Picturing Trauma: Freud, Resilience and Visual Agency in the Neurosciences

What if cognitive neuroscience had more to do with psychoanalysis than we think? In the wake of the 13 November 2015 Paris attacks, neuroscientists have conducted a biomedical study of traumatic memory in survivors. The REMEMBER project, standing for ‘ RE silience and M odification of brain control network following nov EMBER 13’, emphasizes resilience and the human brain’s connectivity over the old localization paradigm in neuroanatomy. The resilience paradigm, I contend, has unexpected origins in Freud’s dynamic model of intrusion and repression known as Bahnung , or psychic ‘censorship’. Using an intermedial approach, I read Freud for diagrams and for the interplay of text and image as a source of innovation. At the crossroads of visual studies, history of neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, the article offers a more dynamic view of the history of science – and of the way that newness comes into the world – than the classic split between psychoanalysis and neuroscience allows for.