A powerfully argued work of intellectual history, Trauma will rewrite the terms of future discussion of its subject.
Psychic trauma is one of the most frequently invoked ideas in the behavioral sciences and the humanities today. Yet bitter disputes have marked the discussion of trauma ever since it first became an issue in the 1870s, growing even more heated in recent years following official recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In this key work for psychoanalysis and hypnosis as well as trauma studies and intellectual history, Ruth Leys investigates the history of the concept of trauma. Leys argues that the concept of trauma has always been fundamentally unstable, oscillating uncontrollably between two competing models, each of which tends at its limit to collapse into the other. She explores the emergence of multiple personality disorder, Freud's approaches to trauma, medical responses to shellshock and combat fatigue, Sándor Ferenczi's revisions of psychoanalysis, and ends with a erudite and devastating critique of the neurobiologically influenced theories of Cathy Caruth and Besel A. Van der Kolk.