Title: 
Headings: Art Spiegelman's
MAUS
: Working-Through The Trauma of the Holocaust

Art Spiegelman's MAUS: Working-Through The Trauma of the Holocaust
Robert S. Leventhal
Trauma, Working-Through, and the Problem of Historical Understanding
The Postmodern Melancholia
Cultural Besetzung: The Canon and Canonical Texts
Spiegelman's Maus: The Intentional Subversion of Genre and Cultural Norm

Content: In mourning, the subject grieves for the loss of the beloved, and gradually comes to terms with that loss through the sustained reflection regarding the multiple meanings of that loss. Mourning is characterized by an initial withdrawl from the external world of things and events, and centers upon the subject's feeling of the loss of a significant aspect of one's life. In melancholia, however, there has usually been a highly ambivalent relation to the beloved object, and the subject becomes isolated, depressed, and experiences this loss of the Other as the loss of him or herself. The melancholic reaction to the traumatic loss of a beloved is characterized by extreme self-devaluation, to the extent that the subject might actually believe that he or she is responsible for the death or departure of the Other, that he or she is a "murderer" him or herself responsible for the "killing off" of the Other. Or, conversely, the subject views him or herself as the abandoned object, having been "left" by the dead Other, and might view him or herself as a victim, as the wounded or hurt recipient of this traumatic loss that the Other has "imposed." In the Neo-Freudian Theories of Winicott, the attempt has been made to articulate the process of "working-through" the traumatic loss of the beloved object more precisely. Winicott's famous phrase "Mourning without empathy leads to madness" has often been cited as the key to his theory, which is that there must be an empathetic witness to the pain of this traumatic loss, that the person who suffers this loss must be able to give testimony to someone as a way of working-through or processing this loss, and that finally certain "transitional" or "intermediate" objects might be necessary in order to move from the state of dependence and reliance on the Other to a renewed state of self-sufficiency after the traumatic severance. The difficulty with this type of understanding is its insistence on a singular empathetic Other who hears the testimony of the witness, and thereby bears witness to the traumatic loss in a therapeutic manner. What does it actually mean to "work-through" a traumatic loss? and what does this mean with regard not to an individual, but to an entire people?