4 Quotes & Sayings By Cathy Caruth

Cathy Caruth is the author of the National Book Award-winning novel "The Kindly Ones." Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Granta, and elsewhere. She is a professor at UC Irvine and was a resident at the MacDowell Colony.

1
It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself” (p. 5) Cathy Caruth
2
If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet. Cathy Caruth
3
As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashbacks can be itself re-traumatizing; if not life-threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivor, for example, survivors of Vietnam. Cathy Caruth