Trauma is a word that is used in a variety of ways in everyday language today. But do we really understand what it means when we speak about trauma ?
The word trauma (Greek: wound), which can be found since the 17th century, was initially used in a medical context and stands for a physical injury caused by force from outside. Roger Luckhurst, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature, describes the history of the development of the concept of trauma and highlights how it changed with the industrial developments in the 19th and 20th centuries. The experience that train crashes and other industrial accidents can cause not only physically injured victims, but also negatively affect the thoughts and actions of those that were present to the event, gave rise to the idea that the human psyche can also be harmed by challenging experiences. The idea of trauma as a permanent psychological wound was reinforced by the First World War, after which many soldiers exhibited disorders called neuroses (shell shock), which were compared to the symptoms of hysteria, previously diagnosed only in female patients. Luckhurst points out that it was only after the Vietnam War and after the efforts of many psychiatrists fighting for compensation for Vietnam War veterans that post-traumatic symptoms were officially recognized in 1980.
This recognition was achieved through the inclusion of the term ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ (PTSD) in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Manual of Classification of Mental Disorders. Luckhurst further explains that popular attention to the idea of trauma as a form of persistent psychological injury was not limited only to Vietnam War veterans at the time, but also to other groups who had survived extreme experiences, such as the victims of Slavery and the bombing of Hiroshima. It was only in this context, writes Luckhurst, that the Holocaust was recognized and seen as the real trauma of modern Western civilization. The debate on trauma that emerged was taken up as well as influenced by the activist groups at the time, such as: the anti-Vietnam movement, the women’s movement and the ‘Black Power’ movement and therefore associated with the ideas of identity politics, which critically questioned the positions of a white patriarchal society. In this context, the concept of the trauma victim became important. According to Luckhurst, the debate about trauma was taken up academically in the late 1980s and has since become an important part of many disciplines within the humanities such as philosophy, literary studies, anthropology, history and sociology (Luckhurst, 2008).
Having discussed how the concept of trauma has evolved within the last 300 years, it is important to understand how a traumatic experience can occur and what the associated effects can be. This enquiry will be the topic of the 3 blogs to follow.
Bibliography
Luckhurst, R. (2008). The Trauma Question. New York: Routledge.
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