Trauma, Contingency, and The Psychoanalytic Zero

Koichi Togashi

This article begins the examination of suffering and its relation to the experience of being human. Trauma is neither an experience nor an actual event, but the beginning of the “human” condition. The argument is illustrated through interwoven narratives of transgenerational trauma that arose in the psychoanalytic treatment of a traumatized patient whose parents were atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It describes the patient’s and analyst’s surrender to the nameless universe in which the division between victim and victimizer is a production of contingency.