The Effects of the Traumatic in the Weaving of Memorialistic Narratives

Abstract

This paper analyzes the speech demands of young people participating in three different psychoanalytic research experiences to investigate social phenomena. The Memorialistic Narratives were adopted as the data collection method. Following the proposed strategy, such requests emerged after these young people narrated their life stories. It is observed that those who demand new speech spaces in the three studies in reference are those who went through traumatic experiences, with particular emphasis on young people who acquired disabilities due to gunshot wounds. Therefore, this study develops an analysis of these speech demands based on the Freudian theory of trauma.

Introduction

The scientific research process, with its rhythms, times, stops and movements, requires researchers to be open to the new, which sometimes refers to the encounter with paradoxes, contradictions, and differences, that is, a true adventure in the field of alterity, because the researched themes change, move, fit and unfit. As Plato teaches us (428 BC-347 BC) in The Sophist: “…our inference is, that if there is no motion, neither is there any mind anywhere, or about anything or belonging to anyone…And yet this equally follows if we grant that all things are in motion—upon this view, too mind has no existence. (Platão, 2011, p. 91). In other words, it is in the articulation between movement and rest that scientific research is situated. Movement and rest act both in the researcher and in the researched phenomenon. After all, as Platão (2011) emphasizes: “And on this view being, in so far as it is known, is acted upon by knowledge, and is therefore in motion; for that which is in a state of rest cannot be acted upon, as we affirm” (p. 91), which also occurs with the researcher who, when exploring a specific field of knowledge, suffers the action and the consequent displacements from this search.

Considering these two states, movement and rest in academic research, we reflect in this paper on the effects arising from the invitation to speak inaugurated by Memorialistic Narratives (Guerra, Oliveira, Moreira & Lima, 2017) method, which relates to data collection adopted in three different experiences of psychoanalytical research aimed at investigating social phenomena. Such studies are separated by time intervals of about one year, reinforcing the Platonic logic of articulation between movement and rest, from which lies the bases of a scientific investigation.

We can present the Memorialistic Narratives as a method for studying complex social phenomena, guided by the ethics of psychoanalysis (Lacan, 1959–1960/1997) and by fundamental concepts of this field such as free association, the indistinction between reality and fiction and the fixations of jouissance that mark the young people’s speech. Considering these precepts, the researched participants are invited, in this method, to narrate their life stories under the free association, starting from the following question: “Tell me your life story?”. A complex question that produces a particular enigma in each one (Moreira et al., 2022), but the participants freely narrate their stories. The woven narratives are recorded, re-listened to and analyzed by the researchers, always considering the psychoanalytical orientation in data analysis and the focus of the research object. In addition to listening to the researchers, this method has the participation of artists who produce different types of works based on listening to these life stories (Moreira & Guerra, 2020). Finally, a meeting is organized between young narrators, artists and researchers to give young people reinterpretations of their narratives in the form of artistic pieces (Guerra et al., 2022).

Trauma will be a guiding concept in the analysis presented on these listening and speech demands since all participants who addressed such requests to us had gone through explicit traumatic events.

Before we start contextualizing the research, it is important to highlight some ethical issues. Firstly, we stress that in Brazil, there is a National Research Ethics Commission (in Brazil, Comissão Nacional de Ética em Pesquisa- CONEP), created through Resolution 196/96 (In Brazil, Resolução no. 196, 1996) and with constitution designated by Resolution 246/97 (In Brazil, Resolução no. 246, 1997), with the function of implementing the norms and regulatory guidelines for research involving human beings, approved by a Council. Every researcher must submit his research to CONEP and together with a document entitled Term of Free and Informed Consent (in Brazil, Termo de Consentimento Livre Esclarecido - TCLE). This document provides simplified research information such as objectives, methodological procedures, risks, and benefits. It establishes non-mandatory participation and freedom to leave at any time. It also indicates the offer of psychological care and guarantees anonymity; it requests consent and authorization to disclose data, without direct identification, in the form of academic products. CONEP approved our research; each participant read and signed our consent form. We would also like to point out that all the names of the participants mentioned in this article are fictitious. We used pseudonyms the authors chose to preserve the young people’s identities.

In the following section, we will present the three research experiences cited, seeking to identify, in each of them, which were the young people who presented this speech demand, in what context they occurred and what these participants still wanted to tell us.

Methods

The research “Adolescences and Laws” conducted between the years 2016 and 2018 by the research group Psychoanalysis and Social Bond in the Contemporary (in Brazil, Psicanálise e Laço Social no Contemporâneo [PSILACS]) and coordinated by Professors Andrea Guerra (UFMG) and Jacqueline de Oliveira Moreira (PUC-MG), inaugurated the adoption of Memorialistic Narratives in the context of psychoanalytic research focused on the investigation of social phenomena. This research investigated the subjective conditioning factors favorable to the connection and disconnection of young people into criminality, from listening to the narratives of the life history of 16 young men aged between 16 and 35, involved or not with crime. The contact with these young people was mediated by researchers from the nucleus who knew them directly, either due to friendship bonds or previous work experiences and also by partner professionals from the nucleus who worked in the field of public policies aimed at young people.

