Interview with Richard Rechtman (2/2): "I do not believe in a deliverance yielding testimony"
By Stéphanie Gée
09-02-2009
Phnom Penh (Cambodia), 06/02/2009. Vann Nath, paintor and survivor of Khmer Rouge centre S-21, during an art workshop at the Bophana centre. Richard Rechtman: "Vann Nath is probably the first witness I've seen who is a witness to nothing but forces the other to testify."
© John Vink / Magnum
Psychiatrist and anthropologist Richard Rechtman - who has devoted part of his work to Cambodian refugees in France for over twenty years - is in Phnom Penh for the first time. One of the messages he is trying to make people hear is that victims of the Khmer Rouge in particular must stop talking about death. Why? Because, according to him, it equates with making death sacred in a manner that pertains to the genocidal rhetoric. He defends the importance of giving back their lives to the dead by turning them back into subjects with their own subjectivity and stop seeing them as a wholly abstract “dead” entity. In the second part of an interview by Ka-set, he discusses among others the place of the testimony of victims or the change in the victim's status.
Ka-set : You talk about the survivor's paradox. Can you explain what it is?
Richard Rechtman : Some of my Cambodian patients [in France] remained in the clutches of the dead. They were overwhelmed by the dead and unable to let go of them. Don't get me wrong. I make an anthropological distinction here between the dead and the departed. You remember the latter from when they were alive. But the dead, you think of them when they died, and even more acutely so in a society like Cambodia, where this characteristic exists in the form of the ghost. Thus, they are unable to leave their dead because, if they did – and so was I told by my patients – their dead would disappear... meaning the Khmer Rouge would have succeeded in killing the dead and those people, those souls, or as I prefer to say, those beings, would have never existed. And if they don't exist as departed, it means they have never existed. That is why they don't want to let go of them, because otherwise, they would prove the Khmer Rouge right.
At the same time, by not abandoning them, they are also proving the Khmer Rouge right because they are living in the same world as the dead... That was the most important thing to understand for me: tell myself that their dead had come together with them to Paris. That is where the necessity to transform this relationship appeared to me. And the work of Rithy Panh and Vann Nath has been very decisive in my clinical work.
K7 : What interested you in the approach taken by Rithy Panh in his movie “S-21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine”?
RR : It opened new perspectives for me. We had discussed about it with Rithy Panh. We were both concerned and thought: enough with the testimony of victims. I wasn't bemoaning the testimony of the victim in itself, but the usurpation by the victim of the posture of the dead by talking only about the dead. So, when I watched the movie “S-21”, I understood something: Vann Nath is probably the first witness I've seen who is a witness to nothing but forces the other to testify. What I found amazing is that on this basis, you can ask survivors to discuss the living and let the torturers talk about the dead.
K7 : Is testifying at the heart of liberation from suffering?
RR : I don't believe in that at all. There are the individual testimony and the judicial one, and those are two different processes. I believe it is extremely important to urge people to testify before a court and I would say brutally so, whatever the psychological consequences may be because this plays a major political role. But I do not believe at all in a deliverance yielding testimony. First, because people will never be asked – and even less so by a court – to describe what happened to them but to talk about the context and the others... Then, you cannot imagine what traumatises people. I remember a patient who once told me: “You know, doctor, seeing corpses every day for four years, I got used to it. It had no effect on me. And that's precisely what makes me wonder today...” This subject had a question not about seeing dead people, but about the fact that after a while, it no longer had any effect on her.
What is the value of such a testimony before a court? None. And when it is delivered publicly? None. But what is the value of that being shared with me, a clinician? It lies in the fact that I can say, “Yes, I understand. It is a real question...” and start working on it. The worst in a trauma always lies in insignificant things. People have seen horrific things and tolerated them. But as for the insignificant ones, they never talk about them because that's impossible. It is considered trivial next to the rest. I am interested in is what people believe to be trivial because it never is. […] As for the rest, there is a vocabulary to express it – unbearable, etc – but it is not necessarily traumatising mentally. My job is to heal traumas, not to fix what is irreparable. That's why no, I don't think there is any saving dimension in testifying.
K7 : What about the unspeakable...?
RR : I don't believe in the unspeakable either. I have never met it! I think that people are expressing it all the time through their symptoms. I reckon it was a very bad idea of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to invent the “unspeakable”. The right word to be accurate would be the “inaudible”. They never cease to talk about what was unbearable, but nobody hears anything.
K7 : Is this your role, to hear them?
