It has been reported that, on average, most adults recall first memories formed around age 3.5. In general, most first memories are positive. However, whether these first memories tend to be visual or verbal and whether the period for childhood amnesia (CA) is greater for visual or verbal or for positive versus negative memories has not been determined. Because negative, stressful experiences disrupt memory and can injure memory centers such as the hippocampus and amygdala, and since adults who were traumatized (...) or abused during childhood (TA) reportedly suffer memory disturbances, it was hypothesized that those with a history of early trauma might suffer from a lengthier childhood amnesia and form their first recallable memories at a later age as compared to the general population (GP). Because the right hemisphere matures earlier than the language-dominant left hemisphere, and is dominant for visual and emotional memory, as well as the stress reponse, it was hypothesized that first recallable memories would be visual rather than verbal. Lastly, since stress can injure the brain and disrupt memory, it was hypothesized that the traumatized group would demonstrate memory and intellectual disturbances associated with right hemisphere injury as based on WAIS-R, Wechsler Memory Scale, and facial-memory testing. All hypotheses were supported. Positive and visual memories are formed before negative and verbal memories. TA CA offset, on average, is at age 6.1 versus 3.5 for GPs. TA PIQ (performance IQ), short-term visual memory, and facial memory were significantly reduced. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Emotional Trauma The Therapeutic Power of the Blues Three ‘Clinical’ Illustrations ‐ The Role of Lyrics Musical Characteristics of the Blues Concluding Remarks Notes.

The process of bringing the visceral, bodily aspect of emotional experience into language plays a vital role in the working through of painful emotional states. Such visceral-linguistic unities are achieved in a dialogue of emotional understanding, and it is in such dialogue that experiences of emotional trauma can be held and transformed into endurable and namable painful feelings. The blues is a wonderful example of such dialogue. In the unifying experience of the blues, songwriter, performers, and listeners are joined (...) in a visceral-linguistic conversation in which universally traumatizing aspects of human existence can be communally held and borne. (shrink)

This paper seeks to provide a noetic analysis of emotional trauma. It highlights three essential features of trauma, as well as one non-essential feature, and attempts to make sense of them phenomenologically. The first essential feature of trauma that the paper considers is the disbelief that pervades traumatic experience. When traumatized, we cannot believe that the traumatic event has taken place. This is because we will, not for the event not to have happened—we cannot will something that (...) is in the past—but to believe that it did not happen so as to shield ourselves from our painful emotional response to it. The second essential feature of trauma is our inability to distinctly categorially intuit the central state of affairs around which our trauma revolves. The traumatic situation is literally unthinkable by us, for it is incongruent with both our expectations regarding the subject of the trauma and our horizon of sense more generally. The third essential feature of trauma is the temporal disorientation that it brings about. Such disorientation arises from our prolonged and single-minded attention to an increasingly complex categorial object: the traumatic situation. Finally, the paper considers a non-essential feature of trauma, namely, how traumatic experience can motivate phenomenological and scientific reactions. (shrink)

After a brief overview of the author's phenomenological-contextualist psychoanalytic perspective, the paper traces the evolution of the author’s conception of emotional trauma over the course of three decades, as it developed in concert with his efforts to grasp his own traumatized states and his studies of existential philosophy. The author illuminates two of trauma’s essential features: (1) its context-embeddedness—painful or frightening affect becomes traumatic when it cannot find a context of emotional understanding in which it can be held (...) and integrated, and (2) its existential significance—emotional trauma shatters our illusions of safety and plunges us into an authentic Being-toward-death, wherein we must face up to our finitude and the finitude of all those we love. The paper also describes the impact of trauma on the phenomenology of time and the sense of alienation from others that accompanies traumatic temporality. The author contends that the proper therapeutic comportment toward trauma is a form of emotional dwelling. He concludes with a discussion of the implications of all these formulations for the development of an ethics of finitude. (shrink)

This article examines the public significance of emotions, most specifically their role in constituting identity and community in the wake of political violence and trauma. It offers a conceptual engagement with processes of healing and reconciliation, showing that emotions are central to how societies experience and work through the legacy of catastrophe. In many instances, political actors deal with the legacy of trauma in restorative ways, by re-imposing the order that has been violated. Emotions can in this way (...) be directed by elites who are concerned with reinstating political stability and social control. Healing often becomes more about retribution and revenge, rather than a long-term project begetting peace, collaboration and emotional catharsis. The emotions triggered by trauma thus tend to perpetuate existing antagonisms, further entrenching the disingenuous perceptions of identity that may have created violence in the first place. Surveying this process, this article suggests that scholars of politics and reconciliation need to be more attentive to the role emotion plays in shaping particular forms of community. Doing so requires a systematic understanding not only of the feelings associated with first-hand experiences of trauma, but also of the manner in which these affective reactions can spread and generate collective emotions, thus producing new forms of antagonism. Addressing this challenge, the authors explore how a more conscious and active appreciation of the whole spectrum of emotions — not only anger and fear, for instance, but also empathy, compassion and wonder — may facilitate more lasting and ingenuous forms of social healing and reconciliation. (shrink)

The psychiatric diagnostic system, as exemplified by the DSM, is a pseudo-scientific framework for diagnosing sick Cartesian isolated minds. As such, it completely overlooks the exquisite context sensitivity and radical context dependence of human emotional life and of all forms of emotional disturbance. In Descartes’s vision, the mind is a “thinking thing,” ontologically decontextualized, fundamentally separated from its world. Heidegger’s existential phenomenology mended this Cartesian subject-object split, unveiling our Being as always already contextualized, a Being-in-the-world. Here I offer a critique (...) of studies in “phenomenological psychopathology” that presuppose the validity of the psychiatric diagnostic system and leave it unchallenged. In this vein, I contend that all emotional disturbances are constituted in an indissoluble context of human interrelatedness. Specifically, I claim that all emotional disturbances, including those objectified by the DSM, take form in relational contexts of severe emotional trauma. There are no psychiatric entities, only devastating contexts. Additionally, I show that Heidegger’s analyses of Angst, world-collapse, uncanniness, and thrownness into Being-toward-death provide extraordinary philosophical tools for grasping the existential significance of such contexts of emotional trauma. Applying Heidegger’s concept of authenticity, I suggest that emotional health entails an ease of passage—i.e., an absence of dissociation—between the world of trauma and the world of everydayness. (shrink)

This article discusses the relationship between the post-2008 global economic crisis and trauma journalism through a quantitative study of reporters covering austerity’s everyday manifestations and examines the effects on the media professionals involved. The findings indicate that journalists who cover economic crisis-related incidents suffer specific symptoms of trauma. As such, the study re-conceptualizes the economic crisis as primarily affective for media workers, it establishes a direct correlation between the economic crisis and emotional trauma, and provides an insight (...) into the kind of trauma that stems from covering austerity and its impact on society. A regression analysis of symptoms indicates trauma journalism as an emerging field of research into the economic crisis. (shrink)

Trauma and Human Existence effectively interweaves two themes central to emotional trauma--the first pertains to the contextuality of emotional life in general, and of the experience of emotional trauma in particular, and the second pertains to the recognition that the possibility of emotional trauma is built into the basic constitution of human existence. This volume traces how both themes interconnect, largely as they crystallize in the author’s personal experience of traumatic loss. As discussed in the book's (...) final chapter, whether or not this constitutive possibility will be brought lastingly into the foreground of our experiential world depends on the relational contexts in which we live. (shrink)

Adopting an ecological perspective on children’s functioning and psychological well-being, we investigated the association between agency and life satisfaction, and its bearing on trauma symptoms and negative emotions in a group of Bedouin children living in the occupied Palestinian territories. Specifically, we hypothesized that the more children were agentic, the more they would be satisfied with their lives; and that greater life satisfaction would be associated with reduced trauma symptoms. A sample of 286 Bedouin children attending primary schools (...) in four different villages in the Jordan Valley completed the Multidimensional Students’ Life Satisfaction Scale (MSLSS), Positive Affect and Negative Affect Scale for Children (PANAS-C), Children’s Impact of Event Scale (CRIES-13), and the Children’s Hope Scale (CHS). Structural equation modelling was performed to evaluate the cumulative network of direct and indirect effects between children’s agency, life satisfaction, and trauma symptoms. The findings confirmed the key role of life satisfaction in mitigating traumatic reactions. Higher levels of life satisfaction were associated with reduced negative emotions and trauma symptoms, suggesting that agency may be viewed as a pre-determining factor with the potential to protect children from trauma symptoms. We discuss the implications for research and clinical practice. (shrink)

In this article I chronicle the emergence of two interrelated themes that crystallized in my investigations of emotional trauma during the more than 16 years that followed my own experience of traumatic loss. One pertains to the context-embeddedness of emotional trauma and the other to the claim that the possibility of emotional trauma is built into our existential constitution. I find a reconciliation and synthesis of these two themes—trauma’s contextuality and its existentiality—in the recognition of the (...) bonds of deep emotional attunement we can form with one another in virtue of our common finitude. (shrink)

Stolorow and his collaborators' post-Cartesian psychoanalytic perspective – intersubjective-systems theory – is a phenomenological contextualism that illuminates worlds of emotional experience as they take form within relational contexts. After outlining the evolution and basic ideas of this framework, Stolorow shows both how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds enrichment and philosophical support in Heidegger's analysis of human existence, and how Heidegger's existential philosophy, in turn, can be enriched and expanded by an encounter with post-Cartesian psychoanalysis. In doing so, he creates an important psychological (...) bridge between post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and existential philosophy in the phenomenology of emotional trauma. (shrink)

