Words are never enough: The processing of traumatic experience and the creation of narratives---the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen

The creation of narratives often allows individuals to bear witness to traumatic events. This study looked at connections between the processing of traumatic, affect laden experience and levels of symbolization and symmetry within the context of poetic expression. The author hypothesized that trauma, using the neo-Kleinian language of Newirth's Matrix of Psychic Experience (2001) is a syndrome of Concrete Symmetry, or an internal state in which experience becomes ossified around the traumatic event, lying beyond the realm of metaphor and imagination. The sample for this study is taken from the works of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, two of the most celebrated British soldier-poets of the Great War. For both poets, the language of the poems initially reflected the deepening trauma of the war experience by showing significant increases in Asymmetrical, Symmetrical and Depressive content, which the author interpreted as a retreat into dissociative defenses. Once they began to translate their traumatic experience into poetry, there were dramatic, highly significant shifts towards Paranoid-Schizoid (concrete) experiences, and in the case of Owen towards Symmetrical experience; while Sassoon also saw significant increases in Symmetry, he also maintained high levels of Asymmetry. As the poets were able to process the memory of the events, the poetry reflected a more balanced shift toward integration of Depressive (symbolic)/Asymmetrical experience. Thus, the results suggest that trauma is a syndrome of extremes; not only was the author's hypothesis of "Concrete-Symmetry" supported, but high levels of Asymmetry may represent the extreme isolation associated with trauma. The further results suggest a way in which traumatic events are processed. The routine horror and brutality of the Western Front initially lay outside the realm of language and symbols and were thus highly concrete and unprocessed experiences. Time, place and identity collapsed on itself, leading to the increase of symmetrical experience, while the extreme "us versus them experience" of the trenches can be seen in the balance of asymmetrical experience. The study has implications for the treatment of war trauma, suggesting that writing provides a vehicle through which events can be processed and an internal sense of balance can be approached.