JMG: I want to begin with a prefatory remark. When you work in this field of research, and in places such as asylums, where the traumatized or the mad are confined, you learn that these people are the witnesses of histories that have no right to exist. But beyond that, the patients also have—and they tell you—a theory of this witness as well. Next month, when we go to speak in a conference on history and trauma with historians of our institute of research, EHESS, I will begin with the first sentence by which a patient of mine at an asylum introduced himself to me, when he was in really bad shape, almost starving in his bed. The chief medical doctor had said that I should see him. And I introduced myself; he had been confined for more than ten years so he knew who I was. “I am Jean-Max Gaudillière,” I said, “I am a psychoanalyst on the ward.” And he looked at me with his eyes completely wide open from fever, and he said to me, “I am an encoded of the anti-past.”
Cathy Caruth. Listening to Trauma (p. 82). Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014, Kindle edition.
