The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma

Colin Davis, Hanna Meretoja, Colin Davis, Hanna Meretoja

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351025201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Psychology

Literary trauma studies is a rapidly developing field which examines how literature deals with the personal and cultural aspects of trauma and engages with such historical and current phenomena as the Holocaust and other genocides, 9/11, climate catastrophe or the still unsettled legacy of colonialism.

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma

is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments. It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma.

Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to further the understanding of literature and other cultural forms across the world.

Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

PART I
Sources and inspirations

1
HISTORY OF TRAUMA THEORY

Nicole A. Sütterlin

“Trauma paradigm”, “trauma culture”, “post-traumatic age” – these academic buzzwords capture the impact that the notion of the psychological wound has made within and beyond literary studies in recent years. Trauma has become a key interpretative category of our time. Ever since the American Psychiatric Association (APA) introduced the diagnosis “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) in the 1980 edition of their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the concept of psychological trauma has virtually exploded, generating its own discipline and informing numerous others. Its exact nature has been debated in a growing body of handbooks, journals and studies. As newly built therapy centres treat trauma survivors all over the world, the concept has successfully entered the everyday usage of many societies. Indeed, trauma has been both hailed and condemned as an essential feature of present-day subjectivity. When did this new paradigm emerge and why?

This survey traces the main developments in the history of trauma in four steps. (1) The first theories of this concept were developed by European and American physicians, neurologists and psychiatrists in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. (2) Recent discourse-oriented histories of trauma have argued convincingly that these first diagnoses were constituted by and constitutive of specifically modern developments, such as the industrial revolution and the rise of modern nation states and welfare states. But if trauma is a product of modernity, this raises the question of whether genealogies of trauma should look beyond the established timeframe, locating the origin of this concept in discourses that emerged prior to 1850. (3) In the complex and turbulent history or, rather, politics of trauma, it is the establishment of the PTSD diagnosis in 1980 that marks a watershed moment, which heralded what has been termed a “shift in moral economy” and the advent of present-day trauma culture. (4) The pioneers of trauma theory in the humanities participated in this shift, but their contested ethical stance raises the question of the current and future role of literary criticism in reading the traumatic wound. By addressing, in passing, some key achievements and shortcomings of extant genealogies, this survey also offers a brief historiography of the histories of trauma.

From railway spine to war neurosis: the beginnings of trauma theory

Isolated descriptions of what today we refer to as psychological trauma can arguably be traced all the way back to Homer’s Iliad (Shay 1994; Figley 2012: 454). Insofar as tragic events have caused humans immense and prolonged suffering since times immemorial, trauma may be deemed an “anthropological constant” (Fricke 2004: 9). But since Judith Herman’s, Bessel van der Kolk’s and Ruth Leys’ influential accounts of the history of trauma in psychiatry (Herman 1992; Van der Kolk, Weisaeth and Van der Hart 1996: 47–56; Leys 2000), the general consensus has been that the development of trauma as a scientific concept did not begin until the mid-nineteenth century. Marc Micale and Paul Lerner’s path-breaking interdisciplinary volume Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 and subsequent genealogies have foregrounded the context within which this concept emerged, particularly the context of the industrial revolution (Micale and Lerner 2001). The first systematic medical explorations of what would later be termed “trauma” began in the 1860s, when British medical practitioners investigated a mysterious condition called “railway spine”. This condition was ascribed to victims of railroad accidents who presented with physical disorders without having suffered any obvious organic injury. As a symbol of technological development and societal progress in the nineteenth century as well as of the dramatic changes brought about by modern life, the railway is intrinsically linked to the history of trauma. To a Victorian public rocked by frequent news of railroad collisions, the shocking arbitrariness and suddenness of railway accidents emblematized the dark side of the new golden age: an increased sense of vulnerability in the face of fast-moving technologies that exceeded human control and comprehension (Harrington 2001).

From its very first theorizations, trauma has generated controversial views about its aetiology. While the physician John Erichsen (1866) prominently attributed the railway spine syndrome to organic causes, namely to a concussion of the spine, the surgeon Herbert Page attributed it to emotional and neurological factors such as fright and “nervous shock” (Page 1883). The Berlin neurologist Hermann Oppenheim coined the term “traumatic neurosis” for this paradoxical condition, in which victims of shock-like impact seemed physically unharmed, yet reported motor and sensory deficits such as paralysis and convulsions (Figley 2012: 455). In doing so, he introduced into psychiatry the Greek word for “wound”, “injury”, which until then had been exclusive to surgery, thus paving the way for the notion that a shattering life experience can cause neurological and indeed psychological wounds analogous to physical wounds. In an 1889 monograph that initially exerted considerable influence on German psychiatry and legislation, Oppenheim (1889) maintained that traumatic neuroses constituted a distinct diagnostic entity. The Parisian neuropsychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot, by contrast, subsumed them under the heading of the then-fashionable disorder hysteria. Although Charcot attributed hysteria to hereditary causes, thereby supporting the dominant neurophysiological paradigm of heredity, he associated cases of traumatic neurosis or “traumatic hysteria” with physical accidents. He eventually ascribed an increasingly prominent role to emotional factors or “nervous shock” – a term he adopted from Page – as causative agents (Charcot 1889: 30). He thus played an important role in the “process of psychologization” whereby what began as the concept of a somatic disorder developed into the concept of a neurological and, finally, a psychological condition (Micale, in Micale and Lerner 2001: 123).

