Introduction - Trauma as Interpretation of Injury

The present book crystallized.....what had drawn.... from the ends of two centuries - what they all share, suffusing and energizing them, latent and yet formative - was a mood of cultural crisis: a sense that something has gone terribly wrong in the modern world, something that we can neither assimilate nor put right. The mood's special poignancy comes not only from life's usual struggles and sorrows, but also from a sense that the ground of experience has been compromised. Implicitly, that is, these are fantasies about trauma. But they are also particular uses of trauma to interpret and adapt to the world...

Severe trauma explodes the cohesion of consciousness. When a survivor creates a fully realized narrative that brings together the shattered knowledge of what happened, the emotions that were aroused by the meanings of the events, and the bodily sensations that the physical events created, the survivor pieces back together the fragmentation of consciousness that trauma has caused. ---- Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam

A particular disaster may immediately cripple some survivors, but most will begin repairing their lives. By contract, the mood I am describing is post-traumatic - belated, epiphenomenal, the outcome of cumulative stresses. It reflects a disturbance in the ground of collective experience: a shock to people's values, trust, and sense of purpose; an obsessive awareness that nations, leaders, even we ourselves can die. 
Change exacerbates the mood by undercutting social consensus and the stable transmission of values from one generation to another. Its most prominent symptoms express anxiety about loss of control and decline or degeneration, along with the death anxiety these symptoms often mask. 

The core experience of trauma: intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation. Ultimately, trauma is a radical form of terror management.

Whatever the physical distress, then, trauma is also psychocultural, because the injury entails interpretation of the injury.... because terror afflicts the body, but it also demands to be interpreted and, if possible, integrated into character. In an effort to master danger the victim may symbolically transform it, compulsively reexperience it, or deny it. And those interpretations are profoundly influenced by the particular cultural context. Evolution gives everyone a survival drive, but combat stress would probably have had different effects on a Roman centurion than on a suburban teenage conscript in Vietnam. A culture may make terror and loss heroically meaningful and so diminish its damage, but a culture may also contribute to psychic ruin. For exactly this reason - because trauma can be ideologically manipulated, reinforced, and exploited - it calls for critical analysis as well as psychiatric intervention.

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There are four characteristics of post-traumatic stress that make the concept useful for thinking about culture:

The first is the proposition that an injury can continue to influence behavior long after the initial impact. Symptoms may surface belatedly and in disguised, often somatic , forms. From this point of view, a given behavior need not be a direct reaction to a massive injury, but may represent the cumulative effect of a number of small buy synergistic shocks. Such a view is akin to the ego psychologists' premise that adult personality is shaped by an accretion of potentially neurotic defenses or character armor.

Second, closely related to the discontinuous persistence of symptoms is the frequency of dissociation in post-traumatic stress... "traumatized people [may] alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alternations of consciousness... called 'doublethink,', and which mental health professionals ... call 'dissociation.'" Orwell's 1984 envisions the postwar world as a nightmarish post-traumatic culture in which traumatic dissociation is Big Brother's basic tool of social control... traumatic dissociation represents a loss of control, panic in the face of what is unthinkable.

The third significant quality of post-traumatic stress is its contagiousness. Herman describes in detail the "vicarious traumatization" that may afflict therapists when working with victims.......  of our capacity for suggestibility, post-traumatic stress can be seen as a category of experience that mediates between a specific individual's injury and a group or even a culture. A vivid example is the way Hitler, who was  nearly killed in WWI, infected an entire nation with his post-traumatic symptoms. In a sense, all his policies obsessively attempted to undo that earlier calamity through fantastic aggression. In cultural applications, then, it is useful to see post-traumatic experience as a sort of critically responsive interface between people: a space in which patterns of supremely important, often dangerous symbols and emotions may reinforce one another, gaining momentum, confirmation, and force when particular social conditions and historical pressures intersect.

The fourth salient characteristic of post-traumatic experience is the way in which it destablizes the ground of conventional reality and arouses death anxiety... The problem is not simply a victim's loss of trust in particular guarantees, but the recognition that no life can be absolutely grounded. As Ernest Becker, Zygmunt Bauman, Jonathan Shay, and others demonstrate, cultural integrity and death anxiety are closely and reciprocally related. The centrality of terror management in trauma relates it to the basic developmental project of coming to terms with mortality. Post-traumatic symptoms, that is, are related to the coping processes of everyday life. 

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How you construe your suffering determines how likely you are to feel the ground of your existence undermined.

One mode of managing trauma: deliberately using social and ideological controls to train people to reinforce one another's self-control. It has roots in ancient religious techniques for calming the central nervous system to prevent or to relieve terror.

