The refusal of the image

‘The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses’. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The premise of my research is the unnameable and unrepresentable origin of the 'image in trauma'. As an adopted twin I am driven to rewrite a history without beginning, to endlessly make and re-make images in an attempt to find an image, an image from childhood, the first image. On this slate, this tabula rasa all images slide and disappear, there is nothing to hold them. It is flashback without image – a screen of invisibility comprehensible only as 'affect'. In Understanding Trauma, A Psychoanalytic Approach Caroline Garland states 'the psychical trauma – or more precisely the memory of the trauma – acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent which is still at work…' (1998, p. 13) To modify Freud’s concept of the dream as the 'royal road to the unconscious’, through tangible images that serve to cover an underlying reality something is disclosed in its unrepresentability.