Without pretending to do justice to the vast research on “trauma,” it is variously defined as an event that threatens the person’s life and limb, making the individual feel he or she is going to die or be gravely injured (which would include rape). The blue roadside signs here in the USA that guide the ambulance to the “Trauma Center” (emergency department that has staff on call 7×24), suggest an emergency, usually but not always, a physical injury.
Cathy Caruth (1996) concisely defines trauma in terms of an experience that is registered but not experienced, a truth or reality that is not available to the survivor as a standard experience. The person (for example) was factually, objectively present when the head on collision occurred, but, even if the person has memories, and would acknowledge the event, paradoxically, the person does not presently experience it as something the person experienced in a way that a person standardly experienced the past event. The survivor experiences dissociated, repetitive nightmares, flashbacks, and depersonalization.
Image credit (Wkimedia): Printmaker: Image: Prometheus being “traumatized” by the Vulture as punishment for giving the gift of fire to humanity (“mankind”): Cornelis Cortnaar Antwerp van: Titiaan (publisher of object), verlener van privilege: onbekend (vermeld op object)
Plate published: Rome
Date: 1566
Strictly speaking, the challenge is not only that the would-be empathizer was not with the surviving Other when the survivor experienced the life-threatening trauma, but the survivor was physically present yet did not have the experience in such a way as to experience it. That may sound strange that the survivor did not experience the experience. Once again, one searches for words to capture an experience one did not experience. That is Caruth’s (1996) definition of “unclaimed” experience.
At the risk of oversimplification, Caruth’s work aligns with that of Bessel van der Kolk (2014). Van der Kolk emphasizes an account of trauma that redescribes in neuro-cognitive terms an event that gets registered in the body—burned into the neurons, so to speak, but remains sequestered—split off or quarantined— from the person’s everyday going on being and ordinary sense of self. The self is supposed to be a coherent unity—another example of a regulative idea—but a component of the self is split off due to a hypothetical, unknown traumatic cause. For both Caruth and van der Kolk, the survivor is suffering from an unintegrated experience of self-annihilating magnitude for which the treatment—whether working through, witnessing, or (note well) artistic engagement—consists in reintegrating that which was split off because it was simply too much to bear.
This artistic engagement with trauma has been described as “writing trauma,” for example, by Dominick LaCapra:
Trauma indicates a shattering break or caesura in experience which has belated effects. Writing trauma would be one of those telling after-effects in what I termed traumatic and post-traumatic writing (or signifying practice in general). It involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to [it] [. . . ]—processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experiences’, limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different combinations and hybridized forms. Writing trauma is often seen in terms of enacting it, which may at times be equated with acting (or playing) it out in performative discourse or artistic practice (LaCapra 2001: 186–187).
Without intending to do so, LaCapra has unwittingly described Beloved (1987) (see Chapter 11), where the infant of the infanticide is literally reincarnated, reborn, in the person named “Beloved.” For LaCapra, working through such traumatic events is necessary for the survivors (and the entire community) in order to get their power back over their lives and open up the possibility of a future of flourishing. This “working through” is key for it excludes denial, repression, suppression, and, in contrast, advocates for positive inquiry into the possibility of transformation in the service of life. Yet the attempt at working through of the experiences, memories, nightmares, and consequences of such traumatic events often result in repetition, acting out, and, LaCapra’s key term, “empathic unsettlement.”
Such unsettlement is a challenge and an obstacle for the witness, therapist, or friend providing a gracious and generous listening. From a place of safety and security, the survivor has to do precisely that which she or he is least inclined to do—engage with the trauma, talk about it, try to integrate and overcome it. According to LaCapra, the empathic unsettlement points to the possibility that the vicarious experience of the trauma on the part of the witness leaves the witness unwilling to complete the working through, lest it “betray” the survivor, invalidate the survivor’s suffering or accomplishment in surviving.
Those traumatized by extreme events as well as those empathizing with them, may resist working through because of what might almost be termed a fidelity to trauma, a feeling that one must somehow keep faith with it” (LaCapra 2001: 22).
This “unsettlement” is a way that empathy breaks down, misfires, goes off the rails, resulting in empathic distress (Hoffman 2000). “Keeping faith with trauma” means the trauma itself has become an uncomfortable comfort zone. Extreme situations require extreme methods to engage and break up the emotional tangle.