Of the 16 young people participating in the “Adolescences and Laws” survey, only one, Júlio, asked to retell his life story. This young man was not involved in criminality. His narrative was based on three main points: (1) the pain felt by the separation of his parents, (2) the loneliness felt as a result of the absence of his parents in caring for him and his difficulty in making friends at school and (3) the importance of his encounter with dance, taken as a place for building bonds and life drive.

However, on the occasion of the sharing (a term inspired by Rancière, 2005), the moment of returning the art pieces, another theme emerged: the death of a friend in his early teens. Deep in emotion, the young man said he regretted not responding to some of this friend’s demands. That friend had cognitive impairments, and Júlio acknowledged having little patience to deal with his difficulties. A year after the devolution meeting, Júlio addressed a new speech demand. This time, he wanted to retell his life story. This desire arose when the young man was invited again by a researcher of the nucleus to participate in her Master’s investigation, which sought to investigate the effects arising from the intervention method of Memorialistic Narratives in the young participants of the research “Adolescences and Laws”.

Throughout the interview given to the researcher mentioned above, the young man spoke about the desire to retell his life story, justifying that, this time, he would like to do it in a way that everything would be in order without “getting in tangles” and without “coming back” (Malta, 2021). A new narrative about his life trajectory was woven based on the pain of his parents’ separation. However, this time Júlio talked about the death of his “disabled friend” (a signifier used by the young) and about a depressive period he faced in 2011, a year before his encounter with dance, which he mentions, again, as something that brought him encouragement and drove desires.

One year after that meeting in which the young man recounted his life story, he turned to the researcher seeking psychological assistance. Júlio’s case provoked us to think of the traumatic scene through the image of a ball of wool, which is unfolding, but which is never wholly unwoven, thus preventing “everything from being in order”, from coming back or getting in tangles, as the young man told us in his desire to retell his life story. A new thread is added for each one that arranges itself outside the knot. In the weaving of the threads that organize themselves and the ones that are tangled, the participant constructs a narrative that highlights the impossibility of either saying about everything or unraveling all the yarns of a symbolic plot, also woven by the imaginary and real dimensions (Lacan, 1953/2010).

Except for Júlio, no participant in the “Adolescences and Laws” research turned to the researchers with a new speech demand. We believe that revisiting the traumatic scene of his friend’s death provoked an urgency in Júlio that was embodied in a request for more speech space, outlined by the weaving/tessitura of a new narrative and his desire to start an analysis. We chose to present the two ideas of weaving and tessitura, thinking that, on the one hand, the subject weaves the fabric of his story when composing his narrative. On the other hand, his voice is arranged in notes, interpreted as a signifier in this experience. It functions as a transmission instrument of their traumatic experiences, following the idea of notes tessitura in a musical composition.

In that regard, let us move on to the second experience of psychoanalytic research, focused on investigating social phenomena, in which the Memorialistic Narratives method was also adopted. It is transdisciplinary research: “Life course and delinquency trajectory: an exploratory study of the events and narratives of young people in vulnerable situations”, financed by the Institute of Advanced Transdisciplinary Studies (in Brazil, Instituto de Estudos Avançados Transdisciplinares [IEAT]) of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and supported by the fields of knowledge of sociology and psychoanalysis (CAEE 89451118.3.1001.5149). The main objective of the research was to trace the life course of young people in vulnerability, sheltered by the socio-educational system at some point in their lives, to identify events that explain the entry, permanence or exit of these young people from criminality (Guerra, Silva, Marinho, Moreira & Pereira, 2020).

In this research experience, only one young woman, Cecília, presented a speech demand after the recorders were turned off. Cecília confided to the pair of researchers accompanying her a sexual abuse suffered in childhood (de Oliveira Moreira et al., 2020). Listening to her suffering, the researchers offered her psychological support under the care of the UFMG teaching clinic, but the offer was refused. A new meeting between the young woman and the researchers occurred during the sharing, but no new speech demand emerged.

Following the research movements, we maintained the project of listening to young people’s relationship with criminality through memorialistic narratives. However, we chose to listen to young people with disabilities acquired by gunshot wounds. Thus, we aimed to problematize the effects of violence and criminality in the youth sphere by investigating, in addition to the increase in mortality and incarceration rates, the transformation of these young people into persons with disabilities, more specifically into people who need a wheelchair to get around. The research entitled “Young people with disabilities due to gunshot injuries: an exploratory study from the Memorialistic Narratives” (2022) was approved by the Ethics Committee of author’s university and is registered under CAAE: 24351419.0.0000.5137.

According to Brazilian legislation, specifically the Brazilian Inclusion Law (in Brazil, Lei Brasileira de Inclusão [Law No. 13,146, 2015]), a person with a disability is “one with a long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairment, which in interaction with one or more barriers, may present difficulties for full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others”.

In the survey “Young people with disabilities due to gunshot injuries,” three adult males who depended on the wheelchair device for locomotion were interviewed after gunshot injuries.

