The highly sensory nature of (traumatic) memories and the absence of verbal narrative makes them similar to the memories of young children. Yet unlike normal memories from early childhood, traumatic memories (and the associated phenomenon of traumatic dreams) are experienced as involuntary, having a phenomenon of traumatic dreams) are experienced as involuntary, having a "driven, tenacious quality" and a repetitive dimension. Current research suggests in situations of hyper-arousal, particularity those for which the subject is unable to prepare, memory is encoded in a different, more viscerally experiential manner than normal. These bodily memories are not assimilated to consciousness and thus impinge on it in uncontrollable and intrusive ways. The best availble treatment for such memories seems to be narrativisaztion, through which bodily memories are relived and reordered in meaningful narrative forms. (76)

qouting Simone De Bouiver:

"I was more and more persudaded that there was no place in the profane world for the supernatural life. And yet, it was the later alone that counted: it alone. I suddenly received certainty, one morning, that a Christian convinced of a future beatitude, should not attach the least importance t oephermal things. how could hte majority of people accept to remain in the presnet world? The more I reflected, the more I was astonished, I concluded that, in any case, I would not imitate them: between the infite and hte finiste my choices were made: "I will enter a convent". I decided. The acitivites of the sisters of charity seemed to me to be entirely futile; there was no other reasonable occupation than to contemplate to the end of my days the glory of God. I would be a Carmilete, Memoirs of a Jeune Fille, 103-4)


for Beuvoir, Teresa's angency is expressed through her active and self concious sexual response to and desire for her lover, who is God. Beuvoir claims admiraiton for the intenseity of Teresa's faith, in which the absent object is mare present on the body. Unlike the hysteric, Tersa is "not hte slave of her nerves and her hormones: it is necessary, rather, to admire in her the intensity of a fatih that penetrates to the most intimate reions of her flesh" (DS II, 587; Second SEx, 747)
Unlike hte hysteric whose flesh is passively inscribed by her disorder, Tersa writes the body in the intensity of her mystical expereince. Yet despite her admiration for Teresa's faith, Beavoir insists that the value of mystical expereince lies not in the pleasure which which it is subjectively expereinced, but in the object influence it allows its subject to weirld. Beuvoir insists that in the absence of criteria for determeing the authenticity of mystical expereince (she will go futher and claim that mystical expereince cannot be genuine as there is no God, its value likes in its outcome. (129)

...The desire for (divinie wholeness plenititude and the exstantic anguish of hte realizaiton that one cannot be everything stand side by side in Angelas text. Bataille suggests, futhermore that these two conceptions of mysticiism can be found togehter throughout the Christian tradition. This possiblity leads ot the second, more difficult and more pressing formulation of our cquesiton. Why do these semmingly antitheticial expereinces so often emerge in such close proximity to each other. Lacan's Seminar XX: Encore suggests an answer to this quesiton. He describes two tendecnies in language; the first attempts to fix meaning by positing a transcedenal signifier. Understood to be seamlessly united with its singified the transcental signifier assures the stability of language. Yet there is another movement in langauge away from th estability of meaning; for Lcan argues that the transcendtal signifer is always, in fact, empty; its putative wholeness and fixity is an illusion that pyschoanalysis aims to expose. the very site meant to fix meaing becomes the place where it is destabilzed. He argues, even more pointedly, that significaiton--marked by the transcendtal signifer--becomes possible only because of this constituive instability. Hence mysticism, as a quest for the absoulate, for which would ensure meaning, stability, and being, encounters instead that which radicially destabilises subjectivty and meaning---mysticism seeks the tra nscental signifer but discovers the paradoxical interplay of presence and absence through which significaiton is mafe possible. Excstacay occurs in both moments (what Lacan refers to as phallic jouissance and the jousisance that goes beyond) and as he argues in the seminary, if this does not quite make for two Gods, nor does it make for one alone" (149)

The doubless not God is the source of the doubleness of mystiricsim. The split subject sesires an other through which it might become whole, and it conflates that desire wit hthe very operaiton of language through which subjects are constutited as split and other than themselves. Mysticism and pyschoanlaysis after an absoulate other through which it might be fufilled. Yet this unstintiny quest for the abouslate exposes the subjects own lack and the always absent and unattaniable other throug hwhcih it is brought into existeince. Christians, like the pyschoanalysis, Lacan argues, "are horroried by what was revealed to them"; thus the suffering soul exposed by baroque excesses always attempts to cover over its theft of being and the lack from which its ecstatic anguish emerges (Exrits, 103, Seminar Xx, 114) . In the same way, the pretenstions of pyschoanalysis to sciefitic status are both an ineluctable movement toward oneness and fixed meaning and an evasion of hte real. (164)

To avoid the confusion and rancor that have surrounded the debates around essential-ism and to increase the precision of the discussions about Irigaray, the issue might usefully be recast in terms of sexual difference. Thus many feminist theories agree that those identified as "women" within a given culture can be and in fact routinely are differentiated form those defined as "men" (although it is not at all clear, cross-culturally, that these are the only options.) However, how femininity and masculinity are inculcated and lived is not only historically variable, but also intertwined with other differences, salient within any particular culture. In the contemporary United States, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and class are particularly conspicuous and powerful features of subjectivity... (191)

The passages mimed by Irigray concern the expereince sculpted by Bernini, ones thus judged amenable to representation (and, no doubt, attractive ot male viewers), Like Lacan, Irigaray intensfies the moment's visual and visionary quality, and so explodes it, for that which Irigaray names cannot be seen in the baroque excesses of Beriniini's statue. By reasserting the violence of Teresa's expereince, and by emphasizing the site of the transverberaiton as the viscera (stomach or womb) rather than the heart (Teresa describes the arrow as pericing the heart so deeply it reaches into her entrails and pulls them out, Irigary upsets the excesses to the improper entrails of the saint. Teresa's insides literally create her interority as other than and unrepresentable (by man) (202)

Let us pray to god, so that we can be free of God. Miester Eckhart