The Traumatic Event in the Age of PTSD: Psychoanalysis, Neurology, and Literature

ABSTRACT

The DSM‐III (1980) defined a traumatic event as a horrific event that is “outside the range of usual human experience,” such as genocide, war, a terror attack, or rape. However, by the publication of the DSM‐IV in 1994, there was a substantial expansion of the criteria for what a traumatic event could be, and who could be considered a victim of such an event. In the first decades of the 21st century, the discourse of trauma is ubiquitous in medical and cultural domains alike. Still, the traumatic event itself lost much of its currency, and trauma as such changed much of its meaning. This article documents the process by which this epistemological shift unfolded. The first part of the article presents the pedagogical intervention of literary scholar Shoshana Felman in 1984, in which she deliberately aimed to trigger highly emotional reactions in students by exposing them to recorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors. Emotional triggering stands, she believed, at the core of meaningful teaching of trauma in history. Felman was also a major figure in the second phase presented here, which took place in the mid‐1990s, with the fruitful and somewhat surprising collaboration between neurologically oriented clinicians such as the psychiatrists Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart the literary scholar Cathy Caruth and Felman. This collaboration contributed to the promotion of a new understanding of trauma in which triggers and flashbacks turned into the two main focal concepts in trauma discourse—and for PTSD to be popularized far beyond medical circles and academia, entering wider public domains and popular culture. This was the moment—as will be discussed in the last part of this piece—that a new “trigger culture” emerged (Ziv and Bar‐Haim, 2024). The notion that traumatic events from the past have long‐lasting and harmful effects on one's life has turned into an ongoing effort by individuals and the public to mitigate potential traumatic triggers in an unknown future.