Forfeiting the paradigm of victimhood (original) (raw)
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Chapter One: Theorizing Trauma
Wounds and Words, 2013
"Trauma has become a paradigm because it has been turned into a repertoire of compelling stories about the enigmas of identity, memory and selfhood that have saturated Western cultural life." (ROGER LUCKHURST, THE TRAUMA QUESTION) Any attempt to define and theorize "trauma" involves a struggle to make sense of the confusing array of current conceptualizations of trauma, ranging from PTSD to cultural trauma. Any attempt to write a history of trauma faces further challenges in trying to find a way through the jungle-like complexity of the historiography of psychiatry. Roy Porter and Mark Micale emphasize the highly controversial nature of the history of psychiatry and conclude that "it has thus far proved impossible to produce anything like an enduring, comprehensive, authoritative history" (6). 1 Within the contested field of psychiatry, trauma is, in turn, a particularly controversial subject. The history of trauma is a history of repeated gaps and ruptures, with cyclical periods of attention and neglect, of fascination and rejection (van der Kolk,
What is Traumatization?: A Critical Psychological Critique and Reformulation
2019
Inspired by critical psychology this article explores and challenges two central issues in psychology: The use of diagnoses and that of trauma. These concepts and related practices are not as straight-forward as is often assumed in mainstream psychology. On the contrary, they have complex and far-reaching problematic implications for our understanding of agency, difficulties, dilemmas and suffering of concrete subjects, as well as for our practices. This article discusses the conceptualisation of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is in widespread use in most countries. Using this diagnosis as an example, some problems concerning diagnoses in general are introduced. Drawing on a study of women exposed to sexualised coercion, ‘symptoms’ of PTSD are reinterpreted. Trauma is understood as processes of a personal and overpowering sense of loss of control in specific times and places, and thus as embedded in the conduct of everyday lives. ‘Symptoms’ of PTSD are therefore reinter...
Disrupting the Normalization of Clinical Discourses of Trauma
Philosophical Practice, 2017
This essay examines the background and current status of the concept of psychological trauma, especially in the historical context of feminist debates about recovered memory. This historical context is the arena in which the concept of psychological trauma has been fought and from which clarity can be gleaned for the purposes of philosophical counseling. I argue that philosophical counselors should reject the pre- suppositions of the dissociative model of traumatic memory and to consider the positive implications, for philosophical counseling, of feminist, intersectional, and cognitive research agendas that examine the plasticity and healing of traumatic memories by client normative capacities for resilience, autonomy, and narrativity. I urge philosophical counselors to be skeptical toward the idea of extreme dissociative models of memory that imply the absolute collapse of a client’s normative capacities. This skepticism is justifiable not because empirical clinical research has disproved the existence of extreme dissociative states (which it has not done), but rather there is experimental and normative evidence to support alternative constructive therapeutic stances toward dissociative states.
Quaderns de Filosofia, 2022
The present paper focuses on some of the tensions that have been recurrent in the concept of psychic trauma since the late nineteenth century. It further argues that these tensions have been introduced into the concepts of collective trauma and cultural trauma, but have remained undertheorized. These theories have not been able to understand the relationship established between the structural forms of damage and its eventual forms. We therefore draw on some critiques of these concepts to point out the impasses of cultural trauma theories in understanding the dialectic between the general and the particular that is at play in socially mediated psychic suffering. We propose that in order to bring this understanding to fruition, it is necessary to look back to the tradition of critical theory and its concept of suffering, and take up its normative character through a theory of harm based on the concept of negativity. Resumen: El presente artículo se centra en algunas de las tensiones que han sido recurrentes en el concepto de trauma psíquico desde finales del siglo xix. Además, se plantea que esas tensiones se han introducido en el concepto de trauma colectivo y de trauma cultural, pero han permanecido insuficientemente teorizadas. Estas teorías no han sido capaces de entender la relación que se establece entre las formas estructurales de daño y sus formas puntuales. Por ello, se recurre a algunas críticas de estos conceptos para señalar los impasses de las teorías del trauma cultural para comprender la dialéctica entre lo general y lo particular que está en juego en el sufrimiento psíquico socialmente mediado. Proponemos que para llevar esta comprensión a cabo, es preciso volver a mirar a la tradición de la teoría crítica y su concepto de sufrimiento, así como retomar su carácter normativo en una teoría del daño basada en el concepto de negatividad.
