WHAT HAPPENED?

Extracts from an unpublished interview with the late Martin Bergmann by Theresa Delaney, 1996

TD: Is it true you were abused, Reverend Bergmann?

Bergmann: No more so than anyone else.

TD: How so?

It's all a matter of degree. The reason why hypnotherapists can so easily 'recover' abuse traces is not, as we are led to believe, that they have implanted them; but neither is it the case that they are 'real' empirical memories either.

They are what Freud calls trauma, and what Templeton calls a Transcendental Occurrence. When It happens, there is no-One to experience It - The event is precisely too overwhelming to be processed within the time-space-causality frame of human experience and cognition - and therefore there is no memory.

Or: there is only memory. Memory stands in for what could not be experienced. Think of alien abduction narratives. We all know that they concern time anomalies. What is registered initially is precisely a gap in time. For the cogito, that is to say, there is an awareness only of a gap in the 'I Think'. An ellipsis in the illusion of seamless consciousness. This rupture first of all consists only of a question: 'What happened'?

The answer is of course that what happened is a disruption of the empirical-phenomenal by an Outside. Since this can't be experienced - it is literally too intense - it can only be encountered via post hoc neuronic narrativization that is not 'false' but artificial. Anything would be 'false', is the point. Again, the event is perceptible only in the gaps in the narrative mesh.

We need to remember Freud's point that trauma is originary; it is trauma that is constitutive of identity as such. To be introduced into the symbolic order always involves violence. Obviously the child 'experiences' socialization as an unbearable horror. So it isn't going too far to say that the relationship between the child and abuse is analytic: the child is the one that is abused.

What this means is that there is a delirial field underlying all subjectivity that is dripping with abuse signal.

Take something like Cathy O'Brien's recent book [Trance-Formation of America]. Should we believe that O'Brien's claims about CIA-organized trauma-based mind control systems are genuine? Or, alternatively, should we believe that she constructed them as a monstrously elaborate fabrication? Neither hypothesis seems remotely satisfactory.

TD: So what is the explanation?

B: That O'Brien is drawing upon the real 'collective' unconscious of the USA. Of course, her narrative of systematic abuse by the powers-that-be is true, there's no question of that. It just might not be empirically true.

TD: How does all this relate to Christianity?

B: Once we've left behind Paul's child abuse cult, you can see that Christ is about a cut, a break in the cycle of abuse. Instead of being the abuse victim of Catholic iconography, Christ is a child abductor - 'only he who hates his father and mother can follow me' - the one who snatches the child from the cycle of time, from the grips of Kronos, 'the most honest of fathers'.

TD: So, speaking in terms of Stillwell's Lemurian system, Christ would be an avatar of Djynxx?

B: Yes. Absolutely. The cutter. Desert spirit of dust clouds. All of sudden... there they were... gone....

Posted by mark k-p at October 19, 2004 12:49 AM