The Loop

In half-sleep an image comes to Simon: chains, and powerful hands shackled overhead. This is not a “revenge plan” in the ordinary sense — it is the work of the mechanism Freud called repetition compulsion: the psyche strives to return to the scene of the trauma, but with the roles reversed, so that this time it is the one in control.

Notice the mirroring: to immobilize, to strip of choice, to force to listen — that is exactly what was done to Simon, for years. Unprocessed trauma invents nothing new; it reflects. In chapter one “the first loop closed”; the image of the chains is the same loop arriving at its other end. This is how the circle of violence closes — when no one has stepped in to break it.