Trauma and the Gap in the Narrated Body

It is confrontation with Chaos that triggers some change in the way one experiences oneself. Under normal conditions, the scripts people hold of themselves and their abilities can be projected onto the future. Such a projection creates a continuous image of one’s self through which actions in the present can be used to navigate towards future selves. In this sense, as will be elaborated on later in the book, individuals experience their identities as narrated entities that they inhabit.

As such, we I termed them narrated bodies in which we navigate through the Chaos of existence. Linking the reports and analysis above to the notion of “narrated body”, it becomes apparent that severe illness and other encounters with Chaos create a biographical hole within the perception of one’s identity (one’s narrated body) (Bury, 1982; Dunn, 2016). The emergence of this disorientation appears to arise from the destruction of previously existing assumptions about what one is constituted and capable of. Along such assumptions, individuals usually navigate through their environments.

Besides sever illness, natural disasters may be the cause of such disruptions. After the 3-11 disaster in the region of Fukushima, Japan the impact of such natural catastrophes could clearly be observed. It stands out, that this instance poses a deep challenge to the proclaimed fluidity of identity in its situational embeddedness that is exhibited in eastern philosophy. Thus, it exemplifies that natural catastrophes place the individual and its understanding of itself at the fuzzy boundary between human psychology and cultural philosophy.

Here, it seems that the projection of self- stability and coherent continuity of the self narrative into the future forcefully announces itself as a human universal. Trauma as a result of the gap in the narrated body created by the loss of the assumed safety that homes, families and even places used to provide leads to the experience of the “Communitas of disaster” (Turner, 1966). Individuals are removed from the safe space they have inhabited (in a literal and embodied sense as well as a metaphorical sense with regard to the narrated bodies (identities as narratives) they inhabit). The Japanese Philosopher Nishitani Osamu in his book Fushi no wadaarando (Wonderland of immortality) suggests that the human being is not born into what we refer to as home but “born by forming his place of birth as himself” (2005, p. 230). Space and Time are woven into the narrated body of the individual. Home is a consequence of the narration and projection into the future.

Sources

Bury, M. (1982). Chronic illness as biographical disruption. Sociology of Health and Illness, 4(2), 167–182.

Dunn, E., Arber, A., & Gallagher, A. (2016). The immediacy of illness and existential crisis: Patients’ lived experience of undergoing allogeneic stem cell transplantation for haematological malignancy. A phenomenological study. European Journal of Oncology Nursing, 21, 90–96.

Turner, V. (1969).The Ritual Process