Outliving Oneself

The idea of “Outliving Oneself” depends on the concepts of trauma and most importantly the self, in a situation where said trauma obliterates the self for an indefinite amount of time. Brison presents the self in three interwoven parts: the embodied self, the self as narrative, and the autonomous self. Any of these parts of self depend largely on the individual’s society, culture, and interactions with other people. The embodied self represents the self in conjunction with the physical body, which our society separates from the self, to intimate a soul or personality, and also assigns genders to certain traits. Trauma dissolves this separation of body and mind because violence brings the traumatized to face their own mortality. They have to see their body as an object because their assailant treats it as an object. Trauma is so damaging because the self cannot exert any power whatsoever; the interaction between the assailant and the victim, essentially a social situation, robs the victim of a voice, because the assailant ignores it, a personality, because it is of no consequence to the assailant, and a self, because the assailant uses the body as an object, and the body plays a more central role in the interaction than the self does. Brison quotes Cathy Winkler in saying a rape is a “social murder,” because the rapist’s part in the interaction defines the victim through their actions that take away the victim’s sense of self. Any control that the victim felt over their body gets taken from them by the rapist. The consequences of this trauma include a loss of control over physiological functions, such as emotion and incapacitation from anxiety; the body and mind are out of balance, which leads the victim to be stigmatized by societ...

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...nts changes, that person’s self changes. The victim of the trauma must regain control over their life through the cooperation of others. In this way, the autonomy connects to the dependence of the victim on those around them. The dependence on others to be autonomous gets destroyed when the victim is traumatized; they lose their trust in those around them and they lose their ability to connect with humanity. Related to the idea of the narrative self, the autonomous person that existed before the trauma dies and the new self must become autonomous through narration to others. In this way, the self as an independent, the self as dependent on others, and the self as the physical being are integrated with one another and cannot be divided. Just as a self cannot exist without the context of its society, society cannot be without the selves that constitute its existence.