Thus, according to Ruth Leys (2000), the traumatic events are “performed” in being written up as history or made the subject of a literary artwork. But the words, however authentic, true, or artistic, often seem inadequate, even fake. The “trauma” as brought forth as a distinction in language is ultimately inadequate to the pain and suffering that the survivor has endured, which “pain and suffering” are honored with the title of “the real” (as Kant might say). For Leys, the distinction “trauma” itself is inherently unstable oscillating between historical trauma—what really happened, which, however, is hard if not impossible to access accurately—and, paradoxically, literary language bearing witness by a failure of witnessing.
Moral trauma adds a challenging twist to what is traumatic about trauma. What is little recognized is that many survivors are also perpetrators (and vice versa). The survivor may also unwittingly (or even intentionally) become a perpetrator. The incarcerated prisoner of conscience steals a piece of bread from another prisoner, or to save his own life, falsely accuses another. One wants to say: This is tragic in the strict sense. Oedipus, Phaedra, Medea, practically the whole House of Atrius, are all both survivors and perpetrators.
Moral trauma is defined as the distressing emotional, behavioral, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of exposure to (including participation in) events in which a person’s moral boundaries are violated and in which individuals or groups are gravely injured, killed, or credible threat thereof is enacted (i.e., individuals are physically traumatized) (Litz et al 2009; see also Shay 2014). Examples of moral trauma include such things as being put in a situation where “I will kill you if you do not kill this person.” Generalizing on the latter example, the list includes morally fraught instances of double binds, valid military orders that result in unintentional harm to innocent people, situations in which survivors become perpetrators (and vice versa), soul murder (defined as killing the possibility of empathy and/or killing the possibility of possibility), and the Trolley Car Dilemma (Anonymous Wikipedia Content 2012, Foot 1967, Thomson 1976; see Chapter 11, Section: “The Trolley Car Dilemma and empathy”). In moral trauma people become both perpetrators and survivors, and such an outcome is characteristic of many (though not all) moral traumas.
Here radical empathy comes into its own. A person is asked to make a decision that no one should have to make. A person is asked to make a decision that no one is able to make—and yet the person makes the decision anyway, even if the person does nothing, because doing nothing is making a decision. A person is asked to make a decision that no one is entitled to make, which include most decisions about who should live or die (or be gravely injured). The result is moral trauma—the person is both a perpetrator and a survivor. Now empathize with that. No one said it would be easy.
Hence, the need for radical empathy. Extreme situations—that threaten death or dismemberment—call forth radical empathy. Standard empathy is challenged by extreme situations out of remote, hard-to-grasp experiences to become radical empathy.
The treatment or therapy consists of the survivor re-experiencing the trauma vicariously from a place of safety, an empathic space of acceptance and tolerance. In doing so the trauma starts losing its power and when it returns, it does so with less force, eventually becoming a distant unhappy and painful but not overwhelming memory.
For further reading, see van der Kolk 2014; LaCapra 2001; Leys 2000; Caruth 1995, 1996; Scarry 1985, Freud 1920.) See also Agosta (2025) Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature, Chapter 11, Sections: “The Trolley Car Dilemma and empathy” and “The four horsemen arrive.”
References
Lou Agosta. (2025). Radical Empathy in the Context of Literature, Chapter 11, Sections: “The Trolley Car Dilemma and empathy” and “The four horsemen arrive.” New York: Palgrave.
Anonymous Wikipedia Content. (2012). Trolley problem (The trolley dilemma). Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem [checked 2023-06-25]
Cathy Caruth. (1996). Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: John Hopkins.
Philippa Foot. (1967). The problem of abortion and the doctrine of the double effect. Oxford Review, No. 5. In Foot, 1977/2002, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002: 19–32. DOI:10.1093/0199252866.001.0001.
Sigmund Freud. (1920). Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The Standard Edition, Vol 18, New York and London: W.W. Norton: 1–64.
Martin L. Hoffman. (2000). Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP.
Dominick LaCapra. (2001). Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: John Hopkins.
Ruth Leys. (2000). Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
B. T. Litz et al Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: a preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clin Psychol Rev. 2009 Dec;29(8):695-706. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003. Epub 2009 Jul 29. PMID: 19683376.
Elaine Scarry. (1985). The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford UP.
J. Shay, (2014). Moral injury. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(2), 182-191. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0036090
Judith Jarvis Thomson. (1976). Killing, letting die, and the trolley problem, The Monist, vol. 59: 204–217.
Bessel van der Kolk. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. New York: Viking Press.
(c) Lou Agosta, PhD, and The Chicago Empathy Project
Categories: a rigorous and critical empathy, empathic receptivity, empathy in extreme situations, trauma and empathy
Empathy Lessons 