traumacore

English

Etymology

trauma +‎ core

Noun

traumacore (plural not attested)

1. (countable, psychology) A repressed memory of an event that when triggered becomes the primary reason for feeling traumatized.
   • 1999, Pynchon Notes - Issues 42-43, page 246:

     In an immobilization taken up in Kafka's story by the literal fixation of the victim to the bed, the traumacore fixates the victim of trauma to a specific temporal slot in its development (the traumatime and the traumasite), to which it returns, against its conscious will, freezing again and again into a traumatized tableau vivant.

   • 2001, American Studies in Scandinavia - Volumes 33-34, page 134:

     According to Berressem, the ultimate 'traumacore' in Pynchon's poetics is the fall into language, subjectivity and culture, a fall that entails the realization of death, not face to face but rather in the face of the letter.

   • 2003, Wolfram Mauser, Joachim Pfeiffer, Trauer, page 91:

     The traumacore functions, therefore, as an always already excluded, crossed out origin, such as the event of my own birth.

   • 2005, Niran Abbas, Mapping Michel Serres, page 63:

     While the infinitely "small" time of the clinamen designates for Lacan the time of the "traumacore," it designates for Lucretius the birth of complexity.

2. (uncountable) A genre of Internet art where cutesy, childish visuals are juxtaposed with the anguish of trauma and abuse.

   Hypernym: ventcore