RR : Yes, but in a manner that restores privacy. Some say that 'parents haven't transmitted anything to their children' but they don't have to transmit this! Trauma - don't repeat it - happens with the breaking of privacy. To make a rather basic parallel, I would say it is along the lines of sexuality for a child. When parents want to share their story with their child, they don't start by talking about their first night of love - or those who do are incredibly sick [laughs]. You don't do that... But you can tell the child the story of his or her genealogy without going into the encounter of the gametes!
Well, this is the same, except traumatised people don't know where the private story begins and where it ends. So, you don't talk about the grandparents because they are dead. There is a real problem here... and a real mistake. I will sound incredibly megalomaniac, but I think 80% of the practitioners dealing with trauma miss this point because they want to say that people speak the horror of the horror! What is interesting is how the subject experiences it and what effect it has on his or her life.
If there is a therapeutic effect in listening, it is when it restores the privacy, what can be said, what can be told to this or that person but not to another. What you tell a psychiatrist is not what you tell your children, and what is on your mind is not necessarily what can be said. During the Khmer Rouge, precisely, what was on one's mind could never be expressed and there was this arbitrary belief that people could be prevented from thinking by preventing them from speaking. It is not possible, but it does have effects: after a while, people keep thinking but they no longer know what to say.
K7 : If the court established in Phnom Penh to judge the former Khmer Rouge fails in its task, will it have serious consequences for the victims?
RR : Even if the court does not fail, you can have the same psychological damage. When you have victims coming to testify, there are consequences. But it is not the court's mission to protect them. If you want them to be well, you set up a psychological unit. The court is not made to heal people but to give justice, not only to the few people who will come and testify, but also to the millions of dead, future generations, and the whole mankind who must know what happened. You can't say: we are not going to convict this rapist because if you make his victim come and testify, she will be traumatised... So, is it better to let him free?! Even if the court fails, at least all this will have been raised, people will have appeared before a court. Indeed, it is serious if it fails, but the most important is that it happens.
K7 : How has the victim's status evolved in the last few decades?
RR : This was a great part of my anthropological work. In the book I wrote with Didier Fassin [The Empire of Trauma: An Enquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, Princeton University Press, due for release in English in May 2009], we wanted to escape the argument that you are doing too much or too little for victims, and ask the question from an anthropological point of view: since when do we talk about victims, how, why, and when has this - considerable - transformation of not clinical knowledge but moral constructs happened.
If you take mental trauma as one of the elements characterising the victim today, you realise that up to the 1960-70s, trauma is seen as a sign of weakness or cowardice. People who were traumatised were either fakers or lazy. This aimed at two types of people: workers who fall sick after an accident and don't want to go back to work, but want to earn lots of money doing nothing; and the military who don't want to die on the front and are thus cowards. So, trauma has extremely derogatory connotations. It is really a social marker, that of the common soldier or the worker scorned by society. Even during the Second World War, mental trauma doesn't speak about the reality of war, it speaks of the weakness of a man. […] Men who returned from war are heroes – if their psyche is affected, it is a mark of weakness.
It actually all changes with the Vietnam War, which was the subject of many movies. And what do they show? That war is mentally destructive. Whether you are watching “Rambo” [film by Ted Kotcheff, 1983, with Sylvester Stallone], “Born on a Fourth of July” [film by Oliver Stone, 1990, with Tom Cruise], etc, the war is expressed differently from then on. In other words, mental trauma has become all of a sudden the very place of the horror of war. But why did this happen? For a very simple reason I will present quickly. In 1970, what is at stake for the U.S. psychiatry was to know whether the traumatic disqualifying neurosis could be applied to Vietnam War veterans. There is going to be a political decision, and people who work in this group, all of them liberal, military psychiatrists very engaged against Vietnam War, wanted one thing: war traumas to be acknowledged in order to contribute to the end of war too and veterans to receive the status of war victim, which was impossible before.
The only problem is that those who came back from Vietnam are not heroes, but people who committed atrocities. This creates a major problem for society. Why is that guy Rambo traumatised? Because he has seen horrors and perpetrated horrifying abominations, what you would label - if these weren't Westerners - war crimes... In a word, ordinary torturers turned into war victims. I am not making any moral judgement about right or wrong, but that is when the meaning of trauma changed as it came to express the reality of the horror of war and - another important point - of a lost war. From then on, the trauma has become the testimony of the story of the defeated. Until then, there was only one story that dominated society, that of the victor.
