Contextualizing Fragmentation: An Analytic Study of Trauma Theory

Abstract

This article attempts to elucidate the experience of fragmentation from the perspective of trauma studies, an offshoot of psychology. This study originates as an inquiry into psychic trauma, a phenomenon that one cannot locate exclusively within the domain of the cultural, historical, and the personal, but at the crossroads between these realms. Trauma studies came to prominence in the early 1990s and moved away from medicine and psychiatry during the past half-decade. Trauma theory belongs to the tradition of post structuralism.Post structuralism demanded a new way of thinking about how events in the past return to haunt the present.Trauma theory, adhering to Post structuralism is analytical and speculative and attempts to work out what is involved in experiencing traumatic events, in its representation and the like. Trauma theory suggests ways of re-conceptualizing decisive directions in critical theory. It focuses on the rhetoric of poststructuralist and postmodern theories and their emphasis on decentering, fragmentation, the sublime and apocalyptic and seeks to explore the relation they have to the traumatic historical events as well as personal events.Thus trauma theory serves as a tool to analyze and resituate the experience of holocaust and foreground the aftermath of traumatic events.More over trauma narratives demand a new mode of reading and critical thinking. Current trauma theory, which draws heavily on nineteenth and twentieth-century psychoanalytic theories, emphasizes trauma as a psychic wounding, an encounter of the mind with violence and the crisis of meaning.