It seems important to report the difficulties the researchers face in locating these youngsters. We reached the young people through contact with the Sarah Kubitschek Hospital, an important public hospital that works with neurorehabilitation, whether for people with congenital or acquired disabilities.

Reflecting on the possible causes of an acquired disability, Maciel et al. (2016), in a study conducted at the Sarah Kubitschek hospital, concluded that most of the victims with gunshot wounds were young men, black, alcohol/drug users involved in drug trafficking. This study was undertaken from January to March 2013 and included 150 participants, of whom 94.7% were male, 72% black, and 67.3% were under 29 years old. The involvement in trafficking was present in 45.3% of the circumstances related to injuries caused by firearm projectiles, according to the victims’ reports. Following the research on the Index of Youth Vulnerability to Violence and Racial Inequality (In Brazil, Índice de Vulnerabilidade Juvenil à Violência e Desigualdade Racial – IVS) (Presidency of the Republic, 2015), homicides are the great tragedy of the young, male and black population. The national panorama presents a homicide rate among young blacks 155% higher than that of young whites. But, besides the high mortality rate, we also have young people who become disabled and, sometimes, dependent on a wheelchair. In this case, violence and vulnerability are added to the problem of mobility difficulties in the city.

Architectural barriers and lack of access to public means of transportation hinder free movement around the city, including participation in the research. In this sense, the researchers needed to travel to young people’s homes in violent and geographically rugged territories. We started listening to the young people on December 17, 2019, at Guilherme’s house, and we were touched by the fact that the young man lives on the second floor and to access the street, family members must carry his wheelchair.

Guilherme is 33 years old and acquired the injury over ten years ago; however, the exact age at which the incident occurred is unclear. Guilherme tells his story in 12 minutes and 47 seconds. With much difficulty in sentence construction, it seems the injury has produced cognitive problems. Poor and living on the periphery, the young man has several unexpected encounters with death during his adolescence and youth, which he describes in his narrative. Nevertheless, from his initiative, this end almost materializes and produces a medullar lesion in an attempt at self-extermination. Guilherme lives with his family and needs special care due to reduced mobility, offered mainly by his mother.

We returned for a second narrative on February 14, 2020, at his request. After this meeting, it was necessary to pause the data collection phase of the research due to the Covid-19 pandemic that prevented us from holding face-to-face meetings.

Then, on July 7, 2022, we finally resumed data collection, and we listened to Daniel, 47 years old, born in an inland town in Minas Gerais, who acquired the injury at age 25 in an exchange of fire with the police during a robbery. Daniel spoke for 31 minutes and 50 seconds and, after turning off the recording device, still reported his experiences for over an hour.

Today, Daniel lives alone on the periphery of Belo Horizonte and works as a street vendor. In addition, it is essential to emphasize that he gives us evidence, throughout his speech, that he is still involved with criminality in some way, having been arrested recently, in 2018. Although Daniel says he did not commit the crime, he was accused. He tells us his life trajectory almost uninterruptedly, relating his experiences since he left the interior, his involvement with criminality, his passages through the prison system and his life as a person with a disability.

Finally, on July 29, 2022, we listen to Gustavo, a 29-year-old who acquired the injury at 21, resulting from a shot fired by a rival gang. After hospitalization, Gustavo comes to live in a country town for safety since he is still a target of the gang. He has resided in the central region of Belo Horizonte, lives with his family and is an athlete.

Gustavo narrated his story for seven minutes and 35 seconds, dedicating four and a half minutes to relating the traumatic day of the crime and his glories as a Paralympic athlete.

The three young people directed speech demands to the researchers after their narratives were recorded and the recorders turned off. Guilherme demonstrates a lot of difficulties talking about himself in his report. Despite starting his speech about the attempt at self-extermination, he constantly asks the researchers to help him and give him “hints” on what he should say, in addition to remaining in long silences at various times. Thus, he tells fragments of his life, sometimes in a confusing and non-linear way. After the first narrative, Guilherme sent messages via WhatsApp saying he had not said “everything” and offering another visit to say more. This second time, Guilherme does not speak of the attempt at self-extermination; he quotes and enumerates his encounters with death, in the time between the narratives and after, the young person sends messages to the researchers, usually in stickers and images.

Daniel stops talking at a certain point during the meeting and signals the researchers to turn off the tape recorder. From there, he shows several photos of his family, hometown, people in the neighborhood and himself. After the recording is stopped, Daniel talks to the researchers for more than 1 hour about other life situations. In contrast to the recorded narrative, which lasts approximately 30 minutes, the participant makes a much longer report without the recording, besides inviting the researchers to lunch and saying they are now friends. Like Guilherme, Daniel sends messages via WhatsApp, asking if the researchers had arrived home safely on the meeting day.

Despite not sending messages as often as Guilherme and Daniel, Gustavo extends his report when the tape recorder is off. He gives details of the moment he acquired the injury and points out, on his body, the marks of the incident. He also talks about his life as an athlete, shows the researchers the various medals he has won over the years, and says more about his relationship with his wife and family.

