Two Trauma Communities: A Philosophical Archaeology of Cultural and Clinical Trauma Theories

Abstract

While the goal of both clinical work and cultural research generally is the transformation and transcendence of trauma, these communities struggle to characterize trauma as a unified discourse even within one discipline. This chapter makes three proposals that provide order for the concept of trauma through conceptual dichotomies that divide their discourses: first, the term has accrued a supplementarity or excess, which helps explain the variation between the clinical use of trauma and its cultural avatar; second, theorists must separate the ways the word trauma deployed within the trauma process; third, trauma must be separated radically from Event, which is the subtext of a cultural trauma theory. This philosophical archaeology offers keys of translation between these competing cultural and psychiatric trauma theories, calls to deactivate the desubjectivation associated with trauma, and opens new prospects for interdisciplinary research in these intersecting fields based on the possibilities of the Event.