How do you talk about the defeated? Trauma has become the key and the victim has become the key to compose the story of the defeated. That's why I cannot adhere to the idea of a compassionate society, which would give too much importance to the victim. That is not returning to a fair order. In some way, we have only found this device to talk about the defeated. But you still have to check whether it is true that it applies in all cases. That is what we investigated and there came the disappointment of course: it is not true. It really depends on the contexts, the victims are not the ones making the decision, it is not true that all the victims are given a voice. Some will serve a political cause or other interests, others will be completely forgotten and never be recognised as victims. And when you put forward all the victims, it is a way not to put others forward...
The work I do is to try and see the invisible: for me not to focus on what everybody says and sees. For example, someone asked me how S-21 [the Khmer Rouge torture centre] with all its photographs and rationale on the people massacred pertains to a genocide as - like I have said before - one specificity is to conceal traces of death. Well, first, you have to make something visible for the rest to be invisible. If you focus on S-21 - responsible for 17,000 dead - you forget the other two million dead who have left no trace.
However, I would never say that the victim is a compassionate posture. It is a new manner to talk about events, it is a political language but one which primary function at the hands of politicians is to level social inequalities and differences in the population. For example, in the city of Toulouse [in the South of France], on the day following the explosion at the chemical plant AZF [in 2001], it was very important that all the residents be declared traumatised. But among asylum seekers, there were less and less traumatised people because they had to prove it in their bodies. Otherwise, they do not have the victim's status...
The first part of this interview was published on Ka-set on February 5th 2009: Interview with Richard Rechtman (1/2): "Cambodian refugees overwhelmed by their dead"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Being a Khmer Rouge victim and refugee in France or living in Cambodia...
Richard Rechtman: “I think it is more difficult to be a victim living in exile in France, rather than a Cambodian living here in Cambodia today. First, because you must know in France, it is complicated as it is a story that people are completely ignorant about. It is not rare to hear French people confuse 'Khmer' with 'Khmer Rouge'. And the press has often talked about 'self-genocide', an absolutely horrifying notion but that was used very often in France. In this context, Cambodian refugees suffer from feelings of isolation and total incomprehension. They are therefore even more trapped in their story. I am the only psychiatrist in France to take care of this population, which says something...”
Also on Ka-set:
- Vann Nath, survivor of the Khmer Rouge S-21 prison, determined to stand up for remembrance (27-08-2008)
By Stéphanie Gée
09-02-2009
Phnom Penh (Cambodia), 06/02/2009. Vann Nath, paintor and survivor of Khmer Rouge centre S-21, during an art workshop at the Bophana centre. Richard Rechtman: "Vann Nath is probably the first witness I've seen who is a witness to nothing but forces the other to testify."
© John Vink / Magnum
Psychiatrist and anthropologist Richard Rechtman - who has devoted part of his work to Cambodian refugees in France for over twenty years - is in Phnom Penh for the first time. One of the messages he is trying to make people hear is that victims of the Khmer Rouge in particular must stop talking about death. Why? Because, according to him, it equates with making death sacred in a manner that pertains to the genocidal rhetoric. He defends the importance of giving back their lives to the dead by turning them back into subjects with their own subjectivity and stop seeing them as a wholly abstract “dead” entity. In the second part of an interview by Ka-set, he discusses among others the place of the testimony of victims or the change in the victim's status.
Ka-set : You talk about the survivor's paradox. Can you explain what it is?
Richard Rechtman : Some of my Cambodian patients [in France] remained in the clutches of the dead. They were overwhelmed by the dead and unable to let go of them. Don't get me wrong. I make an anthropological distinction here between the dead and the departed. You remember the latter from when they were alive. But the dead, you think of them when they died, and even more acutely so in a society like Cambodia, where this characteristic exists in the form of the ghost. Thus, they are unable to leave their dead because, if they did – and so was I told by my patients – their dead would disappear... meaning the Khmer Rouge would have succeeded in killing the dead and those people, those souls, or as I prefer to say, those beings, would have never existed. And if they don't exist as departed, it means they have never existed. That is why they don't want to let go of them, because otherwise, they would prove the Khmer Rouge right.
At the same time, by not abandoning them, they are also proving the Khmer Rouge right because they are living in the same world as the dead... That was the most important thing to understand for me: tell myself that their dead had come together with them to Paris. That is where the necessity to transform this relationship appeared to me. And the work of Rithy Panh and Vann Nath has been very decisive in my clinical work.
K7 : What interested you in the approach taken by Rithy Panh in his movie “S-21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine”?
