Psychiatric Times.
No. 3
Trauma and Violence
The New Historical Trauma Studies
Digging Through Our Past for Insights Into Today
By Mark S. Micale, PhD |
March 11, 2009
Dr Micale is associate professor in the department of history at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He reports no conflicts of interest concering the subject matter of this article.
If studies about wartime nervous and mental suffering foreshadow our own notion of military PTSD, Cardyn’s research casts forward to current studies about sexual and domestic abuse. Perhaps because readers are prepared for the violence that war entails, Cardyn’s cases, set in the civilian, rural world, are even more chilling than those of shell-shocked soldiers.
Cardyn also noted in her dissertation that pervasively sexualized terrorism was used 150 years ago not as a side effect of other organized mass violence but in a conscious effort to maintain a regime of race, gender, and power. The threat and practice of inflicting sexual trauma became a crucial, time-tested instrument of racial oppression. Cardyn also showed that these activities drew on extensive precedents in the white antebellum South. She pointed out troubling parallels between systematic sexual traumatization in the racialized world of late 19th-century America and in the horrific campaigns of ethnic and religious cleansing in late 20th-century Bosnia.
The individual and collective experience of sexual traumatization was of little interest to people at the time, including the medical profession. One result is rampant omissions in the historical record that scholars today, who are operating under dramatically altered political circumstances, are trying to reconstruct. The full extent of the suffering involved in these historical episodes will almost certainly never be known.
Conclusion
In the first decade of the 21st century, “psychotraumatology” is no longer simply a subspecialty of psychiatry. When researchers in many disciplines (eg, sciences, social sciences, and humanities) converge simultaneously on a new subject, deep metacultural forces are almost certainly at work, regardless of whether these subterranean forces are apparent at the time. Psychological trauma appears to be one of these general cultural forces. In a post-9/11 world, there is little likelihood that interest in the subject will wane in the near future. In humanity’s ongoing attempt to study, process, and master its painful pasts, historians, too, are playing a part.
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