What I Heard in the Silence: Role Reversal, Trauma, and Creativity in the Lives of Women

Abstract

Readers who notice this book in the bookstore will probably be attracted by its title and by the cover photo of George Segal's "Three People on Four Benches." The latter seems to link with the title by suggesting silence, perhaps also resignation or loneliness. Is this a group or three strangers lost in private thought? The positioning of each figure suggests emotional distance. The subtitle is slightly misleading; its topics tum out to be linked additively, rather than by strong connective theoretical tissue. This is not a feminist book or even a book about what are often called, albeit vaguely, "women's issues." Trauma does not appear until the third part of the book; much of it is Holocaust- related. It ignores, but is far from inconsistent with, current burgeoning work on the effects of trauma on cognitive processes, memory, and the dynamics of transference/countertransference. The last section on creativity is, although adequate in its own terms, only superficially related to the other parts. I shall return to this last chapter in a moment. Meanwhile, practitioners who use role reversal as a therapeutic action method-psychodramatists, sociodramatists, and so forth-should be alerted that by role reversal Bergmann means children who feel turned into caretakers by inadequate parents with whom they are reversing roles. That is not a technique but pathology. On the whole, I believe that is Bergmann's strongest and most developed clinical issue.