Neuroscientific perspectives for a theory of trauma: a critical review of integrative models of biology and culture.

Abstract

In the last 25 years of the 20th century, psychopathology coded a diverse range of social phenomena under the heading of trauma, featuring the study of psychological trauma as an autonomous area progressively informed by cultural and neurobiological research. In this scenario, we witnessed the emergence of the biocultural paradigm, an epistemological perspective that seeks to elucidate the interactive trajectories by which culture and biology consolidate each other´s effects. This article will address the intersections between the field of psychological trauma and neurosciences, based on the analytical dimensions of expansion of the category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the epistemological premises of neurobehavioral studies of stress and fear, and the limitations of the bidirectionality hypothesis advanced by contemporary cultural neurosciences. The elaboration of definitively integrative approaches can assist the development of comprehensive models capable of conceiving knowledges and practices at the level of human experience, avoiding reductionist interpretations that submit complex cultural and subjective experiences alternatingly to the imperatives of the brain and to semiologic codes of pathogenic reasoning.