1 Introduction: History under the Shadow of Trauma

In a mountain town in Washington in the film First Blood, Sylvester Stallone’s John Rambo is questioned and tortured by petit-tyrant sheriff’s deputies. Beaten and sprayed with a fire hose, the protagonist is stoic until threatened by a forced shave with a straight razor, whereupon a deputy begins choking him with a club, triggering flashbacks to his torture in the Vietnam War and driving him to escape the jail and rely on guerrilla tactics in the mountainside to survive.

In a 1996 episode of the landmark television sitcom Seinfeld, Jerry Stiller’s Frank Costanza, the ornery father of central character George Costanza, is asked and refuses to cook for a singles event. When pushed to explain what it is he “can’t get over,” sitting in a dark room and drinking liquor, he explains that he was a cook in the US Army during the Korean War, and once overseasoned a shipment of nearly turned beef to the point that soldiers became sick. Viewers see this through a narrated flashback, as soldiers cough and run for the latrine in slow motion while Frank looks on in horror, all set to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, a nod to its prominence in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War film Platoon. Later, after Frank has rediscovered his love for cooking and agreed to work the event, he sees a man dressed in camouflage coughing. As the Barber score plays again, Frank has a flashback, panics, and flips a buffet table as the episode ends.

In a 1993 episode of X-Men: The Animated Series, the chief antagonist Magneto faces off against his friend-turned-rival Professor X. As Magneto moves to land a finishing blow, having knocked his enemy to the ground, he is struck by a psychic attack that forces him to experience a flashback to the loss of his family in the Holocaust. Scenes of him as a child searching for his parents and being captured by German soldiers are overlaid with him as an adult supervillain, until, after begging the professor for an end to his torment and being refused, he begins to scream, his child visage transforming into his adult face, cementing for the viewer the immediacy and the visceral nature of the reexperience of the memory. Whereas Magneto is unable to overcome the Professor’s attack and flies away in anguish, earlier in the same episode, another mutant hero, Storm, experiences a similar traumatic recall amidst an attack, rendering her unable to move as a brick wall collapses around her.

The previous examples were not selected for any particular merit. They are not presented here as necessarily sophisticated or reflective treatments of psychological suffering, its causes, or its effects; nor are they presumed or argued to offer insight into trauma beneath the cultural surface that they inhabit. Nor are they confined to the obscure or the avant-garde: None could be considered particularly inaccessible or obscure, and they all were produced in English-language media to significant public note. On the contrary, they are by and large unsophisticated representations of trauma in its most common cultural circulation. What they do establish, however, is a glimpse of the hegemony of trauma as a vector of cultural and social meaning-making. Encompassing both tragedy and satire, banality and depth, and victim and perpetrator, the thread that unites these texts is trauma. Across these cultural products, trauma stands as a shared framework for depicting and making sense of psychological suffering in the wake of extreme events. It is an organizing concept, an occurrence in a story, a trope in a plot archetype.

This hegemony extends over elite cultural and literary discourse as well. Writing in the New Yorker in 2021, Parul Sehgal critiqued the “trauma plot,” the contemporary literary metastructure, which, by means of its elasticity across subject and setting, has entrenched trauma as a “totalizing identity” (Sehgal Reference Sehgal2021). As a structuring force, for Sehgal, trauma both displaces and supersedes other dimensions of identity while obscuring its own historicity. Sehgal further links the dominance of trauma with our obsession (relatively recent, in anglophone literature) with backstory, to the extent that they have become one and the same narrative feature: To have a past is to embody trauma. With such ubiquity comes hollowness, as the trauma plot is predicably replicated from contemporary high fiction to comic book television adaptations and all forms in between.

Sehgal’s intervention on such a sensitive topic – both in the suffering that trauma narratives work upon and in the personal histories that they intersect – generated further reflections. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Christina Fogarasi complements Sehgal’s critique through a consideration of “the Therapizer,” a contemporary character archetype that demonstrates both the all-encompassing interpretive domain of trauma – that is, its monologic capacity to filter events and ascribe meaning – but also trauma’s status as a hermeneutic device as such. This archetype is itself a product of “an ever-expanding therapeutic culture that prioritizes individual solutions to what might otherwise be framed as structural or political problems” (Fogarasi Reference Fogarasi2022). In a contrary vein, defenses of the trauma plot have appeared as well, describing it as a vehicle for agency and for the legitimacy of confessional writing. This is the position of Jamie Hood, author of Trauma Plot: A Life, who argued that criticism of the trauma plot elided the political and solidarity-forming potential of trauma stories by casting them unfairly as mere products of dominant culture (Hood Reference Hood2025).

This debate is not so much interesting for its outcome or its fallout as for its revelation, along with the examples from popular culture, of the presence of trauma in every level and at every stage of cultural production, from the television studio to the confessional novel to the critic’s editorial. I have opened with these examples because they demonstrate something of the present milieu in which histories of trauma are conceived, written, and disseminated. Trauma has become familiar: It is a readily available and commonly recognizable experience. Within such a saturated horizon, the question of how to think about and write about histories of trauma asserts itself. It is this question that this study takes up.

Trauma has a fascinating genealogy, a conceptual double life. From the Greek for “wound,” trauma came into medical use in the seventeenth century as a descriptor for an externally caused bodily injury (Oxford English Dictionary). This usage pertains today for the treatment of severe and life-threatening injuries: “shock trauma,” “blunt-force trauma,” and the like. Trauma’s second life began much more recently, and for that is all the more complicated. Beginning in the nineteenth century, trauma was repurposed as a medical designator. First, physically, as a means to establish a pathology of mental suffering by positing biological changes in the brain and spine of survivors of railway accidents who displayed overwhelming fright in recalling their experiences. Second, around the turn of the century, psychologically, as a framework for understanding emotional wounds and their shattering effects on the psyche. Trauma was here theorized as the inability of the hysterical mind to integrate extreme events into conscious narrative, leading to compulsive reexperience of the event. The observation and pathologization of “shell shock” in the First World War registered the possibilities of wider causes and manifestations of psychological trauma, but cultural biases designating the traumatized soldier as a coward limited both medical and general interest in understanding the phenomenon until the aftermath of the Second World War. In the wake of the Holocaust and in response to movements for reparations for émigrés and camp survivors, the nature of trauma and traumatization became caustically contested as psychiatrists on both sides of the Atlantic advocated for or against survivors’ applications for pensions from the Federal Republic of Germany. From this transatlantic cooperation and the contemporaneity of struggles for Holocaust reparations and for the recognition of psychological suffering in US veterans of the Vietnam War emerged the central elements of what became post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Herzog Reference Herzog2016). Codified as an official medical condition in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980, trauma gained a new canonical pathology. In the decades since and through two more manifestations of the DSM, trauma has become truly global, diagnosed as a response to all manner of violent experiences – genocide, military violence, sexual assault, racial hatred, and many more – and employed in cultural discourses to describe everything from generational inheritance to sports fandom.

Despite the metaphor of biography applied here, the conceptual history of trauma, as Ruth Leys notes in her detailed genealogy of trauma, has never been linear or developmental (Leys Reference Leys2000, 8). Furthermore, the congruence of trauma and its cognate concepts – neurosis, hysteria, shock, dissociation, repression – cannot be assumed, as these conceptual histories have unfolded unevenly, in different times and contexts and discourses over the past century and a half. In its different manifestations and deployments, from popular psychology to culture criticism, trauma has exploded its clinical confines and become a generalized cultural framework through which human beings interpret their world. As such, trauma continues to raise fundamental questions for historians across historiographical and theoretical registers. The basic purpose of this element is to excavate these questions and their significance for history writing and historical consciousness in the twenty-first century.