Listening to these three young adults with disabilities acquired by gunshots produced a question in the researchers: does the experience of a traumatic scene affect the construction activity, that is, on the warp of weaving a memorialistic narrative? Does the act of arranging the threads on history loom to build the fabric of the memorial narrative suffer the effects of the traumatic scene? With these questions, we returned to previous research. We found, as explained above, those young people who experienced a traumatic scene were the ones who demanded other speech spaces after the recorders were turned off.

Hence, the next session will be reserved for a resumption of the concept of trauma in Freudian work, highlighting the fundamental aspect of trauma (Lacan, 1953/2010), that is, the impossibility of elaborating or symbolically inscribing the traumatic experience, which demands from the participants repeated attempts to draw-up the traumatic event, whether through speech, act or imaginary, phantasmatic and unconscious constructions.

Trauma Theory

The concept of trauma is exceptionally dear to Freudian work, and, not by chance, its development followed the author’s remarkable writing style based on the constant doing and the undoing of his ideas. In this session, we will discuss some elaborations, established and refuted by Freud, about this concept. We will start from the author’s inaugural studies on hysteria (Freud, 1895/1996), reaching the elaborations dated 1920, when in his text “Beyond the pleasure principle,” Freud develops, with precision, the relationship between the traumatic event and the rupture of the psyche’s defense mechanisms.

In “Studies on Hysteria” (Freud, 1895/1996), Freud and Breuer link the causal determination of neurosis to the experience of traumatic facts or accidents in the subject’s history. Despite being determined by multiple causes, according to the authors, trauma is still directly associated with the specific memories experienced capable of awakening the affection that is not sufficiently ab-reacted, responsible for its formation and, consequently, for the expression of symptoms. The treatment direction followed at the time outlines this logic since it bets on the revelation of the traumatic event – through hypnosis or speech – as a way for the symptoms to disappear.

In that same text, Freud (1895/1996) and Breuer propose the emergence of trauma in two stages: traumatic experience and the action of repression. Often, the psyche’s defense mechanisms repress the traumatic effects of disturbing incidents, causing a gap between the time of living the traumatic experience and the expression of the symptom. The repression barrier collapses, and the symptom emerges when the subject is faced, again, in his trajectory, with external stimuli capable of evoking the repressed memories. The effect from the repressed idea escapes repression and remains in transit in the psychic apparatus, being able to be expressed in the most particular guises of a symptom.

A few years later, in his “Letter 69” (Freud, 1897/1996), addressed to his friend Fliess, Freud considers the relevance of unconscious phantasmatic contents in the emergence of trauma and the formation of memories and shares his disbelief in the theory he had elaborated on the infantile sexual etiology of neurosis established in two stages. In this way, the causality of trauma comes, at this point in Freudian studies, not only from overdetermined real traumatic experiences but from unconscious imaginary constructions, the result of the subject’s psychic reality.

Freud continues to bet on the relevance of unconscious phantasmatic contents in the etiology of neuroses throughout his work. About twenty years after the writing of “Letter 69” (Freud, 1897/1996), in his “Conference XVIII” (Freud, 1917/1996), the author supports the differentiation between psychic reality and shared reality, taking the first as the one towards which psychoanalysis directs, primarily listening to it, after all, it is from it that we locate the reality in the cause of desire and the phantasmatic contents at play in the expression of the symptom.

Coming to the text “Beyond the principle of pleasure” (1920/1996), we found that trauma is developed from an analogy to the defense mechanism of the membrane of a living organism, which operates from opening and closing responses to external stimuli. The membrane is a protective shield that prevents disturbing external stimuli from invading the organism, compromising its homeostasis. However, this defense system breaks down in the face of excessive excitation and triggers, which causes a disturbance in the organism’s functioning.

The traumatic experience, according to Freud (1920/1996), carries this so-called excessive amount of joy and stimulus, being able to cross the repression defense mechanism and thus provoke the disturbance of the homeostatic functioning of the psyche, causing traumatic sensations of pain, anguish and anxiety. Nasio and Magalhaes (2010) remind us that the feelings caused by trauma can be physical or psychic. After all, this is a boundary phenomenon: “an imprecise boundary between the body and the psyche, or, above all, between the self and the other, or, mainly, between the well-regulated functioning of the psyche and derangement” (p. 19).

The disruption of defense mechanisms caused by the traumatic experience happens abruptly, without the necessary rhythm and periodization, not allowing the temporalization of the experience. Trauma is an experience out of time, “where past, present and future are confused in the fast and slow instant of now”, as Moreira (2002) reminds us, in line with the Freudian theory on the two stages of trauma. The action of repression causes a gap between the time spent living the traumatic experience, whether resulting from psychic reality or shared by the subject, and the manifestation of the symptom. That said, we echo the formulation by Catani (2018), who tells us that “Trauma is always timeless; for trauma, there is no past, only present” (p. 182).

