Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience by Cathy Caruth (review)

The concept of trauma merges psychology and history, or blurs boundaries between them. The event is external, the response internal.¹ Cognitive systems that previously sustained stable connections to the world collapse. Psychological disturbances such as dissociation or amnesia are common. A traumatized subject may become disconnected from both self and society. "The traumatized person," writes Cathy Caruth, "carries an impossible history within them [sic], or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess" (1991, p. 4).

Historically, our belated cultural awareness of trauma in the 1970s and 1980s arose partly from the population of Vietnam War veterans who brought the war home in their heads. The diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) entered the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980 (DSM-III). Of course this illness was well known before its latest clinical categorizing as "battle fatigue," "shell shock," or "war neurosis." The 1980 APA diagnosis focused on the nature of the traumatic event: war, assault (rape, child abuse), or natural disaster. The next edition in 1994 (DSM-IV), focused on the individual's response to the event. PTSD as a pathology depends on the severity of personal reaction. The horrors of war do not traumatize all soldiers, but perhaps as many as half.

Trauma as concept extended as well to other areas of psychic injury. Partly as a belated response to political feminism, media in the 1980s displayed greater social sensitivity to rape. Interest in Holocaust narratives was growing in political and academic arenas. In 1982, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies opened in the Yale University Library. In 1980 the U.S. Congress approved the construction of a Holocaust memorial on the National Mall. President Reagan laid the cornerstone in 1988, and fifteen years later the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum opened. That same year, 1993, Stephen Spielberg released the film, Schindler's List, followed by the establishment of the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California, funded by donations from Spielberg and supporters. Like the Fortunoff Archive, the USC Shoah project is an archive of testimonials from Holocaust survivors and other witnesses: a repository of personal stories. It allows survivors to retell their trauma, re-articulating pieces of the shattered mental mosaic into a coherent narrative for others: students, researchers, the public. These projects join the psychological and historical, offering an authorized public frame for private narratives

The juncture of individual narrative (biography) and social narrative (history) provokes questions about the "truth" of the event. Trauma narratives—Holocaust, PTSD, or other—become implicated in narrative theory. "Flashbacks" are both a psychological condition and a narrative technique. At about the same time the American cultural conversation was publically discussing trauma, American academia was investigating the concept of historical truth and historical narrative. The 1980s saw the rise of the "New Historicism," an academic field of historiography that challenged any naïve notion that history was a mere record of facts supported by documentary evidence and neutral argument. Rather than a record, history became a narrative: part discovery, part construction. This insight coincided with similar work in cognitive psychology demonstrating the role of personal and social constructions in perceptions and memories. The idea of historical truth, or of unmediated access to truth, was critically destabilized. As Hayden White, a foremost practitioner of historiography, declared: "As a symbolic structure, the historical narrative does not reproduce the events it describes; it tells us in what direction to think about the events and charges our thought about the events with different emotional valences" (1985, p. 91). Geoffrey Hartman, noting the reluctance of professional historians to accept Holocaust survivor testimony as primary materials, argued that oral memoirs provide "a texture of truth" to a general historical overview. "Survivor testimonies," he wrote, "can be a source for historical information or confirmation, yet their real strength lies...