This article aims to analyse one specific type of memorial site that furnishes an indexical link to past traumatic events which took place in precisely these places. Such memorials will be defined here as trauma sites. It will be shown how the semiotic trait of indexicality produces unique meaning effects, forcing a reframing of the issue of representation, with all its aesthetic and ethical dimensions. In contrast to other forms of memorial site, trauma sites exist factually as material (...) testimonies of the violence and horror that took place there. The fact they still exist, more or less as they were, implies a precise choice on the part of post-conflict societies regarding which traces of the past ought to be preserved and in which ways. In other words, a decision is made about what politics of memory to adopt in each case. Trauma sites thus become unique, privileged observatories that allow us to understand better the emergence of post-conflict societies. The various forms of conservation, transformation, memorialization of places where slaughter, torture and horror have been carried out are key clues to better understandings of the relationship between memory and history in each post-conflict society studied. This article presents a close reading of three very different trauma sites: the Tuol Sleng Museum of the Crimes of Genocide in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, Chile; and a third, more recent, museum: The Ustica Memorial Museum (Museo per la Memoria di Ustica) in Bologna, Italy. These memorials represent instances of three very different traumatic memory politics: in Tuol Sleng, visitors are relocated in the trauma space, in a sort of ‘frozen past’; in Villa Grimaldi, a process of attenuation is at work, the traces of the past are less evident, and their emotional effects weaker. The Ustica Museum represents yet another option, a movement towards an artistic and creative reinterpretation of the traumatic event itself. (shrink)

IntroductionFirst aiders are commonly exposed to different forms of traumatic event during their duties, such as Chronic Indirect Vicarious Exposure which refers to an indirect exposure to aversive details of the trauma. If the psychopathological impact of TE is well documented, the mental health of first aiders remains neglected. Therefore, our main objectives are to study the link between exposure to traumatic events and psychopathological outcomes and to quantify the rates of mental health disorders among first aiders.MethodOur sample comprised (...) of 53 volunteer first aiders with an average age of 32.4 years. Traumatic event exposure and mental health were assessed through a set of validated questionnaires completed online.ResultsRates of mental health outcomes were higher than within the general population. Females showed higher scores of post-traumatic stress disorder than males. PTSD scores were significantly correlated with all mental issues scores, apart from tobacco use and eating disorders scores. There was a significant correlation between the number of traumatic events and the years of experience. Exposure to traumatic events only correlated with nicotine dependency. No other correlation reaches statistical significance.DiscussionThe scores of all mental health outcomes were high; a surprising result, as volunteer first aiders are thought to be recruited for their strong dispositional cognitive and emotional abilities. The high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder and burnout, along with the prevalent anxiety and depression, highlight the need for greater psychosocial support. Resilience training and peer support would be useful interventions in this group. (shrink)

In our societies today, the prevalence of serious, untreated trauma means that we cannot reliably expect to receive or give unconditional love, understood as love which functions within a normative framework to protect each and all of us as having dignity. Serious, untreated trauma makes unconditional love, so understood, unreliable because each time the pattern of the psychological damage (trauma) is triggered in the traumatized person, in the wrongdoers, or in the bystanders, their behaviour easily becomes self- (...) and other-numbing, destructive, and moralizing in an irrational and often self-deceived attempt to preserve or defend themselves or others against forces felt as threatening even though they are not. It is also common for someone who lives in societal conditions where avoiding patterned, traumatizing behaviour is impossible to experience the emotional temptation to give up on the possibility of a better future for oneself, one’s loved ones, or one’s community within the larger community or the state. For some, this is experienced as a draw towards suicide, while others experience it as a serious temptation to give up on working together with the good forces in society. This paper seeks to continue Charles Mills’s work on radicalizing Kant by sketching a Kantian account of trauma and thereby develop philosophical resources that can help us fight historical oppression and violence. (shrink)

Child trauma plays an important role in the etiology of Bordeline Personality Disorder. Of all traumas, sexual trauma is the most common, severe and most associated with receiving a BPD diagnosis when adult. Etiologic models posit sexual abuse as a prognostic factor in BPD. Here we apply machine learning using Multiple Kernel Regression to the Magnetic Resonance Structural Images of 20 BPD and 13 healthy control to see whether their brain predicts five sources of traumas: sex abuse, emotion (...) neglect, emotional abuse, physical neglect, physical abuse. We also applied the same analysis to predict symptom severity in five domains: affective, cognitive, impulsivity, interpersonal for BPD patients only. Results indicate that CTQ sexual trauma is predicted by a set of areas including the amygdala, the Heschl area, the Caudate, the Putamen, and portions of the Cerebellum in BPD patients only. Importantly, interpersonal problems only in BPD patients were predicted by a set of areas including temporal lobe and cerebellar regions. Notably, sexual trauma and interpersonal problems were not predicted by structural features in matched healthy controls. This finding may help elucidate the brain circuit affected by traumatic experiences and connected with interpersonal problems BPD suffer from. (shrink)

To date, 1.7 million US military service personnel have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, one in five are suffering from diagnosable combat-stress related psychological injuries including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). All indications are that the mental health toll of the current conflicts on US troops and the medical systems that care for them will only increase. Against this backdrop, research suggesting that the common class of drugs known as beta-blockers might prevent the onset of PTSD is drawing (...) much interest. I urge caution against accepting too quickly the use of beta-blockers for dealing with the psychological injuries that combat experiences can wreak. Beta-blockers are thought to work by disrupting the formation of emotionally disturbing memories that typically occur in the wake of traumatic events and that in some people manifest as PTSD. Focusing on a single dimension of soldiers' experience in combat, namely, their perpetration of other-directed violence, I argue that some of the emotional memories blunted by beta-blockers play important roles in the recovery of moral aspects of soldiers' selves damaged by experiences of combat violence — specifically, in the achievement of a state of grace— and, therefore, that the use of beta-blockers may come with distinct moral costs. (shrink)