This excavation proceeds with an acknowledgment rather than a rejection of the conceptual slipperiness that trauma has attained in the contemporary moment. It is not productive, much less possible, to attempt to delineate accurate and inaccurate articulations of trauma against some stable definition. Indeed, as Leys and other scholars of trauma demonstrate, trauma does not have an inert, superhistorical core definition. Evocations of trauma are as numerous as they are ubiquitous. As Paul Lerner and Mark S. Micale argued in a landmark collection on the history of trauma, this ubiquity is a symptom of the overwhelming concern with catastrophe and violence in the wake of the twentieth century (Lerner and Micale Reference Micale and Lerner2001). Thus, it is not something to be explained away, certainly not as long as those conditions of catastrophe and violence remain. This is not to say that any given articulation of trauma is as sophisticated or serious as the rest. It is to say, rather, that it is precisely the proliferation of deployments of trauma as an interpretive apparatus in our time that demands a thorough theoretical reckoning from historians.

In the following exploration of the theoretical tasks of writing traumatic histories, spectrality is a dominant metaphor. As a past experience that ruptures the present unbidden, trauma is often described in terms of haunting by survivors and clinicians alike. It is not bound to the realm of experience, however. Trauma’s circulation in the humanities, in the social sciences, in popular and academic psychology, and other disciplines has also been enabled by the metaphorics of haunting. Spectral metaphors are both productive of knowledge of trauma – that is, they produce meaning – and indicative of the unique necessity for historical reflection. For spectrality has also come to be a defining term in reflections on historical reality itself. Both present and absent, the past structures the present yet recedes from us; it is available through its traces and legacies, and at the same time, gone. In this respect, Ethan Kleinberg and Saidiya Hartman are useful guides, as their work galvanizes historical thinking about the fundamental relationship between the present and a past that is spectral. Their work is examined in Section 4 and conclusion, in order to think through how histories of trauma are shaped by and can in turn modify our understanding of historical existence.

Scholarship on trauma in the humanities and social sciences – whether designated as “trauma theory,” “trauma studies,” or the like – arose as a subdivision of the larger field of memory studies. While far, far too large a field to summarize here, some of the basic currents of historical memory studies at large are important for understanding the shape and challenges of the history of trauma today. My points here are broad and generalizing, but for that not irrelevant, I believe. Writing in 2007, historian Geoffrey Cubitt attributed the turn toward memory across the humanities in the latter decades of the twentieth century to several factors, including increasing interest in subjective experience among historians, the impetus to understand the effects and legacies of total war and genocide, and the desire to recover pasts repressed by authoritarian regimes (Cubitt Reference Cubitt2007, 2). Beyond these numerous causes, Cubitt continues, memory has become a central subject of historical research and a novel methodology for organizing and representing the past (2). The turn toward memory, then, and within it the turn toward trauma, is an opening toward understanding how mnemonic constructions of the past are themselves makers of history (22).

If the effort to understand the past in any given epoch or society compels us to understand how the past was constructed and made meaningful within that epoch or society, then what the history of memory – and again, by extension, the history of trauma – compels is an embrace of theoretical exploration. If any present exists in dialectical relationships with constructions of its own pasts, then any representation of history is affected, whether directly or indirectly, by past representations of history. Past historical knowledge or sensibility thus becomes an essential part of any historiographical encounter. To make sense of a past, then, requires the historian to investigate the forms of historical consciousness active in that past. The history of trauma, as a species of the history of memory, forces us as historians to conduct first-order inquiry into our own historical consciousness: the practices, values, and prejudices by which we make sense – professional or amateur, individual or collective, radical or reactionary, from above or below – of history. If this study clarifies this theoretical necessity, then I will consider it successful.

A significant portion of this element is taken up by a historical (and historiographical) analysis of trauma scholarship. While I acknowledge that such retrospective construction is both incomplete by necessity and in itself insufficient to explain the challenge of writing traumatic histories, I believe it is essential for the task of unfolding the multifaceted challenge that trauma poses. The illumination and theorization of best practices that I hope to effect here is impossible, in my eyes, without a sustained reflective reading of how trauma has developed as an object of historiography. Furthermore, attention to trauma’s scholarly genealogy reinforces its interdisciplinary emergence and thus reminds us historians that our work is unavoidably – and more importantly, productively – imbricated in vectors of critique that lead beyond departmental, professional, and disciplinary boundaries.

With these aims stated, there remain some important caveats. This survey is limited by accident and by necessity in a number of dimensions. It surveys only works produced in English or translated into English, a shortcoming that speaks for itself. It is limited in length, in its very constitution committed to brevity, only what is elemental. It must be noted, also, that this element cannot illuminate and examine every turn in the medical and intellectual histories of trauma. The conceptual history of trauma itself is examined only briefly. There will be debates, controversies, reversals, and condemnations that are passed over. In literary studies especially, there is an enormous body of scholarship on trauma and memory that is not thoroughly summarized here. What follows is by necessity an overview attuned to the challenges of writing traumatic histories in the present.

2 Event, Analysis, Deployment

This study proceeds in the effort to reground trauma in historiography and historical theory in order to account for the continuing proliferation of appeals to trauma in historical consciousness. Trauma is conceived here as constitutive of (1) the psychological reexperience of extreme events, (2) the diagnostic framework developed to treat reexperience, and (3) the cultural and political signifier that is deployed to interpret both experiences of violence and the difficulty/impossibility of representing these experiences. These layers could also be coded as (1) event, (2) analysis, and (3) deployment. Examining trauma in these different strata helps to ground our analysis and our theoretical prescriptions in a recognition of how trauma and historical consciousness are connected. As Dagmar Herzog reminds readers, the self and society cannot be disentangled (Herzog Reference Herzog2016, 11).

3 Trauma and the West

After the emergence of trauma theory as a distinct field of inquiry in the 1990s, there came a robust series of critiques from scholars of empire and postcolonialism. These critiques were focused on two intertwined problematics within trauma theory as exemplified in the work of Caruth and her fellow travelers: first, the Eurocentrism of the both traumatic model itself, developing out of European modernity and the traditions of European thought and medicine, as well as the canonical literary examples of traumatic narrative that took European suffering as psychologically, narratologically, and aesthetically paradigmatic; second, the limits of a theoretical apparatus that modeled trauma as an event, thereby obscuring everyday, intergenerational, and transhistorical processes that traumatize. What follows is not a chronological reconstruction of these debates, but an unfolding of those points of contention and counterinterpretation that are most relevant for twenty-first century historians.

Regarding Eurocentrism, the stakes of the critique are clear if we return yet again to Caruth’s interpretation of Tasso, in some ways the founding interpretation – or misinterpretation – of trauma theory. Amy Novak, in an important 2008 issue of Studies in the Novel devoted to postcolonialism and trauma theory that we will return to often in this section, describes a crucial aspect of Clorinda’s character that is obscured in Caruth’s reading: her Africanness, as the white daughter of Ethiopian monarchs who fights against the Crusaders. Indeed, for Novak, Clorinda’s Africanness is erased by Tasso’s text itself, as she only submits to Baptism upon death, a development that serves to erase her otherness and make her an acceptable lover for the hero Tancred, leading Novak to interpret Clorinda’s fate as an early representation of a colonial encounter (Novak Reference Novak2008, 32).

