In other words, there appeared to be a sort of background level of trauma that was not greatly altered by the attacks. However, the proportion was higher among those who had had prolonged exposure to television coverage of the attacks on the Twin Towers.

Our goal is rather to understand how we have moved from a realm in which the symptoms of the wounded soldier or the injured worker were deemed of doubtful legitimacy to one in which their suffering, no longer contested, testifies to an experience that excites sympathy and merits compensation. The point is to grasp the shift that has resulted in wha... See more

This critique primarily addresses the concepts and tools with which the men and women of today think and transform the world—concepts and tools that are often invisible, and therefore unrecognized, by those who use them.

our question is: what does this social recognition change, for the men and women of today (whether victims or not), in their vision of the world and its history, and in their relationships with others and with themselves?

The history of the invention of post-traumatic stress in the late nineteenth century and of its rediscovery in the late twentieth century, thus allows us to trace a dual genealogy

The first strand, which belongs in the domain of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis, conceives trauma both at the level of theoretical debate (which has been analyzed many times) and in actual practice (particularly in the fields of forensic medical expert opinion and colonial medicine, which have not hitherto been the object of much attent... See more

The second strand, which relates to social conceptions, traces changes in attitudes to misfortune and to those who suffer it, whether soldiers or workers, accident victims or survivors of the concentration camps.

What we have aimed to do—contra the popular assumption that trauma is self-evident and that those who speak of it are simply revealing a reality—is to understand what is at play when we interpret the world and its disorders through this concept, which has moved from clinical psychiatry into everyday parlance. (pink)

From this point of view, while it is important to speak of “trauma culture,” as does Anne Kaplan, or “cultural trauma,” to use Ron Eyerman’s term (both evoking the traces left by dramatic events in individual histories and collective accounts), we need at the same time to look at what it means that the concept of trauma has given us this unpreceden... See more