Nature has been widely represented in literature and culture as healing, redemptive, unspoilt, and restorative. In the aftermath of the First World War, writers grappled with long cultural associations between nature and healing. Having survived a conflict in which relations between people, and the living environment had been catastrophically ruptured, writers asked: could rural and wild places offer meaningful sites of solace and recovery for traumatised soldiers? In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925), Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918), (...) Nan Shepherd’s The Weatherhouse (1930) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song (1932), trauma severs emotional, social, and cultural relationships with the natural world. These interwar literatures offer counter-narratives to simplistic depictions of nature as a healing space and highlight the difficulties of returning to rural environments and ‘reconnecting’ with known and natural places. (shrink)

Nature has been widely represented in literature and culture as healing, redemptive, unspoilt, and restorative. In the aftermath of the First World War, writers grappled with long cultural associations between nature and healing. Having survived a conflict in which relations between people, and the living environment had been catastrophically ruptured, writers asked: could rural and wild places offer meaningful sites of solace and recovery for traumatised soldiers? In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, Nan Shepherd’s (...) The Weatherhouse and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, trauma severs emotional, social, and cultural relationships with the natural world. These interwar literatures offer counter-narratives to simplistic depictions of nature as a healing space and highlight the difficulties of returning to rural environments and ‘reconnecting’ with known and natural places. (shrink)

This article is about the relationship between reading, trauma and responsive literary caregiving in Britain during the First World War. Its analysis of two little-known documents describing the history of the War Library, begun by Helen Mary Gaskell in 1914, exposes a gap in the scholarship of war-time reading; generates a new narrative of "how," "when," and "why" books went to war; and foregrounds gender in its analysis of the historiography. The Library of Congress's T. W. Koch discovered Gaskell's (...) ground-breaking work in 1917 and reported its successes to the American Library Association. The British Times also covered Gaskell's library, yet researchers working on reading during the war have routinely neglected her distinct model and method, skewing the research base on war-time reading and its association with trauma and caregiving. In the article's second half, a literary case study of a popular war novel demonstrates the extent of the "bitter cry for books." The success of Gaskell's intervention is examined alongside H. G. Wells's representation of textual healing. Reading is shown to offer sick, traumatized and recovering combatants emotional and psychological caregiving in ways that she could not always have predicted and that are not visible in the literary/historical record. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Roots of the Blues in Trauma, Loss, and Adversity Transforming Trauma, Loss, and Adversity The Blues as Living Oral History Transformation through Music Emotional Regulation in the Blues The Creative Reverberation of Traumatic Loss The Blues as a Living, Evolving Legacy Notes.

Incorporating a discussion of physical and emotional trauma in medical education can help prepare students for their encounters with trauma survivors in clinical practice. A pedagogical approach begins with an inquiry into the purpose of historical or current representations of torture. Justifications include rationalizing state-sponsored torture, providing an outlet for critique and protest, and organizing representations of the enemy. Discussions of torture must further address the emotional and symbolic effects of clinical work with torture survivors on the caregiver. (...) Introductory workshops using visual representations can trigger pain, fear and anger in the viewer. Images of torture, war, and genocide may also invoke ethical concerns relating to the impact of visual images, where viewing can elicit an ambiguous response, casting the viewer into the role of voyeur. At the same time, learners should recognize that indifference or inattention to the provocations mediated through images has its own liabilities, signaling defensiveness. Discussions about the respective roles of perpetrators, victims and observers offer opportunities for the viewer to engage in self-reflection. Artistic representations also offer opportunities for advocacy on the survivor’s behalf, sometimes facilitated by dissemination of visual representations, but also by involving the survivors themselves in activities that exploit the healing power of art. (shrink)

This study discusses the issue of emotional crisis and trauma in terms of opportunities to develop and grow. The article seeks to show the complex psychological conditions pertaining to emotional crises, a constructive way of dealing with them, and the possibility of growing and developing thanks to having experienced such a crisis. These issues are usually omitted when describing crises; however, as the author postulates, they constitute a foundation for differentiating — as we surely must do — between emotional (...) crisis and trauma, development and growth through crisis, and the positive adaptive changes observed in cases of post-traumatic disorder. Such changes cannot always be identified as instances of so called post-traumatic growth. The latter is described by the author, with reference to Maslow's theory, as development “resulting from the lack of something”, where this in turn reflects some trauma or other. Moreover, considerations pertaining both to current work in health psychology, and to the distinction between emotional crisis and trauma proposed here, could well prove relevant where practices of intervention are concerned. (shrink)

