Trauma culture?

Trauma has become a really central notion in contemporary society. Some people have even said that we’re living in a “trauma culture”, by which they mean that to get credibility for any statement you make, you have to link it in some way with a traumatic background.

I think that’s an overstatement. Nevertheless, it’s clear that people are speaking about trauma in a way and to a degree that they never did until at least the 1980s.

Trauma is also a historical notion. It didn’t really start to be used as a concept until the middle of the 19th century. Initially, it was related to the enormous shift in people’s perceptions that came with the railways, with the change in speed, with the ways in which time had to be regulated across different places, with new ideas about space and with what people have called “the shock of the new”.

A brief history of trauma

Photo by Akella Srinivas Ramalingaswami

Trauma was first used to refer to the effects of railway accidents. These included not only major accidents but also minor ones, such as railway spine, which is where people working on the railways complained about backaches and weren’t able to work even though there was no evidence of genuine physical injury. As such, trauma became an issue, because people were claiming that they had been damaged by their work. Insurance companies were being called on to pay out insurance on railway workers, but nobody could find anything physically wrong with them.

It’s from that rather strange, rather niche moment that an idea emerges about trauma as a way in which the mind might be affected by a significant event – something very forceful operating on the psyche that leaves a legacy just as impactful as physical damage.

Trauma has always been controversial right through its historical development. People are very familiar with the idea of shell shock in the First World War, where soldiers were sent back from the trenches in complete neurotic meltdown. Were these soldiers malingering so they didn’t have to fight anymore? Should they be punished as deserters? Should they be forced back into the fighting as a way of getting over this shell shock, this trauma – or was there something physical at root? The idea of shell shock was that some real physical damage might have been done by being close to an exploding shell; however, if you called shell shock “war neurosis” instead, then you’d start to think: is it physical? Is it psychological? How seriously can we take this?

Taking trauma seriously

These questions continued to be debated right through the Second World War and, later, the war in Vietnam. For example, there were all kinds of complexities in dealing with Vietnam veterans who were heroes in America yet also suffered deeply from various kinds of war neurosis, and so they couldn’t be written off as malingerers.

It’s actually only in the wake of Vietnam and, of course, the traumatic effects of the Holocaust on its survivors (and indeed on their children) that people started to take trauma seriously. It was clearly utterly central and significant to the experiences that we might have and could not be reduced to some kind of pretence. It’s very striking that the notion people are mostly very familiar with now, of post-traumatic stress disorder, only entered the formal psychiatric lexicon in 1980. It’s a very recent development.

Freud on trauma

In terms of understanding trauma, psychoanalysis and Freud were early on the scene. You could understand Freud’s initial thought that neurosis was caused by sexual abuse (what came to be known as the seduction hypothesis, which he abandoned in 1897) as a trauma hypothesis: sexual abuse happens in childhood, and that produces neurosis in adulthood. The neurosis is linked to a traumatic origin of some sexual intrusion on the child.

Freud backed away from the idea that all neurosis is caused by sexual abuse, but he didn’t back away completely from the idea of a traumatic origin to much psychic suffering, even in his later work. He still held to the notion that there might be a way in which not only the neurological system but also the psychic system is damaged by an intrusion from outside, something too forceful for it to manage. Within that is the kernel of the notion that a trauma should be understood as an event that somebody experiences that is so overwhelming, so psychically devastating, that it actually can’t be thought about. It can’t be converted from an experience into a memory. It can’t be digested. If you want to think about it in a slightly psychoanalytic way, it sits there as an event that’s never fully encountered because it’s just too much to deal with. It’s certainly never fully processed. That’s why traumatic memories keep coming back and being experienced as flashbacks, as if the sufferer is still going through the original event. They’re not memories. They’re reoccurrences of the original traumatic event.

Suffering in silence

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A trauma is an event that’s so overwhelming that we can’t make it part of our psychic apparatus. We can’t put it in its place. Included in that is a notion that because the trauma can’t be dealt with, it can’t be thought about; it can’t be symbolised, which includes being put into words. So, people often can’t speak about their traumatic experiences. They can’t say anything. They struggle to find ways to articulate the damage that’s been done to them. This happens in therapy, where it’s so hard to speak about the worst events of our lives.

It also happens in the wider culture. The paradigm for this is the case of Holocaust survivors. For many years after the war, it was thought that they could not speak about their experiences – not just because they wanted to get on with their lives and not think about them again, but also because once they started talking, they felt like their psyches would explode. They wouldn’t be able to survive psychologically.

The second abuse

A similar story has been told about survivors of child sex abuse, that a silence is imposed on them by the nature of the trauma instead. People still believe that. My view is that this is at best an overstatement and at worst a way of avoiding the reality of encountering trauma in patients in the psychoanalytic situation and in the culture as a whole.

For example, we know that there was a great deal of Holocaust testimony in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and that lots of people spoke and wrote about their experiences. The problem was that nobody listened. They were met with silence. Indeed, in various settings, particularly in Germany, they were met with active denial of the reality of their experiences. As a consequence of that denial, they became silent until at least the 1960s.

Photo by Eakachai Leesin

The same thing is true in regard to child sex abuse. I remember working in the early 1980s in the National Health Service with children who’d been sexually abused, at a time when this was just starting to come into general awareness. At that time, we were not only finding ourselves confronted by children who had been sexually abused, but also by many adults, including the mothers of these children, who came to talk about the experiences they’d had in their own childhood. What became clear was that these experiences were genuinely traumatic, deeply frightening, and also that they had tried to talk about them. They had tried to tell people, but nobody had believed them. As a consequence of this, they felt re-traumatised. The silencing was like a second abuse. Maybe it wasn’t true, they thought. Maybe I’ve made it up?

The importance of witnessing

Over the last 20 years or so, people have become increasingly aware that the issues around trauma and testifying to trauma are also issues around witnessing. What are the conditions under which we can make it possible for people to speak about events which are deeply troubling? They’re not easy to speak about, but for the health of the individual and our culture as a whole, they must be listened to.

How do we dig up the bodies of the dictatorships of the 1960s and the 1980s? How do we face the reality of the memories of concentration camp experiences, not just in the Europe of the Third Reich but throughout the world at different times? How do we talk about apartheid experiences? How do we speak about the legacies of slavery today, so many generations later? Look at what’s happening in America, the UK and elsewhere as brought to light by the Black Lives Matter movement. How can we face these traumas, which we are told can’t be spoken about and yet clearly can be if they are listened to in the right way?

Freud had quite a lot to say about this in terms of being open to the possibility that something terrible might have happened in a person’s past that has not been spoken about, and that it was possible to find ways to reach them. I think contemporary psychoanalysis also has a lot to say about it, but it requires a kind of bravery on the part of both the analyst and the social critic. On the one hand, there’s a tendency to assume one already knows what a trauma means, saying things like, oh, yes, something similar happened to me – when, of course, it didn’t. You never know about the specificity and particularity of one person’s experience. You can’t assume it’s the same as your own. That’s one danger. The other is to back away completely and not to hear the trauma at all,to say, this is too awful; I can’t listen. There’s some narrow strait that we need to navigate between these two extremes, which I think psychoanalysts are pretty good at doing.

Discover more about

psychoanalysis and trauma

Frosh, S. (2019). Those Who Come After: Postmemory, Acknowledgement and Forgiveness. Palgrave Macmillan.

Frosh, S. (2013). Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions. Palgrave Macmillan.

How we learnt to take trauma seriously