The Empire of Trauma

The Empire of Trauma PDF Author: Didier Fassin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691137537
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
This work shows how, during the 20th century, the perspective on victims of trauma shifted from suspicion to recognition. From these ethnographical fieldworks, the authors thus propose a broader perspective on the political and moral issues of contemporary societies.

The Empire of Trauma

The Empire of Trauma PDF Author: Didier Fassin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691137520
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
This work shows how, during the 20th century, the perspective on victims of trauma shifted from suspicion to recognition. From these ethnographical fieldworks, the authors thus propose a broader perspective on the political and moral issues of contemporary societies.

PTSD

PTSD PDF Author: Jerry Lembcke
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739186256
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
Stories of soldiers suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder dominate news coverage of the return from wars in the Middle East. On the surface, the stories call our attention to psychic trauma and the need for mental health services for veterans; scratch that surface and we see that PTSD has morphed from a diagnostic category into a cultural trope with broad societal implications. In PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-empire America, Jerry Lembcke exposes those implications. Lembcke reprises PTSD’s formulation following the war in Vietnam, examining how its medical discourse provided a psychological alternative to the political interpretations of veterans’ opposition to the war— psychiatrists said veteran dissent was cathartic, a form of acting-out. Lembcke drills deeply into the modern history of war-trauma treatment, picking up the threads left by nineteenth-century work on men and hysteria, and following them into the treatment of “shell shock” in World War I. With great originality, Lembcke also shows how art and the media led the “science” of war trauma, and then how the followers of Sigmund Freud showed that shell-shock symptoms were as likely to be expressions of fears and conflicts internal to the patients as the effects of exploding shells. The line drawn by the Freudian critique of the medical/neurological model would resurface in debates leading to PTSD’s inclusion in the DSM in 1980 and on-going deliberations over the definition and meaning of Traumatic Brain Injury. In core chapters, Lembcke shows the influence of film, theater, television, and news coverage on public and professional thinking about war trauma. The inglorious nature of recent wars, from Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan, leaves Americans searching for meaning in those conflicts and finding it in loss and sacrifice. Lembcke warns that the image of damaged war veterans is working metaphorically in these dangerous times to construct a national self-image of defeat and damage that needs to be avenged. It is a dangerous end-of-empire narrative that needs to be engaged, he says, lest its dangers reach fruition in more war. The insights found in this book make it an invaluable resource for scholars of sociology, medical sociology, psychology, military studies, gender studies, and history of psychiatry, and a riveting read for anyone interested in the subjects it treats.

Violent Reverberations

Violent Reverberations PDF Author: Vigdis Broch-Due
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331939049X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
The contributions to this volume map the surprisingly multifarious circumstances in which trauma is invoked – as an analytical tool, a therapeutic term or as a discursive trope. By doing so, we critically engage the far too often individuating aspects of trauma, as well as the assumption of a universal somatic that is globally applicable to contexts of human suffering. The volume takes the reader on a journey across widely differing terrains: from Norwegian institutions for psychiatric patients to the post-war emergence of speech genres on violence in Mozambique, from Greek and Cameroonian ritual and carnivalesque treatments of historical trauma to national discourses of political assassinations in Argentina, the volume provides an empirically founded anti-dote against claiming a universal ‘empire of trauma’ (Didier Fassin) or seeing the trauma as successfully defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Instead, the work critically evaluates and engages whether the term’s dual plasticity and endurance captures, encompasses or challenges legacies and imprints of multiple forms of violence.

Performing Trauma in Central Africa

Performing Trauma in Central Africa PDF Author: Laura Edmondson
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253035511
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Book Description
What are the stakes of cultural production in a time of war? How is artistic expression prone to manipulation by the state and international humanitarian organizations? In the charged political terrain of post-genocide Rwanda, post-civil war Uganda, and recent violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laura Edmondson explores performance through the lens of empire. Instead of celebrating theatre productions as expression of cultural agency and resilience, Edmondson traces their humanitarian imperatives to a place where global narratives of violence take precedence over local traditions and audiences. Working at the intersection of performance and trauma, Edmondson reveals how artists and cultural workers manipulate narratives in the shadow of empire and how empire, in turn, infiltrates creative capacities.

