Trauma and Belief

We undergo a traumatic experience, such as a life-threatening accident or a brutal attack. We survive a period of relentless stress, perhaps because we are in a war zone and witness or commit atrocities. Raised by parents who are alcoholic or mentally ill, we endure traumatic experiences on a daily basis. Or, we are ignored, neglected, or treated as playthings by narcissistic parents, who themselves were ignored and neglected, and on and on through generations.

To survive these experiences, perhaps we dissociate. This can take various forms. In the extreme form, we remove ourselves, psychically speaking, from the situation (because we are unable to do so physically), perhaps by adopting the role of a witness to, instead of the object of, the cruelty. In many cases, because we depended for our lives on those who brutalized us, what would have been normal reactions to our plight—fear, rage, or indignation—could never be expressed or perhaps even felt. But these emotions do not go away; instead, they become misdirected, perhaps directed at ourselves in self-harming patterns, or (sadistically) toward others who have no responsibility for our suffering. To an onlooker or therapist, it makes sense to suppose that such odd behavior is triggered by memories, but these memories are all but inaccessible to the traumatized; indeed, that is one aftermath of the dissociation. Later in life, we see the effects in our relationships with others, in addiction, other forms of self-harm, and in serious illness. In the case of early trauma, it is sometimes only by working backward from these unhealthy patterns that we can be brought to see any connection between how we now act, react, sense, and perceive situations, to what we experienced as children.

In this description, the use of ‘memory’ is a clear extension from the ordinary one, because what we are counting as memories here are ‘all but inaccessible.’ A person is usually considered authoritative about what she remembers; but the justification (or criterion) for the application of the concept of memory in these circumstances is the unusual behavior of the one who has been traumatized; not her avowals or other natural expressions. A similar story could be told about the use of the umbrella concept emotion and of the particular uses of ‘fear’, ‘rage’, and ‘indignation,’ for here too a person is authoritative unless the pattern of her actions, reactions, and expressions in the circumstances are so salient that they override what she says and emerge as the considerations by which we would, if called upon, justify the applications of these terms.

We extend the concepts further by basing our ascriptions of ‘unfelt emotions’ or ‘inaccessible memories’ on something other than ‘characteristic expressions in behavior.’ For the behavior evinced in both simple and complex post-traumatic stress disorder is hardly characteristic in this sense. The decision to diagnose this range of post-traumatic behavior as involving repressed memories and unexpressed emotions is at the same time a decision to extend the relevant mental concepts so as to accommodate new conditions (or criteria) that would justify their application.

Our ordinary mental concepts, like all non-theoretical ones and even a very large number of theoretical ones, have elasticities of significance that permit these extensions when new problems, discoveries, or considerations make it practical to do so.

Is the same not true for the concept of belief? It ought to be. But, before looking into extensions of the concept, it is worth reminding ourselves how we would justify its application in central cases. It depends, of course, on the circumstances. Sometimes, I may use the expression to talk about my principles or opinions. On other occasions, when I say ‘I believe that such and such,’ it may be because I do not want to commit myself fully to its truth. (When I am willing to so commit, I will often simply make an assertion.) In less central cases, ‘I believe’ may be used, not to express an opinion, principle, or withhold one’s commitment from an assertion, but rather as an attempt to understand one’s own actions and reactions, as if one...