Abstract:The island of Grosse Île lies 30 miles downstream of Quebec City in the St. Lawrence River. Once a quarantine station for ships bringing immigrants to the Canadas from Europe, mid-nineteenth-century outbreaks of cholera and typhus led to several thousand Irish deaths aboard ships in quarantine and on Grosse Île itself. This trauma has lived on in the Irish diaspora's memorialization of the island as a place of anguish and death that ultimately symbolized the Irish diaspora's flight to North (...) America. As a liminal space between the Old World and New, life and death, and hope and despair, Grosse Île has also been a contested site between the memory of Irish diaspora and the Canadian state. As such, it may be newly conceived as an “emotional borderland” by scholars of transnational space and immigration. (shrink)

The Netherdutch Reformed Church of Africa (NRCA) did not escape this existential crisis of conflict. It manifests in various ways resulting in the bleeding of congregations, the exodus of congregants and the closure of congregations, as many congregants that declare themselves as members of the Church do not attend worship services or participate in the Holy Communion and exit the church. The study was conducted in the NRCA to determine the effect and response formation of observed conflict by ministers in (...) their respective congregations. The results of the study indicate that pastors and/or ministers do suffer emotional trauma because of the conflict in the congregation which, according to their own statements results in a loss of role performance. We provide an overview of the problem statement and methodology of the study. We discuss an abbreviated, theoretical perspective on conflict as a social phenomenon. We present the findings of our study and conclude with an abbreviated process to equip pastors with the necessary emotional maturity and self-management.Contribution: This study uncovers emotional trauma experienced by ministers, affecting their role performance. We offer a succinct problem statement, research methodology, and propose a scientifically informed process to enhance ministers’ emotional resilience within the NRCA. (shrink)

This paper examines the deployment of the concept of psychological trauma in the field of sexual assault service provision, a field in which a feminist understanding of sexual violence has achieved a position of ‘truth’. Using a Foucauldian methodological approach, the investigation centred on service provision in New South Wales, Australia, and analysis focused on the everyday practices of workers illuminated through documents collected from the field, in particular the interview texts produced from interviews with thirty sexual assault practitioners. (...) The paper focuses on the adult survivor of child sexual assault who emerged in the study as the most traumatised category of victim. I lay out how ‘trauma’, specifically the concept of ‘complex trauma’, operates as the conceptual (emotional, relational, neurobiological) link between past abuse and current problems, redefining them not as ‘problems’ but as the symptoms or effects of untreated childhood trauma. I argue that in the local field this deployment is simultaneously enabling and problematic. The production of a subject position of ongoing ontological vulnerability has the effect of repositioning the ‘adult survivor’ outside the socio-political context of their current lives and as such appears misaligned with a feminist ‘regime’ centred on enabling practices and structural gender inequality. However, I demonstrate how this same knowledge of the neurobiological, relational and emotional effects of trauma on the survivor self is used by practitioners as part of their established feminist practices of enabling victims to regain a sense of power and control, of interrupting blame and working for victims at a broader systemic level. The research adds to feminist research and commentary that has drawn critical attention to uptake of trauma in sexual assault work by showing the specificity of how trauma operates in a specific location, and illustrating both the potential and the problematic aspects of trauma as a feminist knowledge practice. (shrink)

Self-harm, or self-mutilation, is generally viewed in academic literature as a pathological act, usually born out of trauma and/or a psychological and personality defect. Individuals who engage in self-harm are usually seen as damaged, destructive, and pathological. While self-harm is not a desirable act, this paper argues through the narratives of those who engage in such acts that self-harm may be better construed as a meaningful, embodied emotional practice, bound up in social understandings of psychological pain and how best (...) to attend to such pain. In particular, this paper suggests that those who engage in self-harm practices are performing embodied, socially situated acts of healing, survival, and self-creation in a physical attempt to retell complex, fragmented stories of abuse, existential angst, trauma, and loss of self. While these individuals may be more or less successful in such attempts, this paper suggests that understandings of self-harm would benefit from more nuanced approaches to individuals’ embodied expressions of pain that take into account the difficult nature of psychological suffering and the effects of trauma. (shrink)

Abstract:Most mental health conditions, though appropriate targets of treatment, do not generate a moral obligation to seek treatment. Trauma, in contrast, is caused (at least in part) by an external event that can happen at any point in the individual’s life. Survivors often experience diverse and enduring symptoms that adversely affect their cognitive, social, emotional, and physical functioning (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). These global impairments diminish an individual’s ability to respond appropriately to morally relevant reasons and stimuli. Fortunately, symptoms (...) of trauma respond well to treatment (Bradley, Greene, Russ, Dutra, & Westen, 2005). The external etiology and effectiveness of treatment allows us examine the moral duties of someone with impaired moral faculties due to trauma within a Kantian framework. The symptoms of trauma interfere with their ability to cultivate what Kant calls “natural powers” of spirit, soul, and body (DoV 6:444–6:445). Kant’s discussion of the natural powers implies that we must possess a baseline level of functioning in these areas in order to fulfill our moral duties (DoV 6:444–446). By Kant’s own reasoning it seems that individuals who experience impairments in any of the three powers are morally obligated to cultivate these capacities. Using Johnson’s (2011) discussion of Kant’s duties to self and careful analysis of available treatments for trauma, I argue that individuals who experience symptoms of trauma and suffer from impairments in Kantian natural powers have an imperfect duty to themselves to repair these powers through empirically informed trauma treatment. (shrink)

