Trauma And Writing Therapy-research On Promise At Dawn Written By Romain Gary

Trauma, a secret and sensitive word, demonstrates physical and mental processes which every individual has to undergo. And it is also an effective tool for researchers to explore human inner world. Romain Gary with the legendary life is indeed such a typical case. Gary, with his multicultural background, played multiple characters in real life:a warrior who was awarded more than once, a diplomat that served as an envoy abroad successfully in multiple countries, a film-maker with acute perspective, and a writer with rich emotions. He was characterized by a chameleon and wounded for many times. These experiences affected and changed his whole life. Since the21st century, researchers have found more and more importance from this great writer. From political thought to Jewish features, from symbol of pseudonym to identity construction, from imaginary space to realistic criticism, both works and life of Romain Gary gave us so much enlightenment.Promise at Dawn serves as a turning point in his writing and symbolizes the maturity of author in creation. Meanwhile, it was an autobiographically-wrote book from which we can fully acknowledge the upbringing from childhood to adolescence of the author. Therefore, on the basis of Promise at Dawn and reconstructing memory line, this paper will employ psychoanalysis on Romain Gary and propose thought towards his’self-treatment’with the aid of Philippe Lejeune’s autobiography theory and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis theory, especially the research of trauma theory.This paper consists of the following three parts:the foreword, the text and the conclusion. The foreword will briefly introduce the realistic meaning, research trend and relevant issues of research about Romain Gary and present the importance of psychoanalysis to him. The research value, theoretical methods and excepted construction of this paper will be stated as well. Then, the text will be divided into three chapters.In the first chapter, we briefly introduce basic performance of wounded human and present the four main symptoms in terms of Romain Gary’s real memories——anxiety, amnesia, dybbuk and compensatory function of the object. In addition, the personality structure of individual exhibits various features under traumatized conditions. For example the personality structure of Romain Gary contains three different and associated parts:impulsive and wild id, weak and helpless ego, and moral and sublimate superego.Continued from the analysis towards symptoms of individual psychological traumatized and personality structure in the preceding chapter, the second chapter will deeply dissect both subjective and objective causes for Romain Gary’s trauma. Firstly in family aspect, ubiquitous motherhood and absence of the paternal function caused initial wound to the individual; secondly, the crash of poverty and dignity as well as the anti-Semitism under historical background harmed Gary——a Russian Jew once again; thirdly, two world wars not only brought grave catastrophe to the world, but also caused fatal strike to our hero both in body and mind.The third chapter will develop a detailed elaboration on the’self-treatment’that Gary chose:the writing therapy. Suffering from multiple strikes, Romain Gary did not recoil or evade, but actively stroke back with his pen. As a result, he not only showed his optimistic and open-minded aspects, but also achieved unification and coordination of imaginary world and cruel reality. In Promise at Dawn, Gary extensively used the writing technique of dialogue and interior monologue so that the novel presented a unique ’Gary style’:childlike lyricism, Hugo’s pathetic and sense of comedy fused with humor and irony. With the aid of writing therapy, the constrained emotions were unleashed and his personality structure transformed from sphere of aesthetic, sphere of morality to sphere of religion.In the conclusion, it is pointed out that the writing therapy not only has positive effects on Gary but also helps other wounded individual and even all human. By analyzing the diagnosis and treatment of the case, we find that the writing therapy makes patients face traumatic memories, soothes repressed emotions, and narrows the distance between similar people. Moreover, this leaves plenty of rich and useful documents, which could guide further investigation in the near future.