From Novak’s critique of Caruth’s reading arises the question of what is obscured if we take for granted the assumptions and prerequisites that undergird the dominant model of trauma as it developed in Europe and North America. Along with the bias toward trauma as a singular event, which we will examine in more detail in a moment, there is the fundamental question of the nature of the subjectivity that the traumatizing process disrupts and that treatment – in whatever form – is meant to restore. The model of an individual, sovereign, whole, and above all functioning psyche as the baseline subjectivity that is broken by trauma is itself, as Stef Craps argues, historically constructed and emergent out of nineteenth-century European understandings of selfhood, health, and medicine (Craps Reference Craps2013, 20–21). As Claire Stocks argues, the canonical conception of trauma projects this unified self in a dual manner: not only as the stable subjectivity that existed prior to the trauma, but also as a goal of recovery in and through which a non-unified self is pathologized (Stocks Reference Stocks2007, 73). For Stocks, this theory of subjectivity, which has its roots in Freud’s work, is not prima facie sufficient to account for the transformations and upheavals of the twentieth century (89). Furthermore, the assumption of a linear model of narrative healing rejects, or fails to register, forms of subjectivity that are nonlinear or multiple (88).

If a subject is constructed from a history that is not coherently linear, or has a sense of identity that is not necessarily unified and integrated, what then? And for whom, and where, are nonlinear formulations of history and identity prevalent? For Stef Craps and other postcolonial critics of dominant trauma theory, this last question is particularly salient in colonial contexts, where disruption and trauma may be the norm rather than the outlier (Craps Reference Craps2013, 33). Indeed, it is the possibility of trauma as an ongoing and unfinished process that forms the second problematic unfolded by postcolonial critiques of trauma theory. In the dominant model inhered in Freudian psychoanalysis and the PTSD diagnostic, treatment for trauma involves the repairing, through narration, of the sense of past and future of the victim(s). If traumatic recall is the reexperience of the extreme event as if it were happening in the present, then healing requires the remigration of the event to the past. Trauma, then, is again a disorder of chronology, a wound in the victim’s experience of time. What postcolonial critics ask, however, is how this model can account for traumatogenic factors that are not confined to the past, but are active and ongoing in the present? That is, not an event to be rechronologized, but a condition or set of conditions that structure subjectivity itself?

Craps also identifies potential secondary biases in the uncritical transposition of the canonical model of trauma into non-Western contexts. Most interesting among these for historians is the “modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia” that Craps, following Rosanne Kennedy and Jill Bennet, identifies as the de facto form for traumatic narratives as conceived in canonical trauma theory (2; Bennett and Kennedy Reference Bennet and Kennedy2003). Developed in the wake of Theodor Adorno’s famous dictum on poetry and barbarity after Auschwitz, this aesthetic privileges fragmentation and absence in its representations of trauma, features which are also mirrored in the Freudian account of the traumatic experience itself (40). If positioned uncritically, this risks the formation of a “narrow trauma canon” that would exclude whole forms of trauma meaning-making beyond the West (41). For Roger Luckhurst, another critic of the presumption of the singular appropriateness of modernist forms for dealing with trauma cited by Craps, the disruption of the traumatic experience is a moment of narrative possibility, not merely proof of its impossibility (Luckhurst Reference Luckhurst2008, 83). This line of critique is crucial for historians of trauma, as it reminds us that the traces of trauma are detectable across different genres and traditions of representation and do not come prepackaged in modernist or modernist-like forms. Here, a postcolonial perspective broadens rather than inhibits traumatic histories, as it allows us to expand the range of texts and sources through which trauma can be expressed and worked upon.

For Craps and other critics in the postcolonial camp, the thought of Franz Fanon is crucial for the critique and revision of the Eurocentric model of trauma. According to Hamish Dalley, for Fanon, “colonialism is traumatizing insofar as it entails the interpellation of subjects by a racialized social order predicated on their non-existence” (Dalley Reference Dalley2015, 30). Centering Fanon’s account of recognition in the master/slave relationship in Black Skin, White Masks, Dalley shows how material colonization is followed by a psychological colonization, in which the negating nonrecognition of the colonizer – that is, not mutual recognition as persons but a lopsided recognition of the colonized as “nothing in itself” – reproduces the colonizer’s gaze “as a pathological presence inside his [the colonized’s] own skin” (30). In The Wretched of the Earth, Dalley continues, Fanon offers a vision of anticolonial revolution, which, despite its limitations, centers “the need to disrupt traumatizing structures at the systemic level through collective action … ” (31). This centering of the structural dynamic of trauma, rather than interpersonal events, is crucial for historians writing in the twenty-first century, an age where trauma is globalized and entangled in all manner of contexts and processes. Indeed, as Dalley goes on to highlight in his critique of the recognition model, trauma as a framework cannot unproblematically condense any and all expressions and experiences into a single model (45).

The critique of the models of subjectivity and linearity in trauma theory has also been accompanied by a rethinking of the conceptualization of trauma as an event. This rethinking was sparked by the intervention of feminist analyst Laura S. Brown in her contribution to Caruth’s Reference Caruth1995 edited volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Drawing from her experience as an expert witness in rape and abuse trials, particularly the use and abuse of the narrow DSM-III definition of trauma as an event beyond normal experience by defense attorneys, Brown problematizes the event structure as one that cannot account for traumatizing experiences that are all-too-common for women, people of color, and other oppressed groups (Brown, 101). If PTSD is delimited by normal human experience, and normal human experience is in turn a category centered around dominant group identities, then clinical definitions of trauma are in part designed to serve the interests of domination, privileging events and scenarios in which dominant groups can participate as victims (102). As a result, invocations of trauma or psychological responses to processes that are not registered by the event model are cast as pathological (105). As an alternative to the exclusivity of the event model and the relationships of oppression she argues that it reinforces, Brown offers the notion of “insidious trauma,” which she draws from the feminist psychoanalyst Maria Root (107). Insidious trauma she defines as “traumatogenetic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily well-being at the given moment but that do violence to the soul and spirit” (107). Insidious trauma, through its emphasis on the everyday and the hidden, also for Brown opens the path toward considering trauma as accumulative, layered through processes and structures rather than imprinted in a single encounter (110). Here again, the critique expands the possibilities for historians of trauma by opening the conceptual limits of the canonical trauma model.

This overview of the question of trauma and the West in trauma theory – in particular, the destabilization of a timeless, universal model of trauma and an interest in exploring encounters with trauma beyond the event paradigm, developments which are shared between trauma theory and trauma historiography – helps to foreground its relevance in historical scholarship. In a 2017 edited collection on trauma and the First World War, Mark S. Micale identified Europe-centered investigations of trauma as a horizon that historians must move beyond (Micale Reference Micale, Crouthamel and Leese2017, 293). This is because trauma itself has gone global: As an event, analysis, and deployment, it has appeared, been evoked, and been worked upon and reworked by agents and contexts across the globe. This historical expansion or proliferation demands a reflexive historiographical and theoretical repositioning. According to Micale, the frameworks developed by Europeans to make sense of traumatized subjects in the historically specific contexts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe must not be simply transplanted to other historical geographies. To do so would be to “straitjacket the empirically expansive field of historical trauma studies into a preexisting explanatory template that has been derived from only a few past events that are assumed unproblematically to possess paradigmatic status …” (305). Attention to the diversity of traumatic phenomena across a global historical view will also serve to trouble any hegemonic claims of trauma theory. Calling for a focus on the relationship between the one who suffers trauma and its cause, rather than the relationship between an instance and a model, Micale is warning against a particular progressive or developmentalist distortion, in which present-day clinical practices and discourses are presumed to be the telos of historical encounters with trauma. As a guard against this temptation to absorb traumatic histories into a triumph of science narrative, Micale argues that “multiple, context-dependent histories of trauma will require a great deal of knowledge about and sensitivity to a myriad of local cultural conditions” (304–305). Therefore, the historiographical reflection necessitated by the globalization of trauma should take the form not of an absorptive, universal model built to harmonize all historical traces of trauma (and excise any errata). Rather, what is required is attention to difference and diffusion. This means, in my estimation, an embrace of the tension between trauma as an interpretive model and the particular phenomena of trauma that only partially instantiate it. What to do with this tension is a question that we return to at the end of this element.