RR : It opened new perspectives for me. We had discussed about it with Rithy Panh. We were both concerned and thought: enough with the testimony of victims. I wasn't bemoaning the testimony of the victim in itself, but the usurpation by the victim of the posture of the dead by talking only about the dead. So, when I watched the movie “S-21”, I understood something: Vann Nath is probably the first witness I've seen who is a witness to nothing but forces the other to testify. What I found amazing is that on this basis, you can ask survivors to discuss the living and let the torturers talk about the dead.
K7 : Is testifying at the heart of liberation from suffering?
RR : I don't believe in that at all. There are the individual testimony and the judicial one, and those are two different processes. I believe it is extremely important to urge people to testify before a court and I would say brutally so, whatever the psychological consequences may be because this plays a major political role. But I do not believe at all in a deliverance yielding testimony. First, because people will never be asked – and even less so by a court – to describe what happened to them but to talk about the context and the others... Then, you cannot imagine what traumatises people. I remember a patient who once told me: “You know, doctor, seeing corpses every day for four years, I got used to it. It had no effect on me. And that's precisely what makes me wonder today...” This subject had a question not about seeing dead people, but about the fact that after a while, it no longer had any effect on her.
What is the value of such a testimony before a court? None. And when it is delivered publicly? None. But what is the value of that being shared with me, a clinician? It lies in the fact that I can say, “Yes, I understand. It is a real question...” and start working on it. The worst in a trauma always lies in insignificant things. People have seen horrific things and tolerated them. But as for the insignificant ones, they never talk about them because that's impossible. It is considered trivial next to the rest. I am interested in is what people believe to be trivial because it never is. […] As for the rest, there is a vocabulary to express it – unbearable, etc – but it is not necessarily traumatising mentally. My job is to heal traumas, not to fix what is irreparable. That's why no, I don't think there is any saving dimension in testifying.
K7 : What about the unspeakable...?
RR : I don't believe in the unspeakable either. I have never met it! I think that people are expressing it all the time through their symptoms. I reckon it was a very bad idea of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts to invent the “unspeakable”. The right word to be accurate would be the “inaudible”. They never cease to talk about what was unbearable, but nobody hears anything.
K7 : Is this your role, to hear them?
RR : Yes, but in a manner that restores privacy. Some say that 'parents haven't transmitted anything to their children' but they don't have to transmit this! Trauma - don't repeat it - happens with the breaking of privacy. To make a rather basic parallel, I would say it is along the lines of sexuality for a child. When parents want to share their story with their child, they don't start by talking about their first night of love - or those who do are incredibly sick [laughs]. You don't do that... But you can tell the child the story of his or her genealogy without going into the encounter of the gametes!
Well, this is the same, except traumatised people don't know where the private story begins and where it ends. So, you don't talk about the grandparents because they are dead. There is a real problem here... and a real mistake. I will sound incredibly megalomaniac, but I think 80% of the practitioners dealing with trauma miss this point because they want to say that people speak the horror of the horror! What is interesting is how the subject experiences it and what effect it has on his or her life.
If there is a therapeutic effect in listening, it is when it restores the privacy, what can be said, what can be told to this or that person but not to another. What you tell a psychiatrist is not what you tell your children, and what is on your mind is not necessarily what can be said. During the Khmer Rouge, precisely, what was on one's mind could never be expressed and there was this arbitrary belief that people could be prevented from thinking by preventing them from speaking. It is not possible, but it does have effects: after a while, people keep thinking but they no longer know what to say.
K7 : If the court established in Phnom Penh to judge the former Khmer Rouge fails in its task, will it have serious consequences for the victims?
RR : Even if the court does not fail, you can have the same psychological damage. When you have victims coming to testify, there are consequences. But it is not the court's mission to protect them. If you want them to be well, you set up a psychological unit. The court is not made to heal people but to give justice, not only to the few people who will come and testify, but also to the millions of dead, future generations, and the whole mankind who must know what happened. You can't say: we are not going to convict this rapist because if you make his victim come and testify, she will be traumatised... So, is it better to let him free?! Even if the court fails, at least all this will have been raised, people will have appeared before a court. Indeed, it is serious if it fails, but the most important is that it happens.
K7 : How has the victim's status evolved in the last few decades?
RR : This was a great part of my anthropological work. In the book I wrote with Didier Fassin [The Empire of Trauma: An Enquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, Princeton University Press, due for release in English in May 2009], we wanted to escape the argument that you are doing too much or too little for victims, and ask the question from an anthropological point of view: since when do we talk about victims, how, why, and when has this - considerable - transformation of not clinical knowledge but moral constructs happened.