Research in Phenomenology, 2000
Already for more than a century, the subject has recurrently died and come to life again upon the stage of philosophical thought. Even if it is incontestable that in the history of these reversals, the reborn subject is never quite the same as the one which disappeared, this survival gives cause for thought. Might it not, for example, lead us to think that the life of the subject consists precisely in surviving the dramas which ceaselessly menace its existence? That the subject, far from being sheltered from the threat of its disappearance, only experiences the need to affirm its existence in undergoing the ordeal of its possible disappearance? By this disappearance we do not mean physical death, but the abolition of subjective identity by an event which is non-appropriable and in consequence traumatising. I am a subject to the degree and so long as I resist my fading away. Being a subject would thus be a matter of being a subject by virtue of losses of identity and subsequent attempts to reconstitute a subjectivity, this subjectivity being henceforth no more than a vulnerable subjectivity, a wounded cogito. To say that this subject's rhythm of life is composed of the succession and perhaps even the simultaneity of events in which its identity is shattered and re-composed, does not, however, by any means demand that there subsists in the heart of the subject a hard core which remains sheltered from these ordeals. On the contrary, the sorrowful plot of this existence opposes with all its tragic weight any attempt to return to a mythical conception of a substantial subject. On the other hand, the recourse to the notion of a subject that would be nothing other than a speaker who says "I", is just as problematic. For it is not sure that the subject which is transformed by surviving the ordeals which menace its identity can speak of them and speak of them in the first person. The subject which resurfaces after being plunged into the ordeal of a non-representable says at most: "Here I am, in spite of myself ".
Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics
Paragraph, 2007
This article discusses the current 'popularity' of trauma research in the Humanities and examines the ethics and politics of trauma theory, as exemplified in the writings of Caruth and Felman and Laub. Written from a position informed by Laplanchian and object relations psychoanalytic theory, it begins by examining and offering a critique of trauma theory's model of subjectivity, and its relations with theories of referentiality and representation, history and testimony. Next, it proposes that although trauma theory's subject matter -the sufferings of others -makes critique difficult, the theory's politics, its exclusions and inclusions, and its unconscious drives and desires are as deserving of attention as those of any other theory. Arguing that the political and cultural contexts within which this theory has risen to prominence have remained largely unexamined, the article concludes by proposing that trauma theory needs to act as a brake against rather than as a vehicle for cultural and political Manicheanism.
Barrette, Catherine; Haylock, Bridget & Mortimer, Danielle (Hg.): Traumatic Imprints. Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice. Oxford (Inter-Disciplinary Press), S. 199-207.
Since 9/11 at the latest, the idea that entire collectives or societies can be traumatized by shattering historical events has witnessed a significant upsurge. Theoretical concepts of collective or societal trauma are surprisingly scarce though. Notable exceptions are Volkan's mass psychological concept of 'chosen trauma' and Alexander's rather sociological notion of 'cultural trauma'. But while Alexander's focus on the social construction of trauma narratives is blind to the real suffering of people and its possible societal consequences, Volkan takes human suffering as a starting point but falls prey to the analyzed communities' own 'invention of tradition' (Hobsbawm/Ranger). His blindness towards the constructive character of 'collective traumas' is problematic because the traumarelated concept of victimhood is used by many collectives in order to legitimate political claims or mask their own perpetratorship. In my chapter I want to follow up the question of how it is possible to speak about human suffering after wars, genocides and persecutions while at the same time countering the pervasive ideological trauma and victimhood discourses. With Hans Keilson, Ernst Simmel and psychoanalytic trauma theory I argue that all traumatization processes must be understood in societal context. The psychosocial reality before, during, and after the traumatizing event always shapes the trauma.