Trauma, Posttraumatic Growth, and World Literature

Metamorphoses and a Literary Arts Praxis

Suzanne LaLonde

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032256887
• eBook ISBN: 9781000578669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Pandemics, global climate chaos, worldwide migration crises? These phenomena are provoking traumatic experiences in unprecedented ways and numbers. This book is targeted for clinicians, scientists, cultural theorists, and other scholars and students of trauma studies interested in cultivating interdisciplinary understandings of trauma and posttraumatic conditions, especially resistance, resilience, and posttraumatic growth. Following clinicians' invitation for trauma survivors to wear a philosopher's hat, to engage in creative activities, and to employ cognitive exercises to combat psychic constriction, I introduce the concept of a Literary Arts Praxis. The Praxis is built on clinical research and literature seeped in existential, phenomenological, and aesthetic themes. I argue that an educational training in a Praxis might help trauma survivors to get at trauma, as they engage in imaginative escapades, while forging alliances with characters; interpretative exercises, such as triggering emotions through phenomenological experiences; and creative writing endeavors, that include turning testimonies into imaginative stories.

Part I

An Evolution of Key Concepts and Terms

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284642-2

1 Embryonic Concepts of Trauma and Traumatism from the Humanities

DOI: 10.4324/9781003284642-3

“All that the historian or ethnographer can do and all that we can expect of either of them is to enlarge a specific experience to the dimensions of a more general one, which thereby becomes accessible as experience to men of another country or another epoch.”¹ Such is the advice of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. His recommendation prods us to enlarge the “standard” history of trauma studies to make it more accessible to traumatologists from dispersed fields.² As pointed out in this book’s introduction, trauma studies is an interdisciplinary domain of research (from psychiatry to sociology to the arts) that investigates trauma and traumatism (posttraumatic conditions from PTSD to growth).³

The “standard” history of the field begins with the etymology of the term “trauma.” It hails from Greek and refers to a physical wound. This fact is followed by an announcement that the related term “traumatic neurosis” was first used during the industrial revolution to refer to something more than a physical wound. It described psychic disturbances caused by railroad accidents. What typically ensues is a short list of discoveries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Western psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychologists. A most notable discovery was the concept of “psychogenic trauma,” which refers to psychic wounds having a psychological rather than physical origin. The narrative crescendos with the American Psychiatric Association’s recognition of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 1980. An epilogue containing contributions beginning in the mid-1980s from cultural theorists (social scientists, historians, and literary theorists) follows as well as an enumeration of scientific and clinical research, both quantitative and qualitative in nature. Following Lévi-Strauss’s advice, I aim to enlarge this historical narrative of trauma studies by highlighting contributions from the humanities, as embryonic as they might be. After all, the past is a foreign land where fresh ideas can be harvested for future heuristic and transdisciplinary investigations.

I explore first notions of trauma and posttraumatic conditions in early writing.⁴ I consider illustrations of war trauma found in Cuneiform clay tablets and in the work of Greek historian Herodotus (fifth century BCE) and the Roman poet Lucretius (first century BCE); rape and physical abuse trauma in the myths brought to life by the Roman poet Ovid (first century CE) and the Roman philosopher Apuleius (second century CE); and catastrophic and collective trauma traced by the Spanish missionary and writer Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) and the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). I also pay close attention to illustrations of what today we would call PTSD, resistance, resilience, and growth in these texts. Although these writers do not employ the terms “trauma” and “PTSD,” they describe kindred concepts through moving prose and vivid metaphors.

After examining these early concepts, I make another main adjustment to a standard history of trauma studies. I put forward that eighteenth-century philosophers Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Denis Diderot provoked a psycho-philosophical revolution that would lead to an adjustment of the term “trauma” in the nineteenth century.⁵ They prepared the terrain for the term to be nuanced by planting new notions of extreme suffering; offering visceral descriptions of the suffering of others; and spurring readers’ emotions. Their ideas were then harnessed to the Romantic movement before the term evoked psychic suffering caused by accidents. This brings us to the industrial revolution and to the major catastrophic events and social injustices of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to their relationship to trauma theories, a history to explore in Chapter 2.⁶

The Framework behind an Examination of Embryonic Concepts

The framework of my examination of embryonic concepts of trauma and traumatism is sustained by several pillars consisting of common sense, etymology, and previous related research. While the origin of the term “trauma” (to refer to psychological wounds) comes from industrial accidents, it defies common sense to imagine that only these accidents played a role in the term’s birth. These accidents might have provoked an adjustment to the word, but the development of the concept and kindred ones are another story. What about previous pandemics, wars, pogroms, genocides, witch hunts, barbaric punishments, not to mention natural disasters that had plagued human communities prior to the nineteenth century? Weren’t they considered traumatic? Didn’t they cause deleterious posttraumatic conditions? Were humans previously übermensch? These rhetorical questions invite us to recognize that there must have been related concepts to trauma that existed prior to the nineteenth century.