This turn has already borne compelling fruit. The pressing questions of the universality of the canonical trauma model and the tensions between event and process, extreme and everyday, and global and local have been taken up by historians of trauma. For example, a recent volume on histories of trauma in Asia examines the slippages, modifications, and adaptations that occur when examining trauma in the context of twentieth-century Asian history. As editors Mark S. Micale and Hans Pols argue, trauma theory enables new insights into histories of suffering across Asia, while at the same time those histories can expand, refine, and trouble the trauma paradigm that reigns in North American and European clinical practice (Micale and Pols Reference Micale, Pols, Micale and Pols2021, 4–5). This troubling is important for our efforts in this element to see the limits and possibilities of traumatic histories, as Micale and Pols stress repeatedly the friction that has occurred when Western-trained care workers have encountered communities whose understandings of suffering and practices for processing it are not legible within the Western paradigms and their centering of the individual traumatized psyche and the model of trauma as an event (3).

An impressive treatment of this friction is given by Saiba Varma in her contribution to the volume, which examines the limits and alternatives to PTSD in Indian-controlled Kashmir. As “the most militarized place on earth” with a ratio of one Indian soldier per thirteen Kashmiris and an ongoing state of emergency, psychological distress in Indian-controlled Kashmir is shockingly high, affecting nearly half of the adult population (Varma Reference Varma, Micale and Pols2017, 269). In response to this crisis, international aid groups and Kashmiri psychiatrists have deployed PTSD as a diagnostic lens, an effort which, while raising public awareness, risks obscuring other forms of experiencing, diagnosing, and treating psychological suffering (270). Varma is interested in the nonobjective and preclinical values and choices that determine whose suffering matters and which suffering is privileged as visible – particularly in the case of kamzōrī. An ailment that in South Asia is symptomized by weakness, fatigue, and depression, kamzōrī, Varma reveals, can also denote the suffering caused by caste domination, and, in the case of Kashmir, “the psychic and bodily trauma of colonialism, the presence of a colonial wound” (270–271). Crucially, Varma stresses that the friction between PTSD and kamzōrī is not a simple tale of fitting a square (local) peg into a round (global/Western) hole; rather, it is that each operates on different conceptions of stakes and a different “ontology of violence, trauma and personhood” (271). In this case, Varma argues that kamzōrī “reflects how distress is dispersed across social relations” and thus articulates a communal – and structural – conception of suffering that is distinct from the event and individual-based model of PTSD (282).

This matter of stakes and ontology can be made more grounded for historians by looking closer at a concept that Varma astutely adopts from Didier Fassin: a “politics of life.” Distinct from Foucault’s concept of biopolitics – through which populations are modulated, regulated, and governed – politics of life refers to “the evaluation of human beings and the meaning of their existence” (Fassin Reference Fassin2007, 501). This evaluation, Fassin argues, rests on an implicit differentiating logic that distinguishes lives to be risked from lives to be saved, the latter belonging to the recipients of humanitarian aid (victims), the former to the aid workers providing assistance (507). This “ontology of inequality” lies, for Fassin, at the heart of humanitarian and interventionist ethics as an irreducible problematic, generating further distinctions between lives with higher value (Western volunteers) and lives with lower value (civilians and “local agents” in the parlance of Médecins sans frontières) and between lives capable of self-narration (again, aid workers) and those that can only be narrated by another (again, victims and locals) (519). Thus, even within the humanitarian moral economy that increasingly dominates how Western societies conceive of and speak about their interactions with the “Third World”/Global South – a moral economy derived, Fassin stresses, from ideas about common humanity and solidarity – there is a problematic of inequality that is not only present within the moral economy but generative of it.

Following Varma, historians of trauma may derive meaningful thinking and writing from Fassin’s analysis, even without, I think, adopting wholesale all the political implications of the concept of “ontology of inequality.” However, it is by no means a simple task. If trauma functions as a moral economy, organizing how suffering is understood and how redress can be made, then recognition is central to its operation. Obtaining recognition of trauma, whether of an individual or a community or other larger social unit, requires encoding the suffering within the circulatory norms and procedures of the moral economy. Thus, bringing historical sufferings to light increasingly takes the form of building it into traumatic narratives, which, through articulation within a shared moral economy, accrue social and political force. From this, the question that confronts historians of trauma is: What are the historiographical and theoretical consequences of the deployment of or participation in such a moral economy? Insofar as trauma’s moral economy enables the visibility and address of suffering (and, perhaps, to some extent, its redress), then such participation is an avenue for the effective transformation of the present that historians often long for. Any embrace of this potential, however, also requires attention to the construction and operation of the moral economy itself. Any political, theoretical, or medical discourse (trauma combines all three if we take Fassin and others seriously) not only allows for the interpretation of historical phenomena but also prefigures their legibility as such. Historians of trauma are well-positioned to add a further dimension to these inquiries by investigating not only what the moral economy reveals but also what it elides, leaves out, or marginalizes. Are there forms of psychological suffering, even forms of traumatization, that are not expressible in the paradigm described by “politics of life?” This question cannot be answered simply, as it is not unique to the historiography of trauma but is endemic to the task of historical interpretation itself. Indeed, I believe it is as important for histories of trauma to reveal and dwell in this tension as it is for them to attempt to solve it. This would be fruitful, furthermore, for approaches that embrace the deployment of the trauma model as well as those that are skeptical of it.

With the map sketched out above of the contested boundaries of trauma in hand, historians might ask: How has trauma become globalized? What are the processes, discourses, and mechanisms by which a European and then North Atlantic psychological framework came to be applied to experiences of suffering and loss in all contexts? That is to ask: If the dissonance between, on the one side, the dominant clinical model of PTSD and the canonical psychoanalytic model, and on the other, experiences of everyday, processual, and structural traumas in non-Western contexts, reveals the limits of trauma as a universal theory, how did this encounter, the site of the friction, come to be? Alongside the matter of revealing the frictions arising from the application of a universal model to individual contexts, there is also the question of how Western conceptions are hegemonized.

Jennifer Yum-Park’s contribution on “Yankee-Style Trauma” provides a useful study here, examining how Western psychiatric knowledge and the presumptions undergirding it were transferred, in this case, in 1950s Korea. In the wake of the catastrophic experiences of the Korean War, Yum-Park charts how partnerships between the US and South Korean Armies led to Korean psychology taking shape within the patterns and paradigms of American military psychology (Yum-Park Reference Yum-Park, Micale and Pols2017, 108). Yum-Park roots this development in both collaboration and exchange between South Korean and US military doctors and in the distinct similarities in symptoms between soldiers of very different cultures, which gave the neo-Freudian framework undergirding this psychology the appearance of universality (117). While this exchange precedes the coalescence and codification of PTSD, Yum-Park nevertheless shows how the globalization of canonical Western understandings of trauma proceeded long before trauma became the behemoth cultural signifier that it is today (119–120).

Perhaps the most important and well-known examination of this problem, however, is undertaken by Ethan Watters in his book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. Alongside chapters on anorexia in Hong Kong, schizophrenia in Zanzibar, and depression in Japan, Watters tells the story of the arrival of PTSD in Sri Lanka in the wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. With PTSD having achieved uncontested status as a leading field of psychological research and practice at the turn of the millennium, hosts of therapists, clinicians, researchers, nongovernmental organizations, and international aid groups arrived in Sri Lanka to treat the psychological suffering that would follow such a deadly event, in which hundreds of thousands of humans died and which was witnessed by millions more. What they brought with them was not only the model of trauma enshrined in the DSM, but also a complicated yet unexamined apparatus of assumptions about healing and human nature. In doing so, they ran roughshod over cultural beliefs and practices related to healing.

