Trauma’s Triumph, Trauma’s Traps 

If Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster treatment of Homer’s Odyssey is any indication, the healing of trauma is at the top of the American mind. In Nolan’s retelling, the nymph Calypso acts as therapist to her patient, Odysseus, and through a combination of pharmacological and conversational remedies artfully, and despite herself, leads him to recollect the repressed memories of his traumatic and guilty past. This interpretation fulfills Philip Rieff’s prediction that “modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives.”  

Predictions aside, this singular cultural artifact represents a wider interest in discovering and processing trauma in therapeutic and extra-therapeutic settings. I propose that the growing preference for trauma-informed care reflects a political preference for victimhood and conflicts with the healing for which therapy exists. 

Therapy’s Role  

If therapy is healing for the mind and the passions, then it naturally comes in many forms, only one of which goes by that name: therapy. In therapy’s clinical form, a patient, who is sick of mind to one degree or another, pays money to a therapist, a healer, to apply remedies. The most common remedy is conversation, but there are many others, including at least rapid-eye movement exercises, dream interpretation, controlled consumption of psychedelics, hypnosis, dietary and lifestyle changes, and breathing exercises.  

I take it for granted that the clinical form of therapy exists to bring patients to a condition where they can successfully avail themselves of ordinary means of healing. These ordinary means are frequently social, and they usually have ends separate from the goal of mental health. They are, among others, family life, friendship, political life (broadly construed), employment, recreational activities, intellectual pursuits, religious worship, and religious practice. The healing that takes place through these ordinary bonds and practices has the effect of strengthening those same bonds and making people more able to engage in those practices.  

It follows that a therapist is good as a therapist if he works himself out of a job. In this sense, the therapist’s role is like the medical doctor’s, which is to return the patient to a state of health, in which the body repairs itself with the help of a wholesome diet and form of life.  

Therapy’s Place 

The position of the therapist, however, is more complicated than that of the medical doctor. Therapies are politically nested, which is to say that they reflect and support particular political realities. This political embeddedness has been around since antiquity. The Stoic therapies of the microcosmic soul prescribed not only attunement to the macro-cosmos, considered from the widest possible perspective with its immanent logos, but also to the political macro-cosmos of the Roman empire, which required that culturally diverse elites from across the Mediterranean and beyond find their own little or big place in a world newly unmoored from the local and particular.  

The Christian successor to this form of the care of self, monasticism, equally reflected its political setting in the empire, except this time by way of counterimage. Elites rejected imperial ladder-climbing for the Kingdom of God and sought the healing, therapeia, of their thoughts, emotions, and appetites in the deserts of Egypt and the hinterlands of Cappadocia and Syria through the guidance of spiritual fathers. Along the way they proposed their lives as an implicit critique of Roman ambition and the libido dominandi. 

The twentieth century saw its own succession of therapeutic movements. A French Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz has chronicled these movements in a series of books. In Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help, Illouz shows how the Freudian therapies and theories that fit originally into the culture of an elite class were then popularized in America for an emergent postwar middle class of managers. She also shows how feminism and therapeutic culture found common cause in driving a narrative wedge between the individual and his community and family through the practice of problematization, which she defines as “posing problems in such a way that scientists become necessary to solve them.”  

In Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Controls our Lives, Illouz and her co-author, Edgar Cabanas, show how the positivistic forms of therapy of the 1980s and ’90s (of “serenity now” fame) suited and continue to suit the needs of a pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps capitalist economy of individualists. Likewise, I posit that the trauma-based therapies of the same era, which have resurged in recent years and have been popularized by best-selling books like by Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, fit within our own political context of victimhood.  

The Trouble with Trauma 

One strategy of trauma-based therapy is to change the frame from a moral or medical question (“What is wrong with me?”) to a narrative-historical question (“What happened to me?”). This shift places the patient in an obviously passive posture, but, more disturbingly, promises that the correct and scientific interpretation of present behaviors makes possible the accurate mapping of past traumas, much in the same way that Freud theorized that the contents of the unconscious id could be observed through a glass darkly in the ego’s “states of conflict and uproar.” In practice, a therapist and patient together create a narrative history of trauma by cataloguing observed adverse behaviors. Illouz shows the circularity of this process in Saving the Modern Soul. Does a patient habitually seek toxic partners? This habit is taken as evidence of some past abuse or neglect. How do we know this abuse or neglect took place? We know it by the present behavior, of course. 

