Abstract
The relationship between traumatic experiences and subsequent distress is not well understood, and little research focuses on the lived experience of psychological trauma. I draw on Louis Sass’s phenomenological taxonomy to address this lacuna. I present his differentiation between relations of phenomenological causality and implication and demonstrate that his taxonomy can be applied to experiences of trauma. Relations of phenomenological causality and implication can be identified in the genesis and constitution of post-traumatic distress. My adaptation of Sass’s taxonomy will furthermore offer an extension and development of his account, applying it to the study of post-traumatic experiences and elaborating it in the process. I shall demonstrate that whether experiences occur synchronically or diachronically is not essential to their categorization in terms of phenomenological implication and causality, respectively. I will show that an alteration in perception or behavior post trauma might temporally succeed the traumatizing event while, at the same time, being implied in the experience of the event. Thereby, I demonstrate how phenomenology may contribute to a detailed understanding of experiences of trauma. Scrutiny of traumatic experiences furthermore promises to contribute to the philosophical discourse on causality, implication, and temporal experience.
Highlights
The relationship between traumatic experiences and subsequent distress is not well understood, and little research focuses on the lived experience of psychological trauma
Both phenomenological causality and implication can be usefully applied to a diachronic relationship like this
I have drawn here on Louis Sass’s phenomenological taxonomy, in which he presents six different ways in which to conceive of relationships between experiences: three of causation and three of implication
Summary
“Traumatic experiences do leave traces,” Bessel van der Kolk writes in his bestseller on trauma (van der Kolk 2015), and this is hardly disputable. I draw here on Louis Sass’s phenomenological taxonomy, which focuses on schizophrenia (Sass and Parnas 2007; Sass 2014; Sass 2010) It includes six ways in which the experiences of schizophrenia and their relation to one another can be conceptualized. I will focus here on the second relationship and demonstrate how it can be conceptualized in more than causal terms, applying Sass’s taxonomy to experiences of trauma.. I shall demonstrate that whether experiences occur synchronically or diachronically is not essential to their categorization in terms of phenomenological implication and causality, respectively. Thereafter, I shall proceed along similar lines in my scrutiny of phenomenological implication, before parting ways with Sass’s taxonomy in order to explore diachronic implication in experiences of trauma
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