A Documentary About Me Abreacting A Bad Memory is a personal journey through the psychoanalytic therapy of Abreaction. Abreaction is a Freudian therapeutic technique of catharsis whereby traumatic events from the past (relived through memory) are reenacted. This repetition of the trauma rescues the trauma from the subconscious (where it has been sectioned off as defense mechanism) and enables the patient to work through the painful memory. In this documentary, I attempt to abreact the memory of watching my chicken have a heart attack and die. The abreaction therapy leads me to question the psyches of the other chickens who form the audience for my public psychotherapy as I compare myself to these silent animals. Part-way through the reenactment of my trauma, a voiceover from a Jean Baudrillard lecture provides an excessively abstruse contextualization of my behavior, claiming abreaction as a political category.