If you take mental trauma as one of the elements characterising the victim today, you realise that up to the 1960-70s, trauma is seen as a sign of weakness or cowardice. People who were traumatised were either fakers or lazy. This aimed at two types of people: workers who fall sick after an accident and don't want to go back to work, but want to earn lots of money doing nothing; and the military who don't want to die on the front and are thus cowards. So, trauma has extremely derogatory connotations. It is really a social marker, that of the common soldier or the worker scorned by society. Even during the Second World War, mental trauma doesn't speak about the reality of war, it speaks of the weakness of a man. […] Men who returned from war are heroes – if their psyche is affected, it is a mark of weakness.
It actually all changes with the Vietnam War, which was the subject of many movies. And what do they show? That war is mentally destructive. Whether you are watching “Rambo” [film by Ted Kotcheff, 1983, with Sylvester Stallone], “Born on a Fourth of July” [film by Oliver Stone, 1990, with Tom Cruise], etc, the war is expressed differently from then on. In other words, mental trauma has become all of a sudden the very place of the horror of war. But why did this happen? For a very simple reason I will present quickly. In 1970, what is at stake for the U.S. psychiatry was to know whether the traumatic disqualifying neurosis could be applied to Vietnam War veterans. There is going to be a political decision, and people who work in this group, all of them liberal, military psychiatrists very engaged against Vietnam War, wanted one thing: war traumas to be acknowledged in order to contribute to the end of war too and veterans to receive the status of war victim, which was impossible before.
The only problem is that those who came back from Vietnam are not heroes, but people who committed atrocities. This creates a major problem for society. Why is that guy Rambo traumatised? Because he has seen horrors and perpetrated horrifying abominations, what you would label - if these weren't Westerners - war crimes... In a word, ordinary torturers turned into war victims. I am not making any moral judgement about right or wrong, but that is when the meaning of trauma changed as it came to express the reality of the horror of war and - another important point - of a lost war. From then on, the trauma has become the testimony of the story of the defeated. Until then, there was only one story that dominated society, that of the victor.
How do you talk about the defeated? Trauma has become the key and the victim has become the key to compose the story of the defeated. That's why I cannot adhere to the idea of a compassionate society, which would give too much importance to the victim. That is not returning to a fair order. In some way, we have only found this device to talk about the defeated. But you still have to check whether it is true that it applies in all cases. That is what we investigated and there came the disappointment of course: it is not true. It really depends on the contexts, the victims are not the ones making the decision, it is not true that all the victims are given a voice. Some will serve a political cause or other interests, others will be completely forgotten and never be recognised as victims. And when you put forward all the victims, it is a way not to put others forward...
The work I do is to try and see the invisible: for me not to focus on what everybody says and sees. For example, someone asked me how S-21 [the Khmer Rouge torture centre] with all its photographs and rationale on the people massacred pertains to a genocide as - like I have said before - one specificity is to conceal traces of death. Well, first, you have to make something visible for the rest to be invisible. If you focus on S-21 - responsible for 17,000 dead - you forget the other two million dead who have left no trace.
However, I would never say that the victim is a compassionate posture. It is a new manner to talk about events, it is a political language but one which primary function at the hands of politicians is to level social inequalities and differences in the population. For example, in the city of Toulouse [in the South of France], on the day following the explosion at the chemical plant AZF [in 2001], it was very important that all the residents be declared traumatised. But among asylum seekers, there were less and less traumatised people because they had to prove it in their bodies. Otherwise, they do not have the victim's status...
The first part of this interview was published on Ka-set on February 5th 2009: Interview with Richard Rechtman (1/2): "Cambodian refugees overwhelmed by their dead"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Being a Khmer Rouge victim and refugee in France or living in Cambodia...
Richard Rechtman: “I think it is more difficult to be a victim living in exile in France, rather than a Cambodian living here in Cambodia today. First, because you must know in France, it is complicated as it is a story that people are completely ignorant about. It is not rare to hear French people confuse 'Khmer' with 'Khmer Rouge'. And the press has often talked about 'self-genocide', an absolutely horrifying notion but that was used very often in France. In this context, Cambodian refugees suffer from feelings of isolation and total incomprehension. They are therefore even more trapped in their story. I am the only psychiatrist in France to take care of this population, which says something...”
Also on Ka-set:
- Vann Nath, survivor of the Khmer Rouge S-21 prison, determined to stand up for remembrance (27-08-2008)
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