psrigyan P&C week 8 annotation 1

Reminds me of the people derisive of wokeness today: “Schäffer also liked to complain that no one was willing to break the taboo against criticizing the reparations project for fear of being accused of antisemitism.17 But the taboo was, inevitably, broken all the time, as invoking the idea of taboo was precisely what facilitated the talk” (96)How moral outrage by itself can obscure ideological ghosts: “While there is always a battle over the truth, this battle is especially acute in the aftermath of great horror. It is especially acute, in short, in a postfascist environment, when people’s invest- ments in rewriting reality – massaging, spinning, reinterpreting the facts – are particularly strong. To only feel morally indignant is to miss just how much the idea that Jews were a problem was part of the commonsense texture of public discussion in the aftermath of a mass-murderous dictatorship.” (98)How medical education prevented reparations: “And why was it that some survivors – maybe as many as three-quarters, all told – seemed to be able to build up some kind of post-camp life, sometimes even a quite successful one, and showed no particular signs of debilitating psychological damage, while others were completely crumpled?63 Throughout, moreover, precisely because sympathizing doctors were acutely aware that mainstream medical teaching in Germany, already since before Nazism, had emphasized that lasting, as opposed to short-term and reparable, psychological damage after a traumatic experience could only be explained by organic somatic damage like a blow to the head or long-term malnutrition, some of them deliberately placed a strong emphasis on whatever somatic findings they could locate” (105)How a new type of objectivity had to be coined based on the incapacity to feel and in establishing the role of countertransference: “The incapacity to feel one’s way into the novelty and grotesquerie of what the Nazis had done demonstrated, in Eissler’s view, a “defect” of objectivity.. It was the rejecters, he said, who had an “emotional conflict” when they were conducting evaluations. The idea that a psyche, a soul, is not autonomous and impervious, that it can in fact be damaged, indeed damaged forever, by external experi- ences: this realization, Eissler proposed, must awaken strong fears.” (107)How emphasizing comparison rather than the uniqueness of trauma shifted thought: “In this particular crucial strategic instance – and no matter how problematic the impulse to compare would also remain – the new emphasis on comparison and not just uniqueness provided an exceptional opportunity for an advance in moral, medical, and legal thinking.” (113)The possibilities and limits of including PTSD in the DSM: “From a more global rather than narrowly US or European point of view, the ascent of PTSD could be understood as a side-effect of both the Cold War and of struggles over decolonization. From this perspective, Becker came to see Viet- nam as “one of the last great imperial wars” and to rethink PTSD’s emergence as a striking compromise, a compromise which, at one and the same time, managed both to acknowledge and to disavow its late colonial context: “The war was lost. The horrors of this war should somehow be recognized, but its political significance, its colonial destructive force should simultaneously be disavowed.” This double- ness in the response to Vietnam in turn provided the key to the PTSD concept as it had been formulated in the DSM: “Suffering is acknowl- edged, but it is stripped of its (colonialist) contents. It is understood that social processes cause pathology, but the processes themselves are off limits for discussion.” