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This paper offers a circling around the interrelations of language and trauma, identity and forgiving through the figure and poems of Paul Celan. In this context, the circle itself becomes a cipher for the trauma of the Shoah and the (im)possibility of speaking or writing poetry after Auschwitz. Via Jenny Edkins, Giorgio Agamben, and Derrida, the poetic is interrogated as an ethical response to the political and social betrayal that is trauma; the subsequent effect of trauma on speaking and listening to testimony is then considered. Finally, the paper explores the poetic as a cipher for forgiving, distinct from moral forgiveness and guilt and equally separate from legal responsibility and debt. Celan's own suicide and one of his elegies are considered as final, literal ciphers in this perpetual and imperfect circling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case presented in this paper demonstrates how the patient's use of poetry and body enactments illustrates the gestalt of her early trauma in which words alone are insufficient. A clinical example is used to exemplify both the patient's and the analyst's conscious and unconscious subjectivity that resides in embodied states. The case also conveys a paradox between the patient feeling understood and known via the articulation of her experience, which was often through her poetry, and simultaneously feeling the spoken word can never fully express what she feels and who she is. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]