My argument examines trauma both as a clinical concept and as a cultural trope that has met many different needs. As an interpretation of the past, trauma is a kind of history. Like other histories, it attempts to square the present with its origins. The past can be personal or collective, recent or remote: an artifact of psychoanalysis or an act of witness; a primordial myth or a use of ancestral spirits to account for misfortune or violation. Because not everybody in a given culture is likely to be neurologically afflicted, or affected the same way, trauma is always to some extent a trope.

People may use it to account for a world in which power and authority seem staggeringly out of balance, in which personal responsibility and helplessness seem crushing, and in which cultural meanings no longer seem to transcend death. In this sense the trope may be a veiled or explicit criticism of society's defects, a cry of distress and a tool grasped in hopes of some redress, but also a justification for aggression. 

The core experience of trauma is violence. Judith Lewis Herman contends that the study of psychological trauma "provokes such intense controversy that it periodically becomes anathema" and is "forgotten" or repressed...... "The systematic study of trauma therefore depends on the support of a political movement" that challenges, for example, "the sacrifice of young men in war" and "the subordination of women and children."

The specter of social death can be as traumatic as literal death.

Post-traumatic culture registers the dissonance - the shock - of meeting long-denied realities that threaten our individual and collective self-esteem....... erosion of self-esteem directly increases vulnerability to death anxiety. Denial, then, is part of a complex feedback loop that implicates not only immediate victims but potentially a wide circle of witnesses and others. And a crucial problem for cultural studies is that people do not simply ignore or become numb to death, but seek to tame it and ultimately heal its wounds through symbolic transformations.

The present cultural mood reflects the contagious effects of clinical and political trauma, with predictable spasms of anxiety and rage, depression and mourning. 

When the idea of trauma moves out of the psychiatrist's office and into the surrounding culture, its clinical definition recedes and its explanatory powers come to the fore. When a group suffers a trauma as....., the survivors create new cultural forms to repair the fabric of reality.  New meanings enfold the alien terror and influence the evolving identity of the group, as in Israeli military culture and the cry "Never again." Cultures not only report but classify traumatic events: a train "wreck" may be a "catastrophe" or a "tragedy" or merely an "accident." The interplay of publishers, editors, reporters, and audiences determines the meaning of an injury and the nature of our involvement.

Violence sells, as media executives remind us, because it serves a sharpened appetite for stimulation....... tamed violence is an important means of regulating our needs for excitement and security. In this context, disaster stories model a range of human relationships to misfortune and keep our defenses exercised. They may function as a reality check even as they frame, and distance us from, horror. As a form of post-traumatic repetition, our obsessiveness about disaster headlines may represent an effort to assimilate what has frightened us since childhood, desensitizing use to the shocks that all flesh is heir to. 

Trauma is a "mind-blowing" experience that destroys a conventional mind-set and compels (or makes possible) a new worldview. This is why practices as diverse as brainwashing and mysticism may manipulate the dynamics of trauma, and why those dynamics may also play a part in conversion experiences. In the aftermaths of shock, a person may move toward numbness and derangement or toward deeper insight and reintegration. 

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People not only suffer trauma; they use it and the idea of it, for all sorts of ends, good and ill. The trope can be ideologically manipulated, reinforced, and exploited. 

The Romans strategically killed and maimed captives to instill lasting inhibitions. In this respect the infliction of trauma resembles the use of torture.... to create physical pain "so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of 'incontestable reality' on that power that has brought it into being. It is, of course, precisely because the reality of that power is os highly contestable, the regime so unstable, that torture is being used." In this account, that is, torture is another technique for invoking a ground of being. 

Many cultures have systematically induced trauma or near-trauma in an effort to reinforce the conviction of a ground of experience and to strengthen group bonding....... the calculated, ritualized trauma likely served to reinforce the group's control over its own potentially dangerous vulnerabilities by demonstrating a mastery of terror. The shared arousal of threat, mastery, and relief powerfully bonded the survivors. The ritual murder of a scapegoat affords tormentors a conviction of mastery over their own terror, helplessness, guilt, and directed rage.......In ritual ordeals such as the periodic self-mutilation of Myan rulers and the solitary... people deliberately induced pain and dissociation in an effort to confront death and acquire special powers. 

These different ritual experiences shared a drive to violate and expand the boundaries of conventional life....... Experiences that we might associate with trauma mediated a kind of  play-death, and the subsequent psychic reintegration signified a renewal or rebirth. 

In the 1990s, Serbs have not only used terror as a weapon against others, but also made the legendary trauma of the Serbian defeat at Kosovo in 1389 the ground of their "resurrected" ethic identity and the justification for genocidal berserking. Ideology tuns repetition-compulsion into heroic fidelity to a transcendent identity. 

The effort to heal psychic wounds invariably involves a need to substantiate or reconfirm the self, which often entails convictions of transcendence.

Trauma can be invoked to substantiate clams on the empathy of others, as a plea for special treatment, or as a demand for compensation.