The framework of my examination is also buttressed by the etymology and history of another important term in the history of ideas, “teologia” (theology). The twelfth-century philosopher Abélard coined the Latin word to refer to the study of the nature of God and religious belief. The Church objected to his dialectical analyses of God and threw his books on the bonfire.⁷ Just because Abélard was responsible for the coinage of the term does not mean that the concept or embryonic concepts did not exist prior. Early Church fathers Ambrose and Augustine (from the fourth and fifth centuries CE) practiced theology. Scholars even refer to them as theologians.⁸ The concept of theology predates the coinage of the term, even if these early Church fathers’ concepts were different (less provocative) than Abélard’s. Similarly, the concepts of trauma and traumatism predate the coinage of these terms, even if writers from Mesopotamia to revolutionary France spoke of them differently. And if Ambrose and Augustine were called “theologians” before the word “theology” existed, early writers from the cradle of human civilization to the Romantic movement could be called traumatologists.

This attempt to propose a new narrative about the history of trauma studies is built additionally on the foundation of anthropologist Allan Young’s arguments. In his The Harmony of Illusions (1995), he proposes three divergent interpretations from the standard history of the concepts of psychogenic trauma and PTSD. To his mind, it makes little sense to imagine that the concepts of traumatic memory and PTSD are timeless. They are found neither in Shakespeare’s or Samuel Pepys’s writings nor in the Epic of Gilgamesh, he asserts. Second, these works could not refer to psychogenic trauma because this type of traumatic memory was previously “unavailable.”⁹ It was not until the nineteenth century, Young claims, that a new concept of memory developed. Namely, the mind could torment the mind, producing memories that were concealed in automatic and repetitive behavior that defied conscious control.¹⁰ Third, the anthropologist maintains that the concept of PTSD is not characterized by some built-in order. “Rather, it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilized these efforts and resources.”¹¹ Whereas I share Young’s opinion that the concepts of psychogenic trauma and PTSD did not formally exist until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, I part company with him by stressing that embryonic forms of these notions did. I also put pressure on his position that the conceptualization of traumatic memory was unavailable to people prior to the nineteenth century. I not only locate hints of traumatic memory, as seen in Montaigne’s work, but also argue that Enlightenment philosophers helped to raise conscious awareness about psychic and psychogenic suffering. By painting portraits of human suffering, philosophers from Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot put the topic on the map, paving the way for Romantics to take up the Enlightenment torch.

My more expansive approach to understanding the roots of the concepts of trauma and traumatism is also founded on an alarming perspective that psychiatrist Judith Herman raises in the 1997 afterword to her Trauma and Recovery. She writes: “The very strength of the recent biological findings in PTSD may foster a narrowed, predominantly biological focus of research.”¹² Clinical neuroscientist and physician Raymond Tallis echoes this position and has coined the term “neuromania” to refer to a current obsession to understand emotional experiences from a neurobiological perspective, as evidenced in the terms “neurotheology” and “neuroaesthetics.”¹³ In more general terms, “the rise of neurobiology is leading to a kind of reductionism in which mental states are reduced to brain states … and the key dimensions of our humanness—language, culture, history—are ignored.”¹⁴ In light of this biological reductionism, I search the humanities for artifacts of trauma and posttraumatic conditions. From earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, humanity has endured trauma and left traces of its experiences. Seen from another perspective, before there were scientific theories about trauma and traumatism, there were stories and art.

Furthermore, recent research findings and trends call for a wide-angle lens when considering the history of the concepts of trauma and PTSD. Contemporary scientific investigations have taught us several important lessons. There is a wide variety of traumatic experiences from wars, genocides, and natural disasters to complex and prolonged traumatic experiences, such as childhood neglect and abuse, clinically known as Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE). The subjective nature of trauma renders it even more complex. The depth, width, and variety of traumatic experiences demand a more enlarged historical narrative of the field, since pivotal related information from the humanities may be discovered in the strata of time.

A history of trauma studies could benefit from an addition from the humanities for another reason. The current historical narrative remains misaligned with important contemporary trends in the field. Post-colonial theorists and anthropologists have added novel theories from non-Western sources, topics to be discussed in Chapter 4. The field has also undertaken research on resistance, resilience, and growth, rather than focusing on trauma and PTSD.¹⁵ Still, cultural trauma studies scholars, save for post-colonialists, have not followed suit. Psychologist Richard Tedeschi and his colleagues complained in 2018 that “there has been almost no study of PTG [posttraumatic growth] in the humanities other than references to the concept of growth …”¹⁶ While scholars from the humanities are invited to investigate PTG going forward, all researchers might look back on the arts, which might ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Trauma, Posttraumatic Growth, and Pedagogy
• PART I: An Evolution of Key Concepts and Terms
• PART II: A Gallery of Trauma Studies
• PART III: Treatments and Educations for Trauma Survivors
• PART IV: Engaging in a Literary Arts Praxis and World Literature
• Bibliography
• Index