Remains to Be Transmitted: Primo Levi’s Traumatic Dream

Drawing on the writings of Primo Levi and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, the author attempts to conceive psychic trauma as a coalescence of traumas, since this is perhaps the only way to prevent a subject from being forced back into identification with the catastrophic event, whatever that may have been. A recurrent dream of Primo Levi's suggests to the author the way that traumas may have coalesced within Levi. The hope would be to restore the entire significance of what remains from that traumatic event to the speech (parole) of the Other, to the speech of every human, even the most helpless, bruised, or destroyed among us.