Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
By Avery F. Gordon
Ghostly Matters by Avery Gordon
Ghostly Matters explores how unresolved trauma, both personal and generational, haunts like ghosts. We sense its presence yet can’t see it. Or perhaps we choose, either consciously or unconsciously, not to see it–at least not with our current methods for seeing and knowing the world. Gordon says, “The ghost makes itself known to us through haunting and pulls us affectively into the structure of feeling, of a reality we come to experience as a recognition.” It’s the way we all walk around the bed in the room that’s not there.
“In order to write about invisibility and haunting requires attention to what is not seen, but is nonetheless powerfully real; requires attention to what appears dead, but is nonetheless powerfully alive; requires attention to what appears to be in the past, but is nonetheless powerfully present; requires attention to just who the subject of analysis.”
Recognition: identification of someone or something or person from previous encounters or knowledge.
A Revolutionary Approach to Engaging With Trauma
This is a revolutionary approach to engaging with trauma. It makes possible, the mystical pursuit of interacting with the essence of generational trauma that we will never know in the concrete way we know physical matter. The present is made of the elements of the past, both remembered and forgotten. Knowing the affective past comes to us through symbols, dreams, and intuitive identification.
Essence: the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, that determines its character.
Perspective on Transference/Countertransference
“The transfer – countertransference is a chaotic field of energy in which, by virtue of the compelling force of that field, memories are remembered, and forgotten, desires are forged and forged, and a story is the affective consequence of the dynamics of speaking and listening within a dyadic relationship.”
The book reminds us that we can traffic our conversations through a different mystical and magical channel to be a part of transforming “a shadow of a life into an undiminished life whose shadows touch softly in the spirit of a peaceful reconciliation” and concern for justice.
Traffic: The messages or signals sent through communication systems
Gordon explores this topic using great works of fiction, such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Louisa Valenzuela’s He Who Searches. Gordon also considers psychoanalysis and how Sabrina Speilrein’s invisibility and absence in a picture and a moment in time may have or could have been one of the most significant discoveries in the field of psychoanalysis.
“The shape described by someone’s absence… I see her shape in his hand in the vast networking of our society… The control he had over her body. The force he was in her life, in the shape of my life today… The habit of his power and the absence of her choice.”
“Invisible things are not necessarily not there.” – Toni Morrison
Engaging With Ghosts Past, Present, and Future
I give this book five stars. As a therapist, it changed the way I think about trauma. The words spoke to that which already lives within me but didn’t have a map to locate.
For example, I have always sensed and known, in an affective way, my parent’s trauma. Most kids do. But these stories came to me in a dream that used the symbol of a wolf combined with my mother’s childhood home to help me know something that couldn’t be known intellectually. In my dreams, as a child, if the wolf was awakened by my attempts to reach my mother, he erupted into a snarling terror, chasing me across the fields of farmland.
As an adult, I wonder if I asked the wolf what it needed me to know. What was it trying to share or warn of? This has become a tool in the exploration of my family history and the layers of generational trauma that created the unpredictable emotional undertones in my home, my parent’s childhood homes, my grandparents and great grandparent’s childhood homes, all the way through the unknowable despair of the Vietnam War, World War II, and surely back to the Civil War and beyond.
“When a ghost appears, it is making contact with you; all its forceful if perplexing enunciations are for you. Offer it a hospitable reception we must, but the victorious reckoning with the ghost always requires a partiality to the living. Because ultimately haunting is about how to transform a shadow of a life into an undiminished life whose shadows touch softly in the spirit of a peaceful reconciliation.”
