Trauma

Is your trauma worse than mine? Did I get over it faster? How to judge levels of insult to the human spirit? In terms of resilience, there are concentration camp survivors who went on to lead productive and happy lives while it’s obvious that those who are unscathed often are the ones who end up scathed--precisely because they lack survival skills. Rich people are for the most part the clientele of psychoanalysts. Not to diminish the effectiveness for what Janet Malcolm once termed “the impossible profession,” but it caters to the wealthy demographic that can afford it. However, consider the trauma of the starving Yemeni child with the distended stomach whose mother has been repeatedly raped, compared to the Park Avenue hausfrau whose industrialist father discounted her talents. These kinds of comparisins are often used to belittle the interior sufferings of the privileged whose madeleines may have left a bad taste in their mouths.The one thing you can say about your problems is that they're yours.The time the ice cream scoop fell to the pavement, when you were a child, evinces a pathos which doesn't even register on the scale of universal pain. Yet it was enough to make you bawl.

read the review of Francis Levy's The Kafka Studies Department in Booklife

and watch the trailer for Erotomania, selected for the Nihilist Film Festival, December 15 in Santa Monica