In the 2010 Absence of Mind, her Terry Lectures at Yale, Marilynne Robinson argues that Freudian psychoanalysis is decontextualized from history, culture, and nature. But her own 1980 novel Housekeeping militates for an understanding of psychoanalysis as not a simple cure for trauma, but a means to let traumatic loss open one up to the possibilities of the external environment. In this reading of the novel, protagonist Ruth learns to address her traumatic loss not as something to be resolved, nor as something to be coped with, but as something to be rejoiced in, for it opens her up to the possibility of transcending ordinary existence and comprehending the redemptive powers of memory. Through the act of narration, she transforms her trauma into a work of beauty, thus revealing the value even of events of the utmost sorrow and sublimating her existence into the realm of collective memory.