Amputated Selfhood and Phantom Selves: Musings and Reflections on Heretofore Unformulated Experience

Gita Zarnegar
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

In this article, I have drawn from my personal experience of exile and my work with patients suffering from similar devastation to illustrate an understanding of traumatic loss and its long-term impact on one’s experience of being in the world. I describe the image of traumatic loss as being an amputation of one’s own experience of being in the world, analogizing that experience to the amputation of a bodily part. I am proposing as well that parts of ourselves that can no longer go on being in relationship to the absent and grieved significant others in our lives are experienced as phantom selves. Using these metaphors permits us to re-conceptualize traumatic loss, broadening our understanding of the long-term effects of grief and mourning. In this effort I am neither pathologizing the senses of amputation or phantom selves, nor am I imposing a designated healing time, or any time when healing ensues at all. Rather, I conceptualize phantom selfhood as a healthy response to trauma that engages the imagination and allows us to preserve a sense of what was lost in order that we may provide a relational continuity within ourselves. I use the term phantomization to describe an unhealthy process by which an individual who has lost a loved one, or has been traumatically displaced, lives solely in an imaginary world of being with the loved one or within the lost place. The phantomized individual is unable to be present in his life and lives predominately in a phantom or illusory world.
被截断的自我与幻影的自我:对迄今为止尚未形成的经验的思考与反思
在这篇文章中,我将从我个人的流亡经历和我与遭受类似灾难的病人的工作中,来说明对创伤性损失的理解,以及它对一个人生活在这个世界上的经历的长期影响。我把创伤性损失的形象描述为一个人对自己在这个世界上存在的经历的截肢,把这种经历比作身体部位的截肢。我还提出,我们自己的一部分不能再继续与我们生活中缺席和悲伤的重要他人保持关系,就像虚幻的自我一样被体验。使用这些隐喻可以让我们重新定义创伤性损失,扩大我们对悲伤和哀悼的长期影响的理解。在这个过程中,我既没有将截肢的感觉或虚幻的自我病态化,也没有强加一个指定的治疗时间,或者任何治疗随之而来的时间。相反,我将幻像自我概念化为对创伤的一种健康反应,它调动了我们的想象力,使我们能够保留一种失去的感觉,以便我们能够在我们自己内部提供一种关系的连续性。我用“幻影化”这个词来描述一种不健康的过程,在这种过程中,一个人失去了所爱的人,或者受到创伤而流离失所,他只生活在一个想象的世界里,与所爱的人在一起,或者生活在失去的地方。幻影化的个体无法出现在他的生活中,主要生活在一个幻影或虚幻的世界中。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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