Basic to all motile life is a differential approach/avoid response to perceived features of environment. The stages of response are initial reflexive noticing and orienting to the stimulus, preparation, and execution of response. Preparation involves a coordination of many aspects of the organism: muscle tone, posture, breathing, autonomic functions, motivational/emotional state, attentional orientation and expectations. The organism organizes itself in relation to the challenge. We propose to call this the “preparatory set” (PS). We suggest that the concept of the PS (...) can offer a more nuanced and flexible perspective on the stress response than do current theories. We also hypothesize that the mechanisms of bodymind therapeutic and educational systems (BTES) can be understood through the PS framework. We suggest that the BTES, including meditative movement, meditation, somatic education, and the body-oriented psychotherapies, are approaches that use interventions on the PS to remedy stress and trauma. We discuss how the PS can be adaptive or maladaptive, how BTES interventions may restore adaptive PS, and how these concepts offer a broader and more flexible view of the phenomena of stress and trauma. We offer supportive evidence for our hypotheses, and suggest directions for future research. We believe that the PS framework will point to ways of improving the management of stress and trauma, and that it will suggest directions of research into the mechanisms of action of BTES. (shrink)

In this essay, I extend my conception of emotional trauma as a shattering of the tranquilizing “absolutisms of everyday life” that shield us from our finitude and our existential vulnerability, to a consideration of collective trauma. Using the collective trauma of 9/11 and its aftermath as my prime example, I illustrate how traumatized people fall prey to “resurrective ideologies” that promise to restore the sheltering illusions that have been lost. I suggest that an alternative to these grandiose (...) illusions can be found in our “kinship-in-finitude.”. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary volume brings together specialists from different backgrounds to deliver expert views on the relationship between morality and emotion, putting a special emphasis on issues related to emotional shocks. One of the distinctive aspects of social existence today is our subjection to traumatic events on a global scale, and our subsequent embodiment of the emotional responses these events provoke. Covering various methodological angles, the contributors ensure careful and heterogeneous reflection on this delicate topic. With eleven original essays, the collection (...) spans a wide variety of fields from philosophy and literary theory, to the visual arts, history, and psychology. The authors cover diverse themes, including philosophical approaches to political polarization; the impact of negative emotions such as anger on inter-relational balance; humour and politics; media and the idea of progress; photography and trauma discourse; democratic morality in modern Indian society; emotional olfactory experiences; phenomenological readings of spatial disorientation, and the significance of moral shocks. This timely volume offers crucial perspectives on contemporary questions relating to ethical behaviours, and the challenges of a globalized society on the verge of political, financial and emotional collapse. (shrink)

This article explores the phenomenon of empathy and examines its manifestation in the context of encounters between victims/survivors of gross human rights violations and perpetrators who are perceived by victims/survivors as showing signs of remorse. The article considers the factors that mediate the development of empathy through, on the one hand, the examination of the external dynamics of victim-perpetrator encounters, and on the other, the analysis of the intrapsychic dynamics of these encounters. The article argues that the defining elements of (...) empathic experience emerge within the relational, intersubjective realm of the victim-perpetrator encounter. The article engages an interdisciplinary dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas' ethics of responsibility for `the Other' and a psychoanalytic conceptualization of the capacity for empathy. It asserts that the emotional state of empathy shared by victims and perpetrators is a result of a pivotal turn to perspective taking and gaining an integrated view of the other. The article concludes that `empathic repair' is a useful concept for understanding the process of forgiveness in the context of gross human rights violations. (shrink)

While emotions can play positive, contributory roles in our cognition and our lives, they frequently have the opposite effect. Michael Brady’s otherwise excellent introduction to the topic of emotion is unbalanced because he does not attend to harms emotions cause. The basic problem is that emotions have a normative aspect: they can be justified or unjustified and Brady does not attend to this. An example of this is Brady’s discussion of curiosity as the emotional motivation for knowledge. More importantly, while (...) emotions can and sometimes do reveal to us what we value, it is far less frequent that emotions reveal objective value. (shrink)

Living in the Borderland addresses the evolution of Western consciousness and describes the emergence of the "Borderland," a spectrum of reality that is beyond the rational yet is palpable to an increasing number of individuals. Building on Jungian theory, Jerome Bernstein argues that a greater openness to transrational reality experienced by Borderland personalities allows new possibilities for understanding and healing confounding clinical and developmental enigmas." "Living in the Borderland challenges the standard clinical model, which views normality as an absence of (...) pathology and which equates normality with the rational. Jerome S. Bernstein describes how psychotherapy itself often contributes to the alienation of Borderland personalities by misperceiving the difference between the pathological and the sacred. The case studies included illustrate the potential this has for causing serious psychic and emotional damage to the patient." "This challenge to the orthodoxies and complacencies of western medicine's concept of pathology will interest Jungian Analysts, Psychotherapists, Psychiatrists and other physicians, as well as educators of children. (shrink)