But it is Charcot’s student Pierre Janet who today is credited with discovering a key feature of psychological trauma: dissociation (Van der Kolk, Weisaeth and Van der Hart 1996: 53). In his 1889 dissertation, L’automatisme psychologique (1889), Janet developed an elaborate model of the psyche, a few years ahead of the model developed by his fellow student at the Salpêtrière in 1888, Sigmund Freud. Based on clinical observations of somnambulism, amnesia, “dédoublement de la personnalité” (“split” or “dual personality”) and other seemingly hysteria-related phenomena, he identified the mechanism of dissociation as the process by which the mind “splits off” an event that is so violent or shocking that it cannot be integrated (“synthesized”) into consciousness. Though psychiatrists such as Moreau de Tours (1865) had already theorized notions of dissociation, Janet produced its first elaborate model. The dissociated information, he maintained, takes on a “parasitic” life of its own and recurs as autonomous “fixed ideas”, uncontrolled by the cognitive mind. His discovery was groundbreaking: in present-day psychotraumatology, dissociation is widely regarded as “the core pathogenic process that gives rise to posttraumatic stress” (Van der Kolk, Weisaeth and Van der Hart 1996: 53).

However, the significance of Janet’s contribution was long forgotten. One of several reasons for this “amnesia” (Herman 1992: 7) was the advent of psychoanalysis. In their early Studies on Hysteria (1895), Freud and Josef Breuer initially adopted Janet’s concept of dissociation. In “The Aetiology of Hysteria” (1896), Freud even posited a bold theory that suggested the widespread existence of sexual abuse. Against Charcot’s hereditary framework, he elevated trauma to a primary aetiology of hysteria, arguing that traumatic neuroses originate in sexual assault in childhood (Freud 1953–74, vol. 3: 191ff.). But the following year, the psychoanalyst dismissed his “seduction theory”, positing instead that neuroses originate in a dynamic of drives present at infancy. Today, Freud is often discredited for abandoning the notion of real trauma as a pathological determinant and subsuming it into a model of intrapsychic conflicts. Yet psychotraumatologists such as Gottfried Fischer and Peter Riedesser, who advocate for a “relational model of trauma” that allows for objective as well as subjective causal factors, nonetheless rely heavily on the influential model of trauma that Freud developed in later years (Fischer and Riedesser 2009).

In the years following the First World War, Freud returned to the subject of trauma once more, as the Great War left in its wake an epidemic of soldiers who presented with nonorganic nervous disorders. Neurophysicians increasingly recognized that so-called “shell-shocked” soldiers suffered not from the concussive effects of exploding shells, but from extreme fear. In his aetiology of “war neuroses” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud described this traumatic impact as a breach of the psyche’s “protective shield” (Freud 1953–74, vol. 18: 29). Because of the event’s overwhelming force, Freud maintains, patients cannot integrate the experience into their psychic “economy”. They are condemned to re-living the event in “dreams which, with a view to the psychical binding of traumatic impressions, obey the compulsion to repeat” (33). Freud’s model of a breach in the protective barrier provided the starting point for the American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner’s systematic account of war neurosis (Kardiner 1941), which in turn became a source for the symptomatology of PTSD in current psychiatric nosology. Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion has been absorbed into a cluster of PTSD-symptoms termed “intrusions”. The notion of a “talking cure” that “binds” (Freud) or “narrativizes” (Janet) the overwhelmingly terrifying experience laid the groundwork for present-day trauma therapy, which emphasizes the importance of integrating the dissociated memory into “a personal narrative” (Van der Kolk, Van der Hart and Marmar 1996: 309). And it formed the basis for the interrelation of trauma and narrative as explored in literary trauma studies (discussed further below).

Trauma: a product of modernity

Even this brief and selective survey of the first key steps in the development of trauma shows that this concept’s history is highly complex and discontinuous. Herman aptly characterized the history of trauma as fraught with “episodic amnesia:” “it has been periodically forgotten and must be periodically reclaimed” (Herman 1992: 7). She also pointed out that in order to understand these fluctuations between progress and regress, critics must take into account the political contexts within which theorizations of trauma have occurred (Herman 1992, 2014). Indeed, histories of trauma succeeding Herman’s have traced not only the political context but the many other discourses that have influenced the trauma concept. Interdisciplinary volumes from Micale and Lerner’s to J. Roger Kurtz’s Trauma and Literature (2018) have highlighted how the advent of the trauma diagnosis in the later 1800s was conditioned by major social, economic and political shifts, of which advanced industrialization, urbanization, technologization and modern warfare formed but one part. Other changes include the establishment of capitalist systems and the emergence of European nation states and welfare states, which in turn generated unprecedented innovations, such as health insurance and legal protections for a restive working class.

We might call these contextual approaches to the history of trauma “discourse-analytical”. This term seems particularly appropriate since the founder of discourse analysis, the historian Michel Foucault, proffered one of the earliest of such approaches. To date, genealogies of trauma have largely ignored the fact that Foucault concluded his 1973/74 lectures on Psychiatric Power with a brief but significant reference to what he deliberately termed the “development” of trauma. Charcot, Foucault maintained, “developed the concept of trauma” because he needed an “assignable cause”, an “event” for hysteria: a manifest aetiology that would help build a rigorous pathological framework, which in turn would strengthen his anticlerical politics and consolidate psychiatry’s hold over a growing number of patients (Foucault 2006: 317). Pointing to other emerging power configurations, Foucault connected the advent of the railway spine diagnosis with the rising labour movement’s claims to welfare protections for the working class. For Foucault, trauma is essentially the product of a power struggle, that is, an “event” in a ...