Watters relates how, upon their arrival in Sri Lanka, many workers expressed shock and confusion at the behavior of those they had arrived to help: Children were eager to return to school, people desired to return to their destroyed villages, and friends and neighbors told each other “hopeful lies” about loved ones surviving against impossible odds (Watters Reference Watters2010, 77, 99). This confusion was often interpreted by Western aid providers as an unfamiliarity with the nature of psychological trauma and as acts of avoidance imagined to fit neatly into PTSD symptomology. What they were unable to see, and what Watters reveals by synthesizing the work of critical anthropologists and medical humanists, was a radically different social understanding of loss and catastrophe.

The traumatologists, as Watters dubs them, worked under the assumption, equally present in the clinical, research, and industrial sectors of the trauma economy, that the mechanisms, expressions, and reactions to trauma are universal and not conditioned by cultural context (76). In this mindset, PTSD, backed by advanced research, tens of thousands of peer-reviewed studies, and international expert consensus, is a universally applicable and culturally transcendent model for describing the reality of human response to extreme suffering. Undergirding this universalism, however, is a historically specific set of propositions about the relationship between individuals and social collectives and how psychological trauma is experienced, manifested, and treated, which will be familiar to scholars of trauma as they map neatly onto the postcolonial critiques outlined in this section. One of the most important of these is the presumption that trauma, and its manifestation in PTSD, is a malfunction of an individual psyche, “a broken spring in a clockwork brain” (120). The problem and its solutions are mechanical, meant to repair the injured organ and return the patient to full functionality. Another is the core tenet that trauma is healed only through confrontation with the event and the reestablishment of (chronological) mastery over it (112).

In examining the misunderstanding around what appeared to Western aid workers and trauma experts as avoidance or hesitance to face the trauma on the part of survivors, Watters sheds light on the limits of the PTSD model. For Sri Lankans, rather than an experience of individual psychic damage, the event and its aftermath were interpreted “in terms of the damage it did to social relationships” (91). Whereas in the Western model, the psychic suffering generates social turbulence, in Sri Lanka, the reverse was the case (92). Traumatologists rushed in to facilitate working through as soon as possible, unable to conceive of experiences of trauma that were not singular events but which were ongoing and thus impossible to master (86).

The consequences of the uncritical application of PTSD and its attendant confident universalism in the context of Sri Lanka were significant. Watters describes a disturbing feeding-frenzy atmosphere in which researchers and pharmaceuticals dove at the chance to test competing models and open markets for medications, often in ways that took advantage of tsunami survivors (78, 80). A critical reliance on a limited number of translators led to compromised instruction and conversation (80). Organizations and parties often bypassed Sri Lankan leaders and institutions to interface directly with survivors, unaware of specific local needs (79).

From this case study, Watters condenses key analyses and criticisms of the PTSD model, of which historians of trauma must take note. He writes, “By isolating trauma as a malfunction of the mind that can be connected to discrete symptoms and targeted with new and specialized treatments, we have removed the experience of trauma from other cultural narratives and beliefs that might otherwise give meaning to suffering” (121). These bundles of cultural forms and practices, furthermore, often appear, from the vantage point of the PTSD model and Western trauma expertise, to be inhibitors or roadblocks to healing. Take, for instance, again, the convention of lying to a grieving parent that their child, believed dead, was seen by friends or acquaintances in a neighboring town or village. Drawing from the work of anthropologists, Watters relates that such practices are normal in places and communities where death and disappearance are all too common, and function to maintain social fabrics and continuities amid crises (99). From the Western perspective, under the PTSD paradigm, such tales read as a red flag, an avoidance and unwillingness to face the traumatic event directly and thereby begin the healing process. By surveying finer-grained and contextually specific accounts, though, Watters is able to retie forms of grief processing such as this back to historically specific situations and reveal the lack of imagination that can attend to uncritical application of the trauma model. Here, the refusal to “work through” the trauma can itself be a form of healing illegible under dominant clinical and professional frameworks.

This matter is crucial, as attested by Watter’s treatment of Critical Incident Debriefing, a program of trauma response designed to be implemented immediately after a traumatizing event by first responders, a psychological counterpart to emergency medical technicians, fire departments, and disaster relief services (116). While support and attendance for training in the practice rose throughout the 1990s, evidence in fact revealed that funneling victims into confronting trauma as soon as possible – and even more, embedding their experiences into the PTSD model – was ineffective at best and harmful at worst (118). From Watter’s examples, both in the Sri Lankan context and in the West, where Critical Incident Debriefing was deployed, we are able to glean something of the risks and pitfalls of uncritical application of a dominant critical framework to all contexts.

This admonition against universality would likely receive agreement from professional historians. What might receive less immediate concurrence is Watter’s argument in the conclusion that “offering the latest Western mental health theories in an attempt to ameliorate the psychological stress caused by globalization is not a solution; it is part of the problem” (253). Here, Watters, like Stevens, points us toward the deeper effectivity of trauma as a conceptual apparatus in framing how the mind and its maladies are constituted as objects of knowledge and carriers of a particular subjectivity. While, as Varma writes, mental health organizations now acknowledge the importance of local cultural knowledge and community orientation, the terms of this encounter are not even, and still rest on a distinction of value that privileges Western frameworks (Varma, 281). The unresolved question is whether trauma can be fully extricated as a phenomenon from the particular theoretical architecture from which it emerged – whichever architecture that may be. If not, then deploying it entails the deployment of a distinct theoretical apparatus and thus a distinct mode of interpretation that can, if wielded with abandon, override existing structures of meaning (Watters, 104).

While Watter’s focus is on therapists, psychologists, and pharmaceutical firms, we may ask: What is the equivalent danger for historiography? What are the consequences or the stakes of moulding historical material to fit the DSM? The stakes are higher than they may seem, as the recursivity between knowledge of the past and knowledge of the present makes the risk of misinterpretation doubly mobile: potentially distorting the past while also strengthening a discursive and biopolitical hegemony in the present. While some historians whose subjects are far from the present – deceased decades, centuries, or even millennia ago – may argue that the danger of misapplications of trauma is low, given that the threat of harm to existing communities as in the Sri Lankan case is nonexistent, I contend that the risk remains through its capacity to distort the interpretive encounter between the historian and the past, to distend the horizon of the past to fit the horizon of the present. Merely applying the PTSD model – that is, employing it as an interpretive apparatus for explaining the past without confronting its deployment in the present and without reexamining its boundaries in the wake of the interpretive encounter – would be to risk a chronological flattening, an indifference toward historical forms and possibilities that are illegible under the universal model. In other words, the present imperial dimensions – à la Fassin and Rechtman – of trauma’s influence on contemporary expressions of grief and suffering risk extending into the past as well.

I return to this matter of the historian’s responsibility to retheorize trauma in the following section and in the conclusion. For now, it suffices to reflect that the question of “trauma and the West” as it has been tackled by scholars of trauma has revealed a conceptual and historical friction that arises where Western notions of trauma are deployed to interpret suffering in imperial, colonial, postcolonial, and globalized contexts. The central presuppositions of the canonical trauma model – that trauma inheres in singular, overwhelming events; that trauma is primarily a malaise of the individual psyche; that the traumatizing event and force are in the past – fray at their limits when applied to ongoing, structural, and everyday forms of extreme suffering.

This fraying need not cause historiography to reduce itself to pessimism, however. An awareness of the operations of our theoretical models of trauma does not entail a wholesale rejection of their potential for historical work. Trauma’s utility for identifying and interpreting psychological suffering is part and parcel of its current ubiquity. That is, its seemingly omnipresent deployment is a result of its effectiveness as an analysis. Historians of trauma are powerfully positioned to bring to light historical suffering that is otherwise unacknowledgeable outside the trauma model. In this regard, histories of trauma expand historical understanding as well as historical empathy. Like any hermeneutic apparatus, however, trauma makes some historical traces legible while overwriting and displacing others. That my cautions in this element are attenuated toward the latter will not, I hope, erase the importance and the historiographic potential of the former, a matter to which I will return briefly in the conclusion.

