most important of these might reside in the simple meaning of the first letter of its formal name, the
P
. The loss, the insight, the fragmentation, the moral vertigo, all of these things only happen
post-
, after The Event has come and gone and we discover to our shock and surprise that we are not who we used to be. It is perhaps a facile thing to say, but it seems to me that the first duty of every survivor is to simply acknowledge the existence of trauma, to accept that there are things in this world that can break us. Only then can we begin to make meaning out of everything that comes after.
3
TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF TRAUMA
M OST PEOPLE , when they first learn about PTSD, assume that the hypervigilance, social isolation, flashbacks, and nightmares of the condition are universal complaints, as old as the hills.In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth, in that the collection of symptoms and concepts that we call PTSD is a relatively new historical entity that emerged from a very particular point in time and spaceâ1970s America, a period lived in the long shadow of the Vietnam War, a period notable for its social upheavals, its crises of faith, its questioning of gender roles and modes of thought, what Joan Didion called its âfebrile rhythms.âThe seventies were, after all, the years that brought us Watergate, Patricia Hearst, Kent State, Jim Jones, the Weather Underground, and, perhaps most importantly, the end of the Vietnam War, a conflict that radically altered not only the way Americans looked at trauma and the role of the veteran in society but also the way America looked at the world.
Even with these data points to anchor us, trying to understand how PTSD fits into the larger sweep of history is a surprisingly difficult task because the human response to war and disaster changes in the way that Texas weather changes: constantly, capriciously, rapidly. To give just one example of the way that culture has influenced how we think about trauma, consider the flashback. Commonly thought of as a signature symptom of PTSD, the flashback is, in fact, a term borrowed from the world of film.Originally coined by early twentieth-century filmmakers to describe a jump between different points of time within a narrative, the flashback is so deeply embedded in the public imagination that it is difficult to imagine a world without it, and yet in 2002, researchers at Kingâs College in London, digging through war records dating back to the Victorian era, found that flashbacks were virtually nonexistent among veterans who fought before the age of film. (Civil War veterans who suffered from involuntary intrusive images didnât refer to them as flashbacks, and they were more likely to describe being visited by a host of spirits, phantoms, demons, and the ghosts of fallen comrades.)Adding to the confusion, a variant of the term was also in wide use in the LSD culture of the sixties and seventies.In all likelihood, the reason that the flashback is an essential part of todayâs understanding of trauma is that an influential San Francisco psychiatrist with an interest in stress syndromes and psychedelia, Mardi Horowitz, served on the working groups that oversaw PTSDâs eventual introduction into the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM) in 1980.
Some scholars, such as Roger Luckhurst of the University of London, have even gone so far as to say that cinemaâs claim on the imagination is so strong that it serves to âshape the psychological and general cultural discourse of trauma into the present.â Looking back on my experiences in Iraq, it isnât hard to see where Luckhurst might derive such ideas. There were, wherever you went in Anbar province, continual references by Marines to
300
, a film about ancient Sparta, and then there were the soldiers in Dora who insistently referred back to their â
Black Hawk Down
dayâ when describing a series of ambushes
P
. The loss, the insight, the fragmentation, the moral vertigo, all of these things only happen
post-
, after The Event has come and gone and we discover to our shock and surprise that we are not who we used to be. It is perhaps a facile thing to say, but it seems to me that the first duty of every survivor is to simply acknowledge the existence of trauma, to accept that there are things in this world that can break us. Only then can we begin to make meaning out of everything that comes after.
3
TOWARD A GENEALOGY OF TRAUMA
M OST PEOPLE , when they first learn about PTSD, assume that the hypervigilance, social isolation, flashbacks, and nightmares of the condition are universal complaints, as old as the hills.In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth, in that the collection of symptoms and concepts that we call PTSD is a relatively new historical entity that emerged from a very particular point in time and spaceâ1970s America, a period lived in the long shadow of the Vietnam War, a period notable for its social upheavals, its crises of faith, its questioning of gender roles and modes of thought, what Joan Didion called its âfebrile rhythms.âThe seventies were, after all, the years that brought us Watergate, Patricia Hearst, Kent State, Jim Jones, the Weather Underground, and, perhaps most importantly, the end of the Vietnam War, a conflict that radically altered not only the way Americans looked at trauma and the role of the veteran in society but also the way America looked at the world.
Even with these data points to anchor us, trying to understand how PTSD fits into the larger sweep of history is a surprisingly difficult task because the human response to war and disaster changes in the way that Texas weather changes: constantly, capriciously, rapidly. To give just one example of the way that culture has influenced how we think about trauma, consider the flashback. Commonly thought of as a signature symptom of PTSD, the flashback is, in fact, a term borrowed from the world of film.Originally coined by early twentieth-century filmmakers to describe a jump between different points of time within a narrative, the flashback is so deeply embedded in the public imagination that it is difficult to imagine a world without it, and yet in 2002, researchers at Kingâs College in London, digging through war records dating back to the Victorian era, found that flashbacks were virtually nonexistent among veterans who fought before the age of film. (Civil War veterans who suffered from involuntary intrusive images didnât refer to them as flashbacks, and they were more likely to describe being visited by a host of spirits, phantoms, demons, and the ghosts of fallen comrades.)Adding to the confusion, a variant of the term was also in wide use in the LSD culture of the sixties and seventies.In all likelihood, the reason that the flashback is an essential part of todayâs understanding of trauma is that an influential San Francisco psychiatrist with an interest in stress syndromes and psychedelia, Mardi Horowitz, served on the working groups that oversaw PTSDâs eventual introduction into the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM) in 1980.
Some scholars, such as Roger Luckhurst of the University of London, have even gone so far as to say that cinemaâs claim on the imagination is so strong that it serves to âshape the psychological and general cultural discourse of trauma into the present.â Looking back on my experiences in Iraq, it isnât hard to see where Luckhurst might derive such ideas. There were, wherever you went in Anbar province, continual references by Marines to
300
, a film about ancient Sparta, and then there were the soldiers in Dora who insistently referred back to their â
Black Hawk Down
dayâ when describing a series of ambushes
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