The Empire of Trauma

Abstract

Today the concept of trauma is widely used to describe responses to extreme events across space and time, as well as to guide their treatment. However, as Allan Young reminds us in The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (1995), it is actually a Western artefact, “invented” in the late nineteenth century: “The disorder is not timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity. Rather, it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilized these efforts and resources” (5). Similarly, in the introduction to Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (2001), Paul Lerner and Mark Micale note that their volume—an edited collection providing a historical study of the concept of trauma—“calls into question the idea of a single, uniform, transhistorically valid concept of psychological trauma by demonstrating its cultural and social contingence through a series of historical case studies” (25). The origins of this “historical product” (A. Young 5) can be located in a variety of medical and psychological discourses dealing with Euro-American experiences of industrialization, gender relations, and modern warfare (Micale and Lerner, eds.; Saunders; Saunders and Aghaie).