The Mousetrap

What may have cinched it for many viewers of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, was the matter of the marriage counseling. Blasey Ford recounted that during a session back in 2012, she and her husband were dealing with a remodelling of her house. Blasey Ford  expressed a desire for a second front door--something which had apparently seemed unnecessary to her husband.The door was an issue between the two of them. Anyone who has been in marriage counseling will recognize the topography, in which seemingly trivial matters take on emblematic significance. It was this that apparently ignited the discussion of the assault which lay at the heart of the testimony. Apres Coup is a psychoanalytic which refers to the latent response to an earlier traumatic incident, and what was so convincing in the Blasey Ford testimony was the way it traced a process by which a present day emotion finds its explanation in the past. If Blasey Ford had communicated something more blatant and dead-on it might have been equally believable, but the detail of the way in which the past insinuated itself into her present life was what was so compelling. Memory is a tricky thing and it's like the trail markings in the wilderness. Whatever one's sympathies or propensity to think that Blasey Ford and/or Kavanaugh are confabulating, truth is a complex matter. However, sometimes signposts like the one Blasey Ford described can provide the anchor from which "the truth" can emerge.