Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives.
are arguing that the violence experienced by America’s impoverished racialized underclass should be understood as trauma passed down epigenetically across generations. Within the gulf separating a British prince and, say, a poor Black teenager on Chicago’s South Side lies the vast range of human experience that increasingly seems to fall within the ambit of trauma.did for the galaxy.
Van der Kolk didn’t set out to study trauma. When he landed as an undergraduate at the University of Hawaii in 1962, he told me, he was mainly interested in “surfing, meeting girls, and learning how to dance the hula.” Born in July 1943 in the Nazi-occupied Hague, he arrived to devastation. He was the middle child of five, and sickly. His father, who worked for Shell Oil, had been caught in one of the Nazis’ mass roundups of able-bodied men and sent to a work zone.
Even Freud’s original formulation of trauma had been troubled by a crucial indeterminacy: Did trauma come from something that occurred outside the individual’s psyche or inside it ? Trauma, in other words, seemed to beg the central question: Does trauma happen when stress tips over some acute threshold, or are people traumatized because of some underlying vulnerability that makes trauma out of what, for someone else, might just be stress? Is trauma even a useful concept,...
This 1985 paper contained all the signature features of van der Kolkian trauma. Most notably, it synthesized the two factions that had clashed over the PTSD diagnosis. From the biological-reductionist camp, it took the idea that trauma is a literal state of the body, and from the veterans’ activists, it took the premise that trauma is caused by social and political violence and would therefore need more than medication to treat.
At the time, scientists did not agree on whether it was possible to recover memories that had been suppressed or lost in traumatic dissociation, but as long as the debate stayed in the academy, things remained civil. The fusillades started when, in the late ’80s, the academics began serving as expert witnesses in recovered-memory lawsuits.
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