4 Trauma and Historical Subjectivity

As I have attempted to demonstrate in Section 2, one of the central knots in the conceptual history as well as the historiography of trauma is the nature of the traumatized subject. Who can lay claim to trauma, what are the bounds of normal experience, which culturally and historically determined diagnostic and therapeutic practices are appropriate for treatment, and crucially for historians, whether and how trauma becomes detectable as a historical phenomenon are all questions that remain unresolved. Even more, they are not questions for which resolutions are forthcoming. However, a closer examination of a specific subfield will reveal how the questions themselves are immanent to the historiography of trauma.

5 Trauma and Modernity

The observation that psychological trauma emerged as a distinctive ailment alongside the rise of European technological modernity is not a new one among scholars. Nor has it gone unnoticed that the turning points in trauma’s conceptual biography have occurred in the aftermath of some of that modernity’s greatest cataclysms: the mechanized warfare of the trenches in the First World War; the industrial genocide of the Second World War; the televised imperial violence of the Vietnam War; and the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terror. The fundamental question here is whether trauma is a transhistorical psychic potentiality, generating a second-order question for historians concerning the possibility and appropriateness of reading trauma out of premodern sources, events, and contexts. Is there an essential link between psychological trauma and the conditions of modernity? Or has trauma been a potential human response to violence across historical epochs?

I am not the first scholar to raise such questions, nor will I be able to resolve them here. Rather more humble, my goal is to uncover the dimensions of the theoretical problem they spiral out from and illuminate how they might shape the work of present and future historians. In their introduction to a recent collection on premodern combat stress, Hurlock et al. describe two broad positions on the question of trauma’s historical depth. The first is a “universalist” position, from which trauma and PTSD are understood as transhistorical phenomena rooted in innate biological realities (Hurlock et al. Reference Hurlock, Rees, Crowley, Hurlock, Rees and Crowley2022, 3). The second is a “relativist” position, with both strong and weak variants, which stresses the importance of cultural context and is skeptical of (over) medicalization of suffering (5–6). A few examples, cited also by Hurlock et al., illustrate the range.

In an article entitled “Nothing New under the Sun: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders in the Ancient World,” Walid Khalid Abdul-Hamid and Jamie Hacker Hughes argue straightforwardly for evidence of trauma in ancient Mesopotamia, in the form of warriors experiencing symptoms including nightmares and apparitions of the deceased, depression, and excessive fear (Abudl-Hamid and Hughes Reference Abdul-Hamid and Hacker Hughes2014, 557). The method here is impressively mechanical: a definition of trauma supplied by Freud, a list of PTSD symptoms drawn from the DSM-V, contextual explanations of ancient Mesopotamian care practices, and textual evidence (550).

The relativist position is more interesting from a historical-theoretical perspective. Taking the most skeptical stance, anthropologist Allan Young in his 1995 book The Harmony of Illusions wrote that “the disorder is not timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity. Rather, it is glued to gether by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilized these efforts and resources” (Young Reference Young1995, 5). Young does not deny the reality of PTSD or traumatization in the contemporary world; rather, his interest is how trauma has been “made real,” in part through the scientific and medical apparatuses that register it (6). For Young, then, psychological trauma as conceived by the PTSD model did not exist in the premodern world, and to proceed as if it did would be to project an illusion of timelessness onto trauma’s present facticity (9–10).

Attempting to chart a middle way between these opposing camps, Donna Trembinski has argued for the necessity of using modern understandings of trauma to interpret potential traumata in the premodern past, as doing so can increase collective knowledge, whether or not said understandings reflect timeless realities (Trembinski Reference Trembinski2011, 84). There is a critique to be made here regarding the status of the knowledge we have of the past if we misapply a theoretical framework – for instance, assuming the universality of PTSD in a way that distorts archival material – but there is also something sensible. Rather than a binary is or is not framework for detecting premodern trauma, Trembinski elects a focus on similarity that brings to light the parallels between modern traumatized reactions to extreme events and, in Trembinski’s case, medieval European instances of melancholy (84). Here, while perhaps not a timeless phenomenon or a chronologically universal diagnostic, trauma can still reveal continuity and difference in the processing of extremity that is significant for our understanding of the past.

Historians then are presented with three broad paths: outright, wholehearted embrace of PTSD as an analytic; outright, hardline rejection of psychological trauma’s premodern existence; or a middle road. Which should they take? Here, our event/analysis/deployment matrix can once more be helpful, as can a temporalization of the interventions from postcolonial scholars and other critics.

In all three modes, I find the application of trauma to premodern pasts to be interesting but also theoretically troubling. As an event, Trembinski’s argument from comparison is reasonable: If we hold open the possibility of premodern traumatizations – unprocessed extreme events, involuntary recall, chronological disruption – we might generate new knowledge about the history of psychological suffering. But the universalization of trauma, even as an event, would also require the universalization of a particular subjectivity. To find trauma in Gilgamesh or in Aeschylus would also require the transposition of at least part of the structure of this subjectivity. When considered from the position of subjectivity, universality is much less tenable, historically and theoretically. Derek Summerfield’s commentary on the transition from survivorhood to victimhood in Western societies is valent here (Summerfield Reference Summerfield2001, 96). As there is no detection of the event without some analytical framework to make such a detection possible, the same difficulties apply.

As deployment – that is, again, as a conceptual assemblage that has effects in the world – the extension of trauma into the premodern world is most complicated. If trauma is embedded in currently active processes of subject formation and the politics of recognition – however fraught or however ennobling – then it would be troubling to seek it in the archives and traces of the premodern world in a way that dodges the historicity of the trauma framework itself. The difficulty here is that the alterity of the past, which constitutes its power to denaturalize and historicize our present historical horizon, might be overwritten. In the field of trauma, then, caution and sustained theoretical reflection are necessary if not sufficient components of thoughtful historiographic practice.

6 Conclusion

The stakes of studying, researching, and writing the history of trauma are as high now as at any time in the phenomenon’s existence. As Byron J. Good argues in his conclusion to the Micale and Pols volume, to engage in the history of trauma is to engage with among the most momentous, destructive, and consequential events and processes in world history (Good Reference Good, Micale and Pols2017, 332). Going even beyond the observation that trauma is at its core a chronological disorder, Good emphasizes trauma as a past that haunts the future.

Here, we are confronted with the return of the spectral and the ghostly, whereupon Caruth’s choice of Tasso’s Clorinda as an archetypical traumatic encounter proves inspired, or at least prophetic, of the basic metaphors that would structure our conceptualizations of traumatic histories. The specter, like the traumatic recall in its canonical formulation, is a chronological anomaly, a piece of the past that has been drawn forth – with shock, terror, and violence – into a present in which its presence – or semi-presence – is disturbing and disruptive. Further, like trauma, the specter often appears as something to be driven away or subjected to reintegration and closure. Indeed, if we consider the clichés at work in the mass produced supernatural thriller or ghost story – the spirit with “unfinished business,” or who “cannot let go,” or who needs to “move on” – then trauma’s adaptability to the symbolism of haunting is no surprise (and conversely, in fact, this adaptability might enable us to query the dependence of trauma’s cultural dominance on the cliché form).