The marks of a traumatic experience are expressed beyond the time they happen. The symptoms caused by the trauma can be expressed a long time after the occurrence of specific episodes or insist, repeatedly, as a challenging memory to be forgotten. In this way, the episode that occurred in the past is always present.

Considering such prerogatives on the trauma concept, especially those that point to the repeated attempts to satisfy the drive excess arising from the traumatic experience, we propose to analyze the speech demands presented by the participants participating in the three-experience research mentioned above, as repeated attempts to speak about the impossible, to seek a symbolic inscription capable of stemming the driven excess of the trauma. This excess remains insistent and wanders around the contours of these participants’ bodies, searching for a possible representation, a symbolic anchor point. Inspired by Kristeva (1994), we can think of the traumatic experience as the invasion of a strange, foreign content that the narration makes possible some appropriation.

In the face of the foreigner that I refuse and with whom I identify at the same time, I lose my limits, I no longer have a container, the memories of the experiences into which I had fallen overwhelm me, I lose control. I feel ‘lost’, ‘vague’, ‘foggy’. (Kristeva, 1994, p. 196)

Notwithstanding, and making use of the Freudian theorization about the times of emergence of the trauma, could we interpret the speech and listening to on demands of these young people as one more among the infinite times in which the subject wanders in search of a symbolic inscription for the traumatic experience that marks on their body? Data analysis does not allow us to answer this question accurately, but we can find characteristic elements of trauma in the narratives of young participants in the research.

In the following section, considering the effort to reduce and present the data collected throughout the three surveys cited – “Adolescences and Laws” (2018), “Life course and delinquent trajectory” (2020) and “Young people with disabilities due to gunshot wounds” (2022) –, we chose to develop an analysis of the characteristic elements of trauma only in the narratives of the young participants in the last mentioned study, in which all participants addressed new speech demands and, not by chance, they went through traumatic experiences throughout their lives.

Findings

According to Huyghebaert (2009), young people aged up to 18 are increasingly victims of armed conflicts. The author points out that, according to several United Nations reports, it is estimated that today, due to armed conflicts, more than 6 million of these young people have acquired a permanent disability. In Brazil, according to Maciel et al. (2016):

In 2013, the gunshot also stood out as an instrument for the practice of aggression among adolescents (10 to 19 years old) in the country, being the means used to generate injuries in 48.2% of these young people hospitalized in the Unified Health System (in Brazil, Sistema Único de Saúde [SUS]). Its use was also frequent among adults (20 to 59 years), reported in 20.5% of hospitalizations in this age group. (p. 608)

How to welcome these wounded young people, victims of this structural violence? Political and social mobilization would be necessary to offer effective follow-up devices. In our reflection, we can explain the strength of the trauma in these lives through its location in the narratives. We know, with Catani (2018), that “times, memories and perceptions are crucial elements for understanding what happened and is happening and that there is a strong presence and staging of the unspeakable, which cannot be transposed into words and representations in a traumatic experience” (p. 181). And this presence of the unspeakable produces effects in the narratives. At the same time, we found strategies for explaining and defending the traumatic scene in each interview.

Inspired by Guerra (2001), we know that it is possible to search for “meaningful points” in people’s speech, that is, to name, to put into words what people repeat or elements loaded with greater affection detected by the voice’s timbre. In the seminars transcribed in “The Bone of an Analysis”, Miller (1998) comments on the way Andrade (1928), a Brazilian poet, in the poem “In the middle of the road” ¹ (In Brazil, “No meio do caminho”), manages to pass his message by repeating words, or, better saying, articulating signifiers through “operations-reduction”. This operation involves three mechanisms: repetition, convergence and avoidance, that is, decanting from the discourse what repeats itself either in words or in the mode of enunciation, what centralizes or has a centripetal force concerning the discourse and, finally, what is avoided in the narrative.

Thus, in this operation-reduction, to locate the signifiers, we understand that the repetition of words or the repetition of the enunciation mode may transmit the force, sometimes unnameable, of the traumatic experience. And yet, the centralization of the discourse in a certain scene may also emit the rawness of the trauma. And, finally, avoidance, the escape from speech to camouflage the trauma’s pain.

Based on the trauma theory of psychoanalysis, we can hear in the narratives of the young people elements that point out this experience after the injury by firearm, either by the disaggregated or contradictory speech or by the richness in the reconstruction of the traumatic scene. We understand, therefore, that the traumatic experience can produce a disintegration of the self and place the person in a situation of confusion. We identified in Guilherme’s narrative this element.

In the interviewee Guilherme, it was possible to observe a certain disaggregation of thought, evident through silences, dispersion and difficulty maintaining a line of reasoning during the report. As Catani (2018) reveals: “it is a reorganization or, more precisely, a disorganization, if we can say so, of what happened to that person” (p. 182). From the beginning of the narrative, shortly after the researchers asked the triggering question, Guilherme already shows embarrassment when telling his own story, remaining silent after saying a few sentences and asking, “What else am I going to say?”. The silence, already present after a few sentences have been spoken, persists in the initial narrative and the one made when he asks us to return. At one point, the silence reaches more than 1 minute in duration.