Artistic images, of a universal nature and validated by global culture, are carriers of an emotional potential that can be used for therapeutic purposes in cultural centers as well as in clinical spaces. Esthetic studies reveal the mobilizing power in their contemplation and the capacity to bring out personal stories with healing potential. The general objective of this paper is to design and validate the PROJECTA instrument, consisting of the therapeutic use of artistic images to approach trauma or difficult (...) conditions in therapy, by means of the association between art images and emotions, feelings or states of mind related with a traumatic experience. A mixed approach of investigation with a concurrent triangulation design has been used for the integration of qualitative and quantitative results, where qualitative research outweighs quantitative, but both have been QUAL → quan sequentially developed. The study was carried out in two phases. The first was a systematic review of the literature. The second, divided into five steps, consisted of the validation of artworks and the associated emotions with the participation of students, experts in art therapy, psychologists and educators through focus groups, interviews and an online questionnaire. The analysis techniques were qualitative and quantitative. A set of 220 artistic images linked to emotional states were proposed by experts in education, psychology and art therapy, and validated through an online questionnaire. The respondents included 228 students and professionals and for 64.55% of these images a consensus of over 80% was obtained. These images and their associated emotions were again reviewed by a confirmatory focus group. Finally, 92 artistic works were linked to primary, secondary and tertiary emotions such as love, joy, victory, surprise, balance, sense of humor, anger, sadness, fear, and emptiness. In addition, there are mobilizing images that have not been related to any emotion because of the polysemy of their meanings. It concludes that PROJECTA is a visual art therapy tool that provides professionals with a resource that helps facilitate the identification, expression or demonstration of emotions or feelings related with trauma, and in challenging situations of vulnerability, psychological discomfort or post-traumatic stress. (shrink)

Fear, anger and hopelessness were the most frequent traumatic emotional responses in the general public during the first stage of outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic in the Czech Republic (N = 1,000). The four most frequent categories of fear were determined: (a) fear of the negative impact on household finances, (b) fear of the negative impact on the household finances of significant others, (c) fear of the unavailability of health care, and (d) fear of an insufficient food supply. The pessimistic (...) communications used by the Czech mass media contributed to intensifying traumatic feelings, fears and psychological distress in the general public during the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic. The anxious emotional tone of the messages and the presentation of selectively chosen “bad ending stories” contributed to the psychological traumatization of the Czech population. This form of communication was motivated by an effort to reach the broadest audience possible. Older adults were the most affected part of the population because of their isolation and their very limited opportunity to share their worries and emotions with others. The communication used by the Czech mass media during the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic is a representative example of a traumatizing form of media communication during an epidemic. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Recent police brutality has reminded people in the United States of America that racism and discrimination toward Black Americans is still prevalent. Evidence supports the claim that many Black Americans experience racial trauma due to the relatively common occurrence of discriminatory racial encounters in their life. Racial traumas are events of danger related to real or secondary experiences of racial discrimination that may cause psychological, emotional, or physical injury. The goal of this article is to identify the ethical (...) complexities for psychologists in addressing racial trauma among Black Americans. First, the article describes examples of racial traumas for Black Americans and their impact on overall mental health. Second, there is an in-depth analysis of ethical issues for psychologists relevant to racial trauma in areas such as competency, discrimination and harassment, bias, assessment, training programs, and harm. Finally, recommendations for psychologists are provided to address racial trauma among Black American clients, students, supervisees, and colleagues. (shrink)

A broad sociocultural perspective defines trauma as the result of an event, a series of events, or a set of circumstances that is experienced as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening, with lasting impacts on an individual’s physical, social, emotional, or spiritual wellbeing. Contexts and practices that aim to be “trauma-informed” strive to attend to the complex impacts of trauma, integrating knowledge into policies and practices, and providing a sanctuary from harm. However, there is a body (...) of critical and decolonial scholarship that challenges the ways in which “trauma-informed” practice prioritizes individualized interventions, reinscribes colonial power relations through its conceptualizations of safety, and obscures the role of systemic injustices. Within music therapy trauma scholarship, research has thus far pointed to the affordances of music in ameliorating symptoms of trauma, bypassing unavailable cognitive processes, and working from a strengths-based orientation. In critiquing the tendency of the dominant trauma paradigm to assign vulnerability and reinforce the individual’s responsibility to develop resilience through adversity, this conceptual analysis outlines potential alternatives within music therapy. Drawing on a case example from a research project with young people in school, I elucidate the ways in which music therapy can respond to power relations as they occur within and beyond “trauma-informed” spaces. I highlight two overarching potentials for music therapy within a shifting trauma paradigm: (1) as a site in which to reframe perceived risk by fostering young people’s resistance and building their political agency and (2) in challenging the assumption of “safe spaces” and instead moving toward practices of “structuring safety.”. (shrink)

