Susan Young
Bearing Witness: Autoethnographic Animation and the Metabolism of Trauma
Summary
This multi-disciplinary practice-based inquiry uses the medium of autoethnographic animation to process the sequela of psychological trauma. Chronic trauma often has devastating consequences. Its encoding in the brain may cause altered threat perception, increased stress hormone activity and emotional dysregulation, leading to nightmares, flashbacks, outbursts of rage, paralyzing fear and other distressing physiological symptoms. Many survivors experience suicidal ideation, some dissociate from their experiences in an attempt to psychologically survive, and others use drugs and alcohol to ameliorate their symptoms. Unless resolved, the distressing images and emotions imprinted at the time of trauma often regularly re-intrude into the survivor’s consciousness in the form of intrusive memories and visceral sensations redolent of the trauma, accompanied by intense feelings of terror, shame and helplessness.
Motivated by my own experiences of abuse within both a violent marriage and the UK psychiatric system, I am using my practice to analyse autoethnographic animation’s capacity to moderate trauma, through its visuospatial processes and potential to rescript trauma narratives, and through its capacity to bear witness to the power dynamics driving interpersonal and institutional abuse.
Additional info
In cognitive science research, it has been found that trauma-related intrusive memories and their associated symptoms may be moderated by visuospatial processes such as Tetris game play, the use of mental imagery (pictures in the mind’s eye), and imagery rescripting (working with imagery to change its perceived meaning). My study proposes that as the medium of animation combines visuospatial attributes alongside rescripting possibilities, it might be similarly used to ameliorate trauma symptoms. Relevant research will be cited to support this proposition.
The choice of animated autoethnography arose from my decision to explore personal experiences. As a methodology, autoethnography takes such experiences and uses them to examine wider socio-cultural-political issues through a variety of media, such as the written word, poetry, film and performance. Within this inquiry I am using it to explore the epistemic injustice (harm caused when a person’s credibility is doubted due to their identity) that I have personally experienced within interpersonal and institutional relationships, including those involving domestic violence and the abuse of psychiatric power.
My theoretical frame draws on physicist and philosopher Karen Barad’s agential realist framework in order to explore how the materiality, discursive practices and performativity of animation, and relationships between researcher, tools, events, and processes, may be used to moderate trauma and identify evidence of therapeutic change.
There is currently very little published material exploring animation’s therapeutic potential and the possible cognitive processes involved, and my inquiry will contribute new knowledge in this area by connecting the disparate fields of animation, autoethnography and cognitive science research. Using the qualitative method of thematic analysis (as set out by Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke), I am ascertaining animation’s visuospatial attributes, rescripting potential and capacity to bear witness to the lived experience of trauma. Interviews with scientists, clinicians, academics, autoethnographers, animators, therapists and trauma survivors provide me with data for analysis, and this in turn informs my animation practice.
My research output comprises my practice (a trilogy of film experiments using personal psychiatric and legal records, diaries and poetry as source material), my thesis, and a series of presentations, screenings and papers. Findings will suggest avenues for autoethnographic animation’s future use, in both arts-based and clinical research and practice.
Expt. 1: It Started with a Murder (2013)
Expt. 2: The Betrayal (2015)