Guilherme, “Give me a hint of what I’m talking about there.”

Researcher, “But what else do you want to tell us?”

[silence]

G, “Life is not easy, see, huh? Wow... I suffer every day...”

[silence]

G, “Some of my friends died killed, my friends. A few were left, right? The real ones all died, the real ones. I got shot in the back before I did this to myself...”.

[silence]

G, “Oh, yeah. What did you come from, by car? Uber? Did somebody leave you at the door right here?”

[long silence – The radio and the dog barking are heard.]

G, “I feel the whole body, you know? I feel everything. I just can’t move the arm. I feel everything, and I feel the legs… thank God! With the physiotherapist again, I can walk. It helped a lot… anything there?”

R, “Oh, For sure.”

[silence]

In those moments of silence, it was not uncommon for Guilherme to be distracted by the radio and/or television, both connected to sports channels that broadcast soccer games. In this sense, we raise the possibility that the trauma affects Guilherme’s speech, causing disaggregated thinking, which appears as a defensive strategy related to the trauma. We can think of trauma as the reverse side of memory (Moreno & Coelho Junior, 2012).

In Daniel’s narrative, the incidence of trauma points to a split, a thought that contradicts statements. At times, Daniel presents a discourse of conformity. That is, his speech approaches that of a citizen resigned to repressive, racist and exclusionary morals; in others, he presents himself as someone revolted by this model but who is driven to criminality by this revolt.

At 33 seconds into the narrative, Daniel tells us that “everyone makes mistakes” when reporting the exchange of fire with the police in which he is shot. Regarding involvement with criminality, he tells us,

That’s what happened. I got involved in criminality, and I’ve been using a wheelchair for 22 years, but I don’t blame anyone, not even myself, right?! Sometimes you go in; you are weak. Sometimes you need help, and I don’t know. Sometimes you find that thing to do and can’t find someone else to come and give you advice. Today, if I… I share some advice, if I see that a child… a young person is getting involved in criminality, I say, ‘beware, you pay dearly for this!’. We pay dearly for that.

Further on, Daniel also says he does not blame the police for his incident,

I can pass on to you that we cannot blame a wheelchair for anything. The chair, if you don’t have legs, the chair is your leg. I’m not going to blame you, and I’m not even going to blame the government. I’m not going to blame the police. If the police shot me, it’s because I were wrong. If I had been praying, they wouldn’t have hit me. That’s how I think, so I have to live my life and teach people who don’t know the path I traced was a rebellious one. You’re there to kill or be killed. If you don’t kill, you die.

However, a little later in his narrative, Daniel talks about police violence, the role of the president in this context and the failure of Brazilian justice,

Both sides, justice and banditry, are killing like chickens. I don’t think even a farm kills like a chicken... The police are killing. It’s on the side of banditry. It’s on the side of the police. After this, Bolsonaro… they invented this president. How many people have these guys killed? Did you see that... from Varginha? Those guys didn’t shoot anyone. Those guys were murdered. They went over them like a bulldozer. And that was, it’s been, it’s been around for about four months now, sometimes you don’t see it, but already... more people were killed here in Brazil by the police than in that war. I think those days in Rio were 35, then more than 24…On the Maranhão (State) side, those days over there, it was 32. So, you add up, and the result is that justice, our Brazilian justice is flawed....

In addition, Daniel also contradicts the speech he gave earlier, that is, that the State and other people are not to blame for his disability, and demonstrates anger at the lack of resources and support from the government and society,

Another thing, for those of us who use a wheelchair, we only have special care here, on paper, do you understand?! [Takes the ICF (Informed Consent Form) in his hand and shakes it, showing us]. I’m in a wheelchair, so buying an ointment for myself is more expensive than yours. If I buy something else, everything I will buy is costly. Look, you see [points to the door’s exit towards the sidewalk, there is a step to go up until you get home], you don’t have an accessible sidewalk. Today, thank God, there are buses. Today, most buses have a lift. This one was an improvement for us for those who use a wheelchair. But in conditions of being, of us being special is only on paper [balances the ICF again]. Because if you take a wheelchair, climb on top of it, and walk the way you want, you won’t go far; quickly, you’re on the ground. Because of what? You go downtown in a wheelchair, and you get here like this... because the street at the same time you’re pushing on this side, you’re pushing here and slowing down here because it’s all crooked. Bakery if you arrive at the bakery, there is no ramp. If you arrive at the store, sometimes if you look for a shirt, look for something, if you go there, there is no ramp in front of your face... How can a wheelchair user get in there? There’s no space. The majority is there. There’s no space for a wheelchair user, do you understand?! We who are wheelchair users do not have freedom. We are not treated the way they talk. We’re there just to say, ‘It’s special’... Get a girlfriend and go to a motel... you don’t have a motel for wheelchair users. Couldn’t a wheelchair user get a girlfriend? Wow?! Can a wheelchair user not have fun?! So, we, the person who is, has the injury, have many missing things, right?!

