What is Trauma?

Despite its ubiquity in conversations about human pain and suffering, why does the meaning of “trauma” remain open and unstable? Why do our theories of trauma encompass such a wide and often contradictory range of experiences? Trauma isn’t necessarily limited to a single, catastrophic event; it also describes ongoing experiences, ranging from war to structural racial violence. An event that is traumatic for one person might not even register for another. Quite bafflingly, trauma reaches across experiences, affecting not only those who are subjected to violence or witness it, but also those who commit acts of violence. This, in turn, continues to raise political questions about the moral category of “victimhood.” Finally, at the most radical end of the spectrum, there is the idea that trauma can be self-generated: the mind can traumatize itself as it attempts to interpret overwhelming or ambiguous experiences. But what is trauma? How does it work, on and within us, at a daily, personal level? And what function does it play collectively—at the level of the culture, civil society, and politics?

In this course, students will explore the concept and discourse of “trauma,” asking, as we go,  why trauma remains so difficult to define. Taking a historical approach to this problem, we will examine the theoretical evolution of trauma, beginning with the work of physicians at the turn of the 19th century: Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud. In our analysis of of this intellectual history, we will focus on three key challenges these thinkers faced in theorizing trauma: the relationship between the neurophysiological and psychological effects of trauma, the role of hypnosis in uncovering the nature of trauma, and the significance of temporality and history in the traumatic experience. Alongside these primary materials, we will read contemporary scholarship that addresses these enduring challenges, including the work of Jean Laplanche, Ruth Leys, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Catherine Malabou, Michael S. Roth, Bessel Van Der Kolk, Cathy Caruth, Judith Herman, and Dominick LaCapra.