The Political is Personal: 'Wounds of History' in the Formation of Self

In her 2014 novel Everything I Never Told You, Chinese-American author Celeste Ng flips the popular 1970s feminist rallying call “the personal is political” on its head to demonstrate the inner-psychic damage that political ideologies can inflict.

Illustrating exactly how the social “gets into” the psyche, Everything I Never Told You constitutes an exemplary psychosocial text that lays bare the psychological mechanisms responsible for generating transgenerational transmission of forms of trauma that are “social” in origin.

My paper offers an invitation to reflect, with Ng, on the chiasmic feedback loop between the social and the psychic. It suggests that what is called for is a “double-dare” – daring us to confront our own painful psychic truths to avoid passing them on, as well as, more broadly, to challenge the violent social configurations that carry such enormous weight in the creation of those wounds in the first place.