If haunting and spectrality then work to structure the metaphorics of the historiography of trauma, then a clearer understanding of how the past might be said to haunt the present is in order. Ethan Kleinberg is an essential guide in this matter. Kleinberg adapts Derrida’s notion of hauntology to critique what he calls the “ontological realism” of conventional historiography: the assumption that the past exists stably as an event, thing, or essence that the historian can access through careful method in order to uncover some truth about it (Kleinberg Reference Kleinberg2017, 1). Hauntology, in contrast, enables an understanding of the past as a present absence: “but the telling [of history] in the present is haunted by the ghost of the past, which is neither present nor absent, neither here nor gone” (2). This haunting manifests at the limits of explanatory power of conventional historiography, in the incompleteness of any archive and the ineradicable possibility of future discovery, and in the writing of conventional history as if the archive – containing the supposedly ontologically stable stuff of the past – were complete, bounded, and stable (9).

What attention to the past as specter enables for Kleinberg is both an awareness of possibilities and alternatives in the construction of history – both in the possible histories we can write and in how what he terms “past possibles” condition what comes down to us as the past – and a recognition of the “latent ontology” of history (136–137). This latent ontology is disturbing and revelatory of contradictions in our historical constructions, uncovering both the aporias between ourselves and the past and the poroi or bridges that historians construct to bring that past into the present, which themselves often serve to obstruct the “polysemous” nature of history and offer the illusion of ontologically stable constructions (138–141). As an alternative theoretical orientation that acknowledges the latent ontology of the past, Kleinberg offers “the past that is,” the strikethrough here being indicative of both its present absence and absent presence and the impossibility of ever possessing it fully in the present (142–144).

While Kleinberg offers the past that is as a framework for historiography and the philosophy of history as such, I believe it is of particularly pressing importance in the case of histories of trauma. The traumatic event itself in its reexperience and traumatic histories in their eruption into the present both fit well into the ghost metaphor – the former as something unbidden that violates the chronological (and ontological) order of things, the latter as a “revenant brought to the present by the historian” (142). But even more incisively, the attention toward incompleteness, possibility, and instability that Kleinberg’s orientation enables contributes to the theoretical self-reflexivity that I argue historians of trauma must have. The past that is would entail special care toward the limits of treating any one model of trauma as timeless and universal, as an index of an ontologically stable essence. If trauma in its experience and its narration as history problematizes oppositions between past and present, then a historical orientation that captures that problematization is necessary for historiography.

This matter is even more fascinating when read in connection with Saidiya Hartman’s reflections on slavery’s attacks on memory. In the titular chapter of her 2007 book Lose Your Mother, she describes how slave traders and owners systematically attempted to destroy enslaved Africans’ memories of their lives before slavery in order to ensure docility (Hartman Reference Hartman2007, 155). These efforts, she relates, often cohered in acts of sorcery, generating common tales of forced amnesia (155–156). The structure of trauma in the canonical model has at its center a failure of memory: The event returns and is reexperienced. In Hartman’s ruminations on the enslaved’s loss of mother, the removal of the memory is itself coded as traumatic. And, if trauma is explicable through a mechanism of haunting, and if the past itself should be theorized as a haunting presence, then what new theorizations of trauma might be possible? Trauma is not only the event that resists placement in memory but also the loss or the closure of the possibility of memory itself, a wound that destabilizes historical distance by severing the chronological ground of continuity, which is also the precondition for narrative.

The unreliability of historical distance – that is, the non-stable supposition of a past and a present that exist apart – is thus crucial for thinking traumatic histories. Already in 1995, intellectual historian Michael S. Roth argued rightly that any representation of the past always occurs in a present that cannot be methodologically excised (Roth Reference Roth1995, 12–14). The arguments over presentism that have stood in for theoretical discussion among historians – at least in the US – in recent years are useful here only insofar as they recognize that politics too are part of a present and structure the horizon of its encounter with the past. Even moreso is Roth’s point true in the case of trauma, which is, again, by its nature, a violation of the smooth, linear, narrative progression from past, to present, and to future.

To attend to and attempt to represent – however circumspect or impossible – a traumatic history requires then attention to the absence/presence fusion that the haunting metaphor captures. To write histories of trauma requires us to detect ghostly traces, traces which are perhaps present in and through their absence. This already is a complicated task, and requires a measure of hermeneutic sophistication that is far from a given in a profession dominated by a suspicion of theory. But even more challenging, it also requires us to ask how this process of detection in turn structures the possibility of identifying a history (or a historical subject) as traumatic, traumatized, or traumatizing. That is, it calls us to ask what the role of the historian is in the moral economy of trauma.

Susannah Radstone raises again an important question here, which is to what extent histories of trauma reproduce a sovereign subject that a century and more of social theory has dismantled (Radstone, 21). Further, histories of trauma participate in the drawing of boundaries that designate what is and is not trauma, a process which itself, she rightly points out, involves the detection of absences, a technique or skill wielded by experts and robed in scholarly authority (24). The danger here for twenty-first century historians is that the thinkability of trauma in a given case is not easily disaggregated from political and ideological constraints that determine whose sufferings are presented for witnessing, or, as Radstone puts it, with whom identifications can be made (25). The inclusion of historiography within this boundary drawing proves again the need for theoretical reflexivity for historians, not only in terms of how primary material reshapes or modifies a theoretical lens, but also how its deployment as scholarship participates in the politics of recognition and identification that structure trauma as a moral economy.

Thus, the historian of trauma faces theoretical pitfalls on two sides. First, via the interfacing of historiography with the moral economy of trauma, to think and write traumatic histories is to interact with the particular forms of power through which the trauma model is active. This is not de facto inhibiting, merely a situation to be acknowledged. A deployment-skeptical historiography of trauma is of course possible, and this element aspires to instantiate it, but is burdened by a hermeneutic-theoretical double move: detecting trauma in the past, retheorizing the analytic model which structured the hermeneutic encounter in the first place, and doing both in a manner attentive to the regime of subjectivity that produces trauma as an experience and object of study, as well as that regime’s relation to historiography. If trauma and history are both expressed in metaphors of haunting, and haunting is a fusion of absence and presence, then what is the nature of historical work on trauma? Is it the detection of absences, of things missing or incomplete? If so, how to do it in a way that maintains evidential and conceptual rigor and avoids reproducing unquestioned assumptions? The answers to this question must include, I think, an acknowledgment of the historicity of trauma as an interpretive model.

Second, given the opacity surrounding trauma’s historical applicability – modern only or transhistorical psychic potentiality, globally applicable or inherently Eurocentric – the straightforward DSM-to-archive style detection of trauma could be theoretically irresponsible. If the globalization of PTSD has threatened to overwrite or subsume forms of healing and grief processing that are not legible to its diagnostic framework or which it reads as pathological, then what are the stakes involved in risking a concomitant overwriting via historiography? Here again, I believe the distinction between event, analysis, and deployment is essential. Trauma as “event” may appear the most straightforward and least historiographically volatile, but that would presume that the recognition of the event of trauma could be disaggregated from the analytic frameworks and forms of authority that make it legible in the first place. I do not believe this disaggregation to be possible. Furthermore, I would argue that this presumption is itself – or would be – a species of a larger presumption that there is a way of encountering the past that is outside the recursive demands of theoretical reflection. As Ethan Kleinberg, Joan Wallach Scott, and Gary Wilder decry in their Reference Kleinberg, Scott and Wilder2018 manifesto Theory Revolt, disciplinary history as practiced in the academy today privileges an uncritical empiricism that presumes a disconnection between historical data and the conceptual and theoretical apparatuses that interpret them (Kleinberg, Scott, and Wilder Reference Kleinberg, Scott and Wilder2018, §1.9). That is, the truth of the past is treated as something stable awaiting discovery by a historian, and this process can proceed happily without the troublesome intervention of theory. However, as they rightfully note, this orientation itself contains repressed theoretical assumptions that are not reducible to data or evidence. This empiricism hides “uninterrogated theoretical assumptions about time and place, intention and agency, proximity and causality, context and chronology” (§ 1.11). In turn, it disincentivizes theoretical engagement and forecloses the reflective capacities of theory, which, in the case of trauma, engenders not just encounters with past constructions of subjectivity but also critical and imaginative reconsiderations of our own in the present.

