What is Trauma Studies?
Trauma Studies is a relatively new area in Cultural Studies that explores the impact of the disruptive experience of trauma on individuals and societies by analyzing its psychological, cultural and literary significance.
What theories are involved?
Trauma Studies bring together psychological approaches with poststructuralism, postcolonialism and other socio-cultural theories.
When did Trauma Studies begin?
Trauma Studies began in the 1990s drawing upon Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries like Joseph Breuer (who co-authored Studies on Hysteria with Freud), Jean-Martin Charcot (who for the first time studied the relationship between trauma and mental illness), his student Pierre Janet, Hermann Oppenheim, Abram Kardiner (who studied war trauma), Morton Prince, etc., and their work on hysteria.
What does Trauma Studies explore?
Kinds of Trauma
Psychological Trauma
One view regarding psychological trauma is that trauma disrupts language and suffering is unrepresentable. There is also the view that unrepresentability of suffering is only one of the responses to trauma and is not its defining feature. Studies on psychological trauma began with hysteria and went on to study manifestations like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), Developmental Trauma Disorder (in children), trauma related to war and terrorism, etc.
Cultural and Collective Trauma
Cultural sociology studies Cultural and Collective trauma, which refers to the social processes that occur when groups endure horrendous events that forever change their group consciousness and identity. Examples would be mass genocides like the Holocaust, war, etc.
The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature by Ann Kaplan analyses the impact of trauma on individuals as well as on cultures and nations. Traumatic Realism by Michael Rothberg studies Holocaust representations.
Trauma in Literature
The study of trauma in literature began with Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996). Here Caruth asserts that in present times, trauma has become universal and bewildering both as an experience and as a subject of study. Because of this, our understand of history also becomes more complex and conflicting.
Kali Tal's Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1995) is another pioneering work where she has reviewed hundreds of scholarly works and presented hundreds of interviews with trauma survivors.
Trauma Studies have a great impact on research in Postcolonialism and Gender.
Other Pioneering Works
The Trauma Question by Roger Luckhurst
Trauma: Explorations in Memory by Cathy Caruth
On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies by Geoffrey Hartman
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub
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Click here to know about our activities and services.
Trauma Studies is a relatively new area in Cultural Studies that explores the impact of the disruptive experience of trauma on individuals and societies by analyzing its psychological, cultural and literary significance.
What theories are involved?
Trauma Studies bring together psychological approaches with poststructuralism, postcolonialism and other socio-cultural theories.
When did Trauma Studies begin?
Trauma Studies began in the 1990s drawing upon Sigmund Freud and his contemporaries like Joseph Breuer (who co-authored Studies on Hysteria with Freud), Jean-Martin Charcot (who for the first time studied the relationship between trauma and mental illness), his student Pierre Janet, Hermann Oppenheim, Abram Kardiner (who studied war trauma), Morton Prince, etc., and their work on hysteria.
What does Trauma Studies explore?
- How identity and memory are affected by trauma.
- How the individual's conception of the external world and social relationships are defined by trauma.
- How trauma shapes (and is shaped by) language and representations.
- Intergenerational transmission of trauma.
Kinds of Trauma
Psychological Trauma
One view regarding psychological trauma is that trauma disrupts language and suffering is unrepresentable. There is also the view that unrepresentability of suffering is only one of the responses to trauma and is not its defining feature. Studies on psychological trauma began with hysteria and went on to study manifestations like PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), Developmental Trauma Disorder (in children), trauma related to war and terrorism, etc.
Cultural and Collective Trauma
Cultural sociology studies Cultural and Collective trauma, which refers to the social processes that occur when groups endure horrendous events that forever change their group consciousness and identity. Examples would be mass genocides like the Holocaust, war, etc.
The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature by Ann Kaplan analyses the impact of trauma on individuals as well as on cultures and nations. Traumatic Realism by Michael Rothberg studies Holocaust representations.
Trauma in Literature
The study of trauma in literature began with Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996). Here Caruth asserts that in present times, trauma has become universal and bewildering both as an experience and as a subject of study. Because of this, our understand of history also becomes more complex and conflicting.
Kali Tal's Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma (1995) is another pioneering work where she has reviewed hundreds of scholarly works and presented hundreds of interviews with trauma survivors.
Trauma Studies have a great impact on research in Postcolonialism and Gender.
Other Pioneering Works
The Trauma Question by Roger Luckhurst
Trauma: Explorations in Memory by Cathy Caruth
On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies by Geoffrey Hartman
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub
Click here to know more about the author of this blog.
Click here to know about our activities and services.
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