, Freud first discusses traumatic experience to explain his work with hysterics and his crucial ideas about repression. His earliest idea is that hysteria is the outcome of repressed memories of traumatic, painful experience. So, according to what fraud states, the traumatic experience is an internal one. Freud in his repression-based model pays much attention to the role of the body, especially the mind, in the hysteric psychic pain and besides its role as a container of a memory or fantasy/wish. Repression leads to the rising of traumatic material from psychic into the body and indeed the body is viewed as something that has metaphorical existence. In this model, conversation is often present and the aim of the cure is to have the individual remember and put words to his / her experience that is to destroy repression. Thus according to Freud's theory, putting memories, experience and feeling into words has a profound effect, especially on the individual's self. (Sense of