Sympathy for the devil: Resiliency and victim-perpetrator dynamics in paula vogel's how i learned to drive

Abstract

This essay argues that Vogel's play stages an intervention against the political-historical limitations of trauma treatment and a corrective measure against the erasure of the perpetrator in survivor discourse. With a survivor who looks directly at the perpetrator's ability to harness power for his own gain and reveals a compassionate understanding of his weaknesses, How I Learned to Drive also dramatizes a deep identification with the perpetrator that does not always align with classical psychoanalysis or some contemporary survivor movements' attempts to redress previous approaches to sexual trauma. The play serves as a warning that unless these painful ambiguities around the survivor-perpetrator dynamic are addressed, efforts to reclaim agency after trauma will be thwarted, and survivor movements risk repeating the failure of earlier trauma paradigms. © 2011 The Author.