A website exploring
American culture at the millennium.
Kirby
Farrell
University of Massachusetts
kfarrell@english.umass.edu
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Trauma is an acute injury from shock
or stress. In the words of one psychiatric textbook, the core
experience is "intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and
threat of annihilation." For a century medical scientists have
searched for a biological explanation of traumatic symptoms without
success.
This website is organized around my book
Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the
Nineties (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), which argues
that trauma is psychocultural, since injury always entails
interpretation of the injury, and all interpretations are shaped by
culture.
In American culture today, the idea of
post-traumatic stress is everywhere. Journalists use childhood trauma
to explain the careers of criminals and celebrities. The idea may
influence employees who go berserk in the workplace, but also
business executives who trigger what The New York Times calls
"traumatic downsizing."
Trauma, then, is an explanatory tool that
people may use when they feel overwhelmed by historical change or
need to justify lives threatened by serious conflict. It may function
as a personal call for justice and compensation, or it may support
predatory rage. When mass entertainment routinely invokes traumatic
abuse to motivate characters, it implies a world in which character
and the stories people live by are exhausted. This website explores
cultural sources of traumatic stress and forms that post-traumatic
thinking may take. It considers criticism an important resource in
uncovering and sorting out the conflicts and confusions that so often
produce symptoms of traumatic stress.
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The site's pages contain excerpts from
Post-Traumatic Culture and some new work. Materials are
copyrighted and may not be reproduced without
permission.
