A cultural history of psychological trauma

The obviousness with which psychological trauma is now recognised as an inescapable consequence of mass violence must not mask the ambiguities of the notion itself and its misuses.

Firstly, the history of the rediscovery of the reality of post-traumatic disorders is characterised by a long period of time where the treatment of victims by EuroAmerican society and its institutions was of their disqualification, suspicion, and where clinical treatments were more humiliating than genuinely therapeutic.

It was not until the end of the Vietnam War, and even more so in the early 1980s, that psychological trauma was no longer seen as the consequence of a pre-existing psychological weakness, but rather as proof that the traumatic event was impossible to overcome. From this point, the evidence of psychological trauma in victims of significant violence became proof of the reality of their persecution for the first time. Trauma before then could in no way be used to defend the cause of the oppressed. On the contrary, the concept had for effect to produce significant stigmatisation of the victims who were then assumed to be emotionally too fragile.

Even today, the extent to which the psychological trauma that resulted from mass violence is attributed remains particularly flexible and is often uneven. Asylum seekers, for example, do not always benefit (far from it) from the leniency of the host countries. Their traumatic experiences are more often than not denied, or even considered insufficient to be able to provide the required "proof" to ascertain a refugee status in a Western country.

Today, people migrating from South and South-East Asia, the Middle East and Africa face great difficulty in being able to use the traumas they experienced before and during their exile to obtain the recognition of their rights. This is in sharp contrast with the context for the people of South-East Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, when hundreds of thousands of refugees from Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia were welcomed in the West. The major difference in the way in which refugees are treated also bears witness to the ambiguous uses of the notion of trauma as such is used in this context: in some cases, psychological trauma alone seems sufficient, while in others - and there are increasingly more of these scenarios – the concept proves to be insufficient, particularly in the instance of populations that are unwanted in the host country.

Similarly in the judicial arena, the ambiguities of the notion are revealed in the suspicion sometimes levelled against the testimony of traumatised victims. For example, this can be the case with women victims of sexual violence, where those who seek to stifle the words of these women argue that the victims’ psychological traumas can alter their memory to the point of questioning the reliability and credibility of their testimony. 

Why PTSD is not enough

A more contemporary observation is that the notion of trauma being used and misused in an effort to bear witness to the horror experienced, sometimes without taking into account cultural variability. This has often resulted in making individual and collective experiences increasingly inaudible, all too often reduced to the single category ‘trauma’ or ‘PTSD’. While the notion is still clinically useful, it does not fully capture the complexity of the singularity of the experience of suffering.

We believe it is essential to go beyond the use of the category ‘trauma’ in interventions and in research. Not to deny its reality, but to give the notion back to the place it deserves alongside all the other forms of expression of suffering, mourning and resistance, and the reclaiming of life that victims so desperately need.

The originality of our team's approach lies in this dual movement: recognising and overcoming the reality of trauma.