Trauma or in search of lost agency

The purpose of this article is to explore the healing power of psychoanalytic narrating of trauma and its being listened to as a way of recovering the agency that violence has stripped away. Based on the Freudian theory of trauma, Judith Butler’s theory of subjection and Hannah Arendt’s theory of action, I analyze how agency is not a full a priori but rather an a posteriori construction achieved, in a deferred manner, in the story told to another who listens.