Trauma, Culture, and PTSD

Trauma, Culture, and PTSD PDF Author: C. Fred Alford
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137576006
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 131

Book Description
This book examines the social contexts in which trauma is created by those who study it, whether considering the way in which trauma afflicts groups, cultures, and nations, or the way in which trauma is transmitted down the generations. As Alford argues, ours has been called an age of trauma. Yet, neither trauma nor post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are scientific concepts. Trauma has been around forever, even if it was not called that. PTSD is the creation of a group of Vietnam veterans and psychiatrists, designed to help explain the veterans' suffering. This does not detract from the value of PTSD, but sets its historical and social context. The author also confronts the attempt to study trauma scientifically, exploring the use of technologies such as magnetic resonance imagining (MRI). Alford concludes that the scientific study of trauma often reflects a willed ignorance of traumatic experience. In the end, trauma is about suffering.

The Empire of Depression

The Empire of Depression PDF Author: Jonathan Sadowsky
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509531661
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
Depression has colonized the world. Today, more than 300 million of us have been diagnosed as depressed. But 150 years ago, "depression" referred to a mood, not a sickness. Does that mean people weren't sick before, only sad? Of course not. Mental illness is a complex thing, part biological, part social, its definition dependent on time and place. But in the mid-twentieth century, even as European empires were crumbling, new Western clinical models and treatments for mental health spread across the world. In so doing, "depression" began to displace older ideas like "melancholia," the Japanese "utsushô," or the Punjabi "sinking heart" syndrome. Award-winning historian Jonathan Sadowsky tells this global story, chronicling the path-breaking work of psychiatrists and pharmacists, and the intimate sufferings of patients. Revealing the continuity of human distress across time and place, he shows us how different cultures have experienced intense mental anguish, and how they have tried to alleviate it. He reaches an unflinching conclusion: the devastating effects of depression are real. A number of treatments do reduce suffering, but a permanent cure remains elusive. Throughout the history of depression, there have been overzealous promoters of particular approaches, but history shows us that there is no single way to get better that works for everyone. Like successful psychotherapy, history can liberate us from the negative patterns of the past.

International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma

International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma PDF Author: Yael Danieli
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1475755678
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 752

Book Description
In this extraordinary new text, the contributors explore the enduring legacy of such social shocks as war, genocide, slavery, tyranny, crime, and disease. Among the cases addressed are: instances of genocide in Turkey, Cambodia, and Russia, the plight of the families of Holocaust survivors, atomic bomb survivors in Japan, and even the children of Nazis, the long-term effects associated with the Vietnam War and the war in Yugoslavia, and the psychology arising from the legacy of slavery in America.

Empire of Liberty

Empire of Liberty PDF Author: Anthony Bogues
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1584659300
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 169

Book Description
An original and stimulating critique of American empire

Contemporary States of Emergency

Contemporary States of Emergency PDF Author: Didier Fassin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781935408017
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The new form of "humanitarian government" emerging from natural disasters and military occupations that reduces people to mere lives to be rescued. From natural disaster areas to zones of political conflict around the world, a new logic of intervention combines military action and humanitarian aid, conflates moral imperatives and political arguments, and confuses the concepts of legitimacy and legality. The mandate to protect human lives--however and wherever endangered--has given rise to a new form of humanitarian government that moves from one crisis to the next, applying the same battery of technical expertise (from military logistics to epidemiological risk management to the latest social scientific tools for "good governance") and reducing people with particular histories and hopes to mere lives to be rescued. This book explores these contemporary states of emergency. Drawing on the critical insights of anthropologists, legal scholars, political scientists, and practitioners from the field, Contemporary States of Emergency examines historical antecedents as well as the moral, juridical, ideological, and economic conditions that have made military and humanitarian interventions common today. It addresses the practical process of intervention in global situations on five continents, describing both differences and similarities, and examines the moral and political consequences of these generalized states of emergency and the new form of government associated with them.
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