We perceive, therefore, that Daniel’s narrative is woven with different threads that do not follow a logical argument but present the oscillation of affections.

In Gustavo’s case, the trauma seems to focus on the speech in describing the traumatic scene: the young man vividly describes the night he was shot, revealing an imagery appeal that allows the listener to imagine the scene. This thrust that drags the speech to the scene offers us, then, a cinematographic description entirely loaded with images, as shown below,

We arrived, we were going, we took Antônio Carlos, we were reaching, then we passed in front of Odilon Behrens. Then, two cars were waiting for us when we turned onto the favela street; suddenly, that knot started, too many shots, and I, like, it seems that I went into a state of shock that I didn’t feel. I didn’t know what was going on. I only heard the noises but didn’t know what was happening. Then I saw him fall and hit his head on the steering wheel. He started squirting blood out of his mouth, trying to talk. Then I said, ‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’. Then, when he fell, the bullets started hitting me. I took six. Then the one that left me in the chair hit the neck, the C8 vertebra. Then, people arrived to try to help. Only my friend was already dead by then. Then I was already paralyzed without moving anything, just the neck. I could move [inaudible] just the neck.

The strength of the trauma seems to be inscribed in the images that stand out in the narrative. The report captures us in vivid images. According to Moreno and Coelho Junior (2012), the traumatic image “refers as much to the impressions that need to be associated with an image to gain meaning and psychic quality, as with pure negativity relative to the lack of sensitive and representational intelligibility” (p. 49).

Invested in the construction of forms that can offer some contour to this experience of driven excess lived by these young people, we continue with the second stage of our research method, which consists of producing artistic objects from listening to life stories. We believe that creating art based on narratives and the return of artworks to young people can offer another space for testimony and re-signification of trauma. To foster this discussion, we will present to readers the pieces produced from listening to the narratives of research participants. “Young people with disabilities due to gunshot wounds”. The extension of the art pieces created from the three research experiences mentioned does not allow us to expose the totality of the produced results in this paper.

Discussion

The act of welcoming and collecting the fragments of a traumatic experience through listening to a narrative crosses the listeners, although not in the same intensity that the invitation to speak affects the body of the narrator who lived that experience. Listening to the reports, marked by the revelation of violent incidents inflicted on the bodies of these young people, displaces everyone involved in the research experience from the comfort of their living arrangements. Thus, the experience of a traumatic scene affects the narrative’s form, content and listening.

We relied upon the generosity of Sebastião Brandão Miguel, painting teacher at the Guignard School of the State University of Minas Gerais (UEMG), who invited three of his students to participate as artists in the research “Young people with disabilities due to gunshot wounds”, from a proposal made by the Laboratory for Studies and Research in Psychoanalysis and Social Criticism (in Brazil, Laboratório de Estudos e Pesquisa em Psicanálise e Crítica Social [LAPCRIS/PUC Minas]), thus beginning the second stage of the Memorialistic Narratives method, in which the listening to the narrated life stories serve as inspiration for the creation of art pieces, as previously highlighted.

Inspired by Édourd Glissant, in his work Poetics of Relation (2021), we believe that the artist’s connection with the narrative “does not only instruct the transmitted, but also a relative and, still, the reported” (p. 52), that is, the listening and translation of the narrative in art form offering a truth perspective. We know, with Glissant (2021), that “the relationship that drives and enlivens the humanities needs the word to be edited, to continue” (p. 52). But the word, and even the artistic translation, does not produce an absolute. It makes relative truths, that is, which are placed in relation. The text and art reproduce traces we can follow to reconstruct the traumatic scene. Thus, the artistic piece (Figure 1) by Gabriel Heliakim Brito de Franca about Guilherme’s narrative reconstructs the plots of a story in an entanglement of wire over a wood fiber plywood mounted in a glass box.

According to Glissant (2021), Then came the time when the relationship no longer prophesies itself in a series of trajectories, itineraries that succeed or contradict one another, but, starting from and in itself, it explodes in the manner of a plot inscribed in sufficient totality in the world. (p. 540).

Figure 1.

Artwork by Gabriel Heliakim Brito de França based on Guilherme’s narrative. “For Guilherme”, 2022. Papering, gauche, oil, graphite, dermatographic pencil, varnish and wire over a wood fiber plywood, mounted in a glass box.

It seems to us that the art piece by Gabriel Heliakim Brito de Franca about Guilherme’s narrative reveals a relationship that is not fixed in linearity but moves in the chaotic tangle of life.

In the case of the art piece “Roda vive” (Life wheel) (Figure 2) by Cecília Sucasas Delgado Santos, inspired by Daniel’s narrative, we can say, with Glissant (2021), that the recognition of the other, which is an ethical requirement, becomes “an aesthetic component, the first precept of a true poetics of relation” (p. 54). Cecília Sucasas Delgado Santos reveals,

Figure 2.

Artwork by Cecília Sucasas Delgado Santos based on Daniel’s narrative. “Roda vive”, 2022. Technique: acrylic on wood.