As this final turn to subjectivity belies, at bottom, I believe the question of how to think traumatic histories that this element engages empties into the problem of the nature of historical subjectivity. Is the traumatized subject of the past discovered by the historian, itself an object preserved in the archive? Is it reconstructed by the historian, collaged and sutured from disparate texts and traces? Is it fully imposed from the present, always a projection from within the horizon of the present? Or does it only become a historical subject in and through the hermeneutic interface that historiography materializes? There is insufficient space and authority to answer here, but such questions should be central to the practice of historians of trauma in the future. They must not be avoided.

My warnings and criticisms here are, of course, tied up in deeper and longer-standing debates – sadly, now quite diminished in the Anglophone historical profession – around the proper roles and uses of theory in historical research and writing. It is pointless to attempt to reignite those debates here. However, reflection on the historiography of trauma makes it clear that the writing of traumatic histories demands theoretical self-reflection from historians. This is because it is a form of historiography that is indelibly the application of an interpretive apparatus to the materials of the past. However enshrined in diagnostic manuals, however ubiquitous as a culturally coded analytic for representing the experience of suffering and its aftereffects, however detectable in the chemistry and the substructures of the brain, however tightly woven into discourses and institutions of memory both public and private and high and low, however much it constitutes the very basis of an international moral economy, however much it appears to us as a thing in itself: It has no meaning, no significance, no historical relevance before or beyond the hermeneutic encounter.

What, then, is the historian to do? My prescriptions (and proscriptions) here are not designed to lock historiography in the mirror-hall of high theory. Nor do they constitute a demand that every account of a historically situated trauma or series of traumata be preceded by a conceptual history of the trauma model itself. Historiography in such a self-defeating mode would inhibit the development of historical knowledge. What I hope these reflections can point toward is the productive capacities of theoretically reflexive historical work on trauma. This is an encouragement of historians to think and write explicitly about how their narratives are situated in a matrix of past and present contexts. Histories of trauma do not have to be limited to explanations of psychological suffering in the past – the detection of trauma as an event – but can also expand our theoretical understanding by engaging also with the question of how the model itself is changed by its application. Here, historians are not mere adopters of theory, but creators, productive theoreticians in their own right. This posture has the potential not only to enrich historiography but also, perhaps even more powerfully, to rehistoricize the dominant scientific and cultural model of suffering in our time. Theoretically reflexive historiography can thus critically sharpen and ethically deepen wider engagements with trauma.

Practically, this would entail historians introducing an element of theoretical creativity into their work. The uniqueness of past events and the irreducible specificity of historical contexts – which empirically minded historians are rightly fond of citing as guardrails against theoretical speculation – do not have to merely inhibit theoretical thinking. On the contrary, it is precisely the specificity of a given history, of given events, actors, struggles, and mentalities, that demands care in the application of the trauma model. When we detect trauma in the past, what fits the model and what does not? What slides comfortably into contemporary clinical frameworks and what remains obstinately misaligned? Such questions, which are practical in nature and of a kind with any historical work that seeks to understand the past from the perspective of the present, should enable and empower rather than limit historians working on trauma.

This enabling capacity of histories of trauma also connects with the question of their transformative political and cultural potential. Here, I wish to return to the problem of transference and the question of the participation of historiography in Freudian Trauerarbeit, a participation argued for by Santner (Santner Reference Santner and Friedlander1992, 144–147). Dominick LaCapra, with characteristic thoughtfulness, sketched out the position of historiography within the larger processes that move – or seek to move – subjects from traumatized to recovering (LaCapra Reference LaCapra, Postone and Santner2003). If part of the task of overcoming trauma is the reestablishment of the experience as past and thus open to remembrance as memory rather than reexperience, then historiography participates in this process insofar as it provides a construction of the past that is credible. He writes, “Indeed one of the ways history is not merely professional or a matter of research is that it undertakes to create a critically tested, accurate memory as its contribution to a cognitively and ethically responsible public sphere” (213). Ever suspicious of uncritically upheld binary oppositions, LaCapra here conceives of historiography as working across the divides between history and memory and between academic and public. Historiography, then, in its critical validation of memory, can contribute to the working through of trauma.

Where things become more complicated, and perhaps more daunting, is in the ethical challenge of this historiographical mode. LaCapra is careful to stress the limits of the historian’s capacities in this process and the pitfalls of an excess of identification: “At most one may argue that the historian is a secondary witness through empathy or compassion that nonetheless respects the otherness of the other and does not pretend to full and intimate presence of either self or other, much less to bonding (mis)understood as fusion or identification” (226, fn 10). The historian cannot take the role of analyst or therapist, nor historiography the role of treatment or cure – the latter being itself problematic for historical work (216).

LaCapra’s concerns here remain current, but I would add to them two lines of critique, one minor and one major, that should trouble the inclusion of historiography, in however secondary a role, in the process of memory work. The first relates to the public sphere and the disturbing question of whether public spheres are public anymore – rather than privatized discursive spaces – or whether they do not rather de-validate critical accounts of the past. The second and much more pressing arises from an engagement with theoretical work that queries trauma itself. The inclusion of histories of trauma in the processes of working on the past would also include them in the work that trauma does as a social and political force. This problem is not one revealed in LaCapra’s formulation alone but has been present throughout this element. What is potentially overwritten, which possibilities are elided, and which hermeneutic avenues are foreclosed in the designation of a history as traumatic? To answer this, a deeper theoretical reflexivity is required, beneath even the potential contributions of historiography to “working through,” that attends to the formulation of the history as traumatic at the primary level, both before, during, and after the hermeneutic encounter.

Thus, I would (humbly) add some cautionary caveats to the opening of historiography as contributory to the recovery of the traumatized subject, whether individual or collective. Stressing and perhaps increasing the limits LaCapra sets for historians, I contend that histories should only rarely themselves become the “working through” of trauma by the traumatized subject. Historiography must not conceive of itself as a discourse capable of completing the healing process – itself contested terrain, but taken here as a canonical reestablishment of the pastness of the event that has broken through in the traumatic recall – by reconstituting or substituting a subject at its end. While historiography might and has contributed to projects aimed at the acknowledgement and redress of trauma – critical work on the operational reality of the Holocaust, for example – it cannot itself enter the primary loop, so to speak, and tie the historical-psychological threads in such a way that the wound is healed and the process brought to a close in a single historiographic act. It may contribute to such a process but not encompass it. To attempt to do so would be to perform – in the sense here of act out not actually do – an impossible transposition of subjectivity, whether in the absorption of another’s trauma or, even in the case of a historian from a traumatized community writing about that collective trauma, in the concentration of collective traumatization into a single narrative. Going further, I would argue that even the language of process adopted from clinical treatments of trauma is dangerous for historians, as metaphors around the unresolved, the unfinished, the incomplete, and so on still rely on a paradigm of closure as ideal.

With all this said, I do not believe the history of trauma to be a field comprised only of impossibilities. In its best forms, the historiography of trauma itself articulates the impossibility of universality and serves to reground us in the specific and the contingent. Trauma is generative in that it is perhaps uniquely oriented to capture and make apparent the instability of the distinction between the past and present that Kleinberg theorizes. Like any hermeneutic framework, trauma can be conscripted to shore up hegemony. But when employed reflexively, it can unfold valuable works of historical empathy, enabling and supplementing critical histories. Historians of trauma, again, are well positioned and equipped to chart how specific historical contexts interact with their interpretive models, in ways that are neither uncritical applications of a diagnosis nor a self-defeating lament of the impossibility of historical interpretation. Thinking traumatic histories reflexively allows us to attend to the specificity of the past through a refinement of theoretical orientations, rather than outside of it.