Telling trauma. Reflections on psychoanalysis and auto-fiction in the field of the un-past

In recent years, in continuation of the MeeToo movement, there has been an increase of auto-fictional publications of accounts of childhood sexual trauma, giving voice to survivors of child sexual abuse. As a reader of these texts and as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, I am convinced that personal accounts provide very authentic descriptions of sexual trauma. Not only does the content of these written stories illustrate valuable information of the nature of sexual trauma, so do the ways in which they are told, which resembles the psychoanalytic situation: While the analyst and the analysand listen to the content of the analytic dialogue, they also register the affective moods that accompany the attempts to create a coherent narrative of the analysand’s life, and as readers of written accounts of sexual trauma, we listen to the protagonist that struggles to find words that can name the nameless. Authors of auto-fiction acknowledge that exact documentary descriptions of the past are an illusion, and therefore fiction is a necessary element in the creation of coherent autobiographical accounts. Psychoanalysis as a theory and practice also acknowledges that the narratives told in psychoanalytic treatment contain aspects of construction.