Important to this tautology is that concrete memory of trauma is inconsequential to the mapping of past territory. In fact, since the suppression or fragmentation of memory counts as evidence of past trauma, it is even less than consequential. The reason proposed is that human beings have evolved to repress memories that are too difficult to process. But repression is never total. Where the mind fails to remember, the body or the unconscious mind “keeps the score.” This esoteric remembering can be unlocked, and its contents may then be processed and reconciled under protection of a controlled therapeutic setting, or, less optimally, through completing a workbook sold as part of a self-help set.  

Here we can see the same practice of problematization. What once succeeded in making the family a problem whose solution could only be found by scientific means now has achieved the same victory over memory.  

This victory leaves the patient in a difficult position. At once, his true self is revealed to be a set of behaviors that all find their cause in a historical trauma or constellation of traumas. The only way for him to become truly realized as an individual is to process these traumas successfully, but by their very nature, these traumas are largely inaccessible to him as traumas apart from the guidance of a therapist or therapeutic method.  

One response to this revelation could be relief. Behaviors associated with shame and guilt are lifted from his conscience as wounds, since their origin lies not in the exercise of his free will but rather in the abuse or neglect suffered at the hands of another. Alternatively, this revelation could be met with horror: his free will is effaced and in its place are only wounds. Furthermore, if his regrettable behaviors owe primarily to the evil acts of another, he faces for the rest of his life the possibility of experiencing traumas that threaten to derail any progress that he might make or healing that he might realize.  

Quite naturally this form of therapy has extended beyond its original territory—veterans recovering from war and victims of sexual or physical abuse—to new territories of micro-trauma and collectivized political trauma. Trauma, argue Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Bruce D. Perry in What Happened to You?, can result from the failure to have needs met (neglect) just as well as from actual abuse. It matters not whether these needs are universally recognizable, such as an infant’s need for a mother’s and father’s affection and care, or more controvertible ones, such as the affirmation of one’s particular sexual desires. When needs are not met, trauma ensues. Since aberrant behavior is traceable to trauma, a thorough healing involves an exhaustive search, investigation, and processing of traumas. If the healing is to be total, the therapy must be endless. More still, if everyone evidences aberrant behavior, then everyone has trauma, and if everyone has trauma, then everyone needs therapy. This logic is played out in calls for the universalization of mental-health screening including trauma screening, despite the lack of evidence that such screening increases mental health. 

Winfrey and Perry rely on identitarian politics to extend this logic more widely. Traumatized identity groups carry the burden of collectivized trauma genetically and epigenetically and through the behavioral heritage of traumatized peoples. This reality requires understanding and empathy on the part of less traumatized groups, who must become trauma-informed through an exploration of their own biases and of the harm that they cause.  

This last move brings us back to the political context of therapy and shows why these forms of therapy, including memory recovery, have such a stranglehold at the moment. In a political context where success is measured in therapeutic terms of self-fulfillment and where woundedness and victimhood are favored markers of one’s place in the social hierarchy, it is unsurprising that people who want to ascend in that hierarchy would seek to discover, amplify, and display their own woundedness. The race toward victimhood notwithstanding, it is beguiling to think that the key to happiness has been hiding all along in plain sight.  

I do not, of course, reject the basic notion of woundedness, namely, that human beings innocently suffer wounds, including horrifying ones, at the hands of others. I also do not reject the notion that these wounds distort the functioning of the brain through, e.g., the over-sensitization of the amygdala. Nor do I reject the notion that therapy can provide healing through conversation, meditation, and other means. Finally, I do not even reject the claim that some people have experienced healing through therapies focused on trauma. What I strongly suspect is that the exploration of trauma (“What happened to me?”) is unlikely to provide healing, and that when healing occurs in such contexts, it occurs despite rather than because of the exploration of that question.  

I propose that someone who is in search of the healing of the mind and the passions might look for someone who would help him ask not “What happened to me?” but rather “For what and for whom do I exist and how?” Wounds suffered at the hands of others can be integrated into the answers to these questions, whether as obstacles or, once healed, as new strengths. The point is that these questions, and those like them, point beyond the therapeutic and clinical setting to life with and for others, where healing is repeatedly sought and repeatedly found. 

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.