When reflecting on the statement, I thought about how much the wheelchair user can feel reduced to a disability, feeling invisible. There is a desire to be active, to rule his destiny, sometimes going against the tide. And life shows that there is no way to control adversity. But he tells his story lightly, with perspective. His intricate, violent, tiring journey is still full of faith. Therefore, my intention with this painting was to continue bringing hope, to show the wheels present in his life as genuine gears beyond the chair: the wheel of joy, the wheel of time, and the wheel of destiny… “Wheel the world, giant Ferris-wheel, Whirlpool, Wheel spinning top”. Wheel!

According to Glissant (2021), “it is necessary to enter into the equivalence of the Relation because the poetics of relation does not imply rigidity. It contradicts the comfortable certainties” (p. 56). In this sense, Luisa de Godoy Alves’ production captures Gustavo’s narrative’s imagery power. It is an inkjet photo print framed in A4 size. According to the author,

The gray poster is titled “Quanto cabe no seu corpo? (How much fits on your body?). The technique includes performance, drawing and photography, but it is just a poster. The other is entitled “Corpos que compartilham lágrimas tremem juntos” (Bodies that share tears tremble together). The technique includes performance, ceramics, color, and photography, but in the same way, I would say it is a poster.

How much fits on a body? This is the question engraved in the image. Let us then imagine, with Glissant (2021), that aesthetics is not reducible to any normative simplicity and whose smallest detail is as complex as the whole” (p. 57). The production of art pieces from the narratives reveals a practice of interconnection that welcomes the rupture of and in lives. In this way, we ask ourselves: were the artists able to capture the drive excess of the traumatic scene that overflows in the narratives of these participants through the production of art pieces?

Conclusions

Each study mentioned in this paper required movement and new production from the researchers. In the research “Adolescence and Laws” (2018), based on the provocation of one of the young participants – who questioned the exploratory logic that permeates part of academic research based on the question: “What are you coming here now for? To take from us what we don’t have and make it look good in the university? -, the researchers mobilized themselves to propose a horizontal research method that would reward the collaboration and generosity of each young person in the construction of university knowledge. Thus, as exposed in the construction of this work, the proposal of the Memorialistic Narratives method was inaugurated in the field of psychoanalytic studies, based on narrating, creating and sharing (Guerra et al., 2022), with particular emphasis on the last process: sharing with the young people the art pieces made from listening to their life stories.

The research “Young people with disabilities due to gunshot wounds” also had its feedback stage, a moment when young people meet the art pieces. This meeting produced different effects for each participant. Unlike previous research, it took place individually, in the young people’s homes and with only their presence and a pair of researchers.

During the meetings, Guilherme thanked him in person and later via WhatsApp messages several times. During the meeting, Gustavo asked to take a picture with the art pieces and the researchers and said he would use it to decorate his room. On the other hand, Daniel assumed an evasive posture and avoided the devolutive moment. However, upon receiving the photos of the piece via WhatsApp, he thanked him, said he liked it and posted them in the “status” of the messaging application.

It can be noticed that the devolutive meeting inaugurated one more speech space, of which each youngster singularly made use. Notably, however, they all took the artistic object as an object of narcissistic restitution, exhibiting it on their social networks. The artwork seems to offer these young people an outline of the fragments of pain and violence that pierce their life stories. Beyond the restitutive semblance effect, the real dimension of the artworks in the devolutive meeting becomes clear. Whenever the participants look at an art piece, they see and say something more about them.

At this point, the constructions of Didi-Huberman about “What we see, what looks at us” (Didi-huberman, 2014) are deeply valued. After all, at the same moment that the subject sees the piece, it looks at him from the enigmatic depth of listening about his life trajectory. Following the proposal of the Memorialistic Narratives, there is no separation between life and work; art pieces and narrative pieces confuse themselves, that is, they merge: when looking and talking about the piece, the young person sees and says something more about his life trajectory, just as talking about his life story says something about what was the inspiration for the advent of the artwork.

These elaborations allow us to approximate the real dimension of the art piece to the unspeakable traumatic experience, which launches the subject in repeated attempts to say about the trauma, to attribute a meaning to what crossed his body and broke his skin, as Grada Kilomba (2020) stated. In her elaborations on structural racism, the author discusses the concept of trauma as damage in which the skin is broken because of external violence, which takes us directly to Freudian elaborations that take the traumatic experience as an effect of the disruption of the psyche’s defense mechanisms, that is, of its protective membrane, using the analogy listed by Freud (1920/1996).

The representational emptiness of the traumatic experience throws the subject into a metonymic slide that does not allow him to metaphorize the trauma but can also be taken as a condition that enables the subject to move away from the traumatic scene and, thus, starts his attempts to attribute new meanings to this experience marked by pain, anguish and helplessness. The findings of the present paper allow us to present the possibility of narrating (albeit several times) the artistic creation and the sharing, proposed as stages of construction of the Memorialistic Narratives method, as powerful spaces for welcoming the repeated attempts of the participants to elaborate the traumatic and displacement of the primary scene.