The Evil Hours by David J. Morris Page B

figure shuffling before the lens of history, often existing as little more than an intriguing irregularity in the negative or a fascinating anecdote that refuses to be linked to any larger phenomenon, such as the Athenian soldier, reported by Herodotus, who went permanently blind from fear during the battle of Marathon in 490 BC, a case that for millennia was consistently described as being so unique, so extraordinary, so far outside the vein of practical experience as to be unfit for deeper examination.
    And yet, amazingly, in spite of the shape-shifting ideas of post-traumatic stress, the changing attitudes and cultural schemes and the general fickleness of the language used to describe it, a few unifying themes do hold across the centuries, as we shall see.
    Most of what we know about trauma’s past comes from military history. The never-ending ebb and flow of war has produced a corresponding cycle of traumatic history, a cycle of societal ignorance followed by denial, a brief period of understanding, and then another interval of ignorance.The bullets fly, the bombs explode, the body of knowledge about the effects of terror on the mind expands generously for a period of time. Previously uninterested doctors and other learned folk are drawn into the war effort. New treatments and technologies emerge. Then the guns fall silent, and the body of knowledge relating to trauma contracts with surprising violence as society moves on, leaving the survivors to more or less fend for themselves.
    The change that broke this cycle, or at the very least seriously altered its periodicity, was PTSD’s introduction into the DSM in 1980. With a mere three pages, some fifteen hundred words in a telephone book–sized manual published by the American Psychiatric Association, the West embarked on a new relationship with trauma, medicalizing what in previous eras had been a spiritual, moral, or artistic concern, inviting survivors to enter into the modern transactional relationship that exists between patients and doctors, expecting them to do what all good patients do: go to their health care provider, undertake a course of treatment, take their medications, and get well.
    Frustratingly, there is no equivalent cycle for survivors of sexual trauma, whose existence, if it can be historically detected at all, is largely defined by society’s insistence that they remain invisible, an insistence that no doubt worsens the harm immeasurably. As sociologist Georges Vigarello argued as recently as 2001, “The history of rape has never been written.”Moreover, as Susan Brownmiller indicates in her study of sexual assault
Against Our Will
, the systematic erasure of rape can be seen throughout human history. “Thou shalt not rape” is not one of the Ten Commandments, whereas adultery and coveting thy neighbor’s wife are both forbidden.As she points out, this blind spot continued through the modern era: Freud, Jung, Adler, Marx, and even Karen Horney discuss rape only glancingly in their work.
    The other reason for this dearth of knowledge is the simple fact that women are far more likely to be the victims of rape than men (91 percent of all rape victims are female), and the struggles of women have long been considered less worthy of the historian’s attention than the struggles of (generally male) soldiers.Unsurprisingly, one of the primary goals of seventies feminism was to force society to recognize the fact that rape is more common than our history textbooks would lead us to believe. By and large, this gendering of trauma continues today. Despite the fact that rape is the most common and most injurious form of trauma, the bulk of PTSD research is directed toward war trauma and veterans.Most of what we know about PTSD comes from studying men: the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in PTSD research is the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, a governmental body designed to serve an overwhelmingly male population.Even the