While many with schizophrenia experience deficits in metacognition it is unclear whether those deficits are related to other features of illness. To explore this issue, the current study classified participants with schizophrenia as possessing a deficit in both awareness of their own emotions and those of others , aware of their own emotions but unaware of the emotions of others and aware of their own emotions and of other’s emotions . Groups were compared on assessments of neurocognitive function, symptoms, and (...) history of sexual trauma. ANCOVA controlling for education found that the group unaware of their own emotions and those of others demonstrated poorer verbal memory, processing speed, executive function, less emotional discomfort and higher levels of disorganization symptoms relative to the other groups. The group aware of their own emotions but not those of others had a significantly higher report of childhood sexual abuse. (shrink)

What mental and physical distress do actors, camerapersons, and reporters experience when working on reenactments of traumatic moments in history? In Political Camerawork, D. Andy Rice theorizes that the intense feelings produced while creating these performed scenarios, called "simulation documentaries," connect difficult pasts to the present. Building on his background as a nonfiction film director, producer, editor, and cinematographer, Rice analyzes performance techniques to gain insight into the emotional toll of simulation documentaries, including those reliving the Vietnam War, the US (...) military's embodied training in California during the Iraq War, and an annual quadruple lynching reenactment organized by Black civil rights activists in Georgia. Investigating the lasting impact of these productions, Political Camerawork reveals that, by performing a simulation of a traumatic event they didn't directly experience, those involved become carriers of the trauma. (shrink)

This groundbreaking interactive book contains the tools that you will need in order to clean your emotional house from top to bottom. It includes a journal as well as access to audio meditations for you to listen along to as you read. The meditations will help you dig deep into past trauma and discover when and how trauma took root, learn to get in touch with various parts of the physical and energy body, and how to use them (...) to let go of stored traumas. From this, you will learn to live from a new mindful and powerful space. (shrink)

The psychosocial impacts of natural disasters are associated with the triggering of negative and positive responses in the affected population; also, such effects are expressed in an individual and collective sphere. This can be seen in several reactions and behaviors that can vary from the development of individual disorders to impacts on interpersonal relationships, cohesion, communication, and participation of the affected communities, among others. The present work addressed the psychosocial impacts of the consequences of natural disasters considering individual effects via (...) the impact of trauma and community effects, through the perception of social well-being, the valuation of the community and the social exchange of emotions. The aim of this study was to assess the relationship between individual reactions (i.e., intensity of trauma) and the evaluation of social and collective circumstances (i.e., social well-being) after the earthquake of 27F 2010 in Chile, through collective-type intervention variables not used in previous studies (i.e., social sharing of emotions and community appraisal). For this purpose, a descriptive,ex postfacto correlational and cross-sectional methodology was carried on, with the participation of 487 people affected by the 2010 earthquake, 331 women (68%) and 156 men (32%), between 18 and 58 years old (M= 21.09;SD= 5.45), from the provinces of Ñuble and Biobío, VIII region, Chile. The measurement was carried out 4 years after the earthquake and the results show that greater individual than collective involvements were found, mainly in the coastal zone of the region. The mediation analysis showed that the relationship between the intensity of the trauma and social well-being occurs through a route that considers social sharing of emotions and community appraisal. These results indicate that the overcoming of individual affectations to achieve social well-being occurs when in the immediate post-disaster phases the affected communities activate shared emotional and cognitive processes, which allow them to jointly face subsequent threats and abrupt changes. (shrink)

Liana Badr's The Eye of the Mirror explores the historical trauma of the 1975–6 siege of the Palestinian refugee camp Tal el–Zaatar in Beirut and the massacre of thousands of its inhabitants by Christian militias. Analogous to Holocaust writing, Badr's fictionalized history, grounded in actual survivor testimonies, enacts a complex politics of cultural memory, but does so from a specifically female perspective. Collapsing the personal and political, private and public, inside and outside through figured violations of bodies and psyches, (...) Badr repositions women at the centre of the Palestinians’ struggle for and story of survival. Badr's novel traces the annihilation of the possibility of address, accompanied by self–loss and the ability to witness, and the laborious recreation of address. Claiming authority on the basis of the emotional, visceral truth of suffering, she seeks to break the endless cycle of an oppressive and impotent masculine history, constructing an alternative history which at least attempts to address the voice of cultural, national, and gender difference. (shrink)

_Ghosts in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Trauma in Psychoanalysis_ is the first of two volumes that delves into the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning. The book uses clinical examples of people living in a state of liminality or ongoing melancholia. The authors reflect on the challenges of learning to move forward and embrace life over time, while acknowledging, witnessing and working through the emotional scars of the past. Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, (...) _Ghosts in the Consulting Room _features accounts of the unpredictable effects of trauma that emerge within clinical work, often unexpectedly, in ways that surprise both patient and therapist. In the book, distinguished psychoanalysts examine how to work with a variety of ‘ghosts’, as they manifest in transference and countertransference, in work with children and adults, in institutional settings and even in the very founders and foundations of the field of psychoanalysis itself. They explore the dilemma of how to process loss when it is unspeakable and unknowable, often manifesting in silence or gaps in knowledge, and living in strange relations to time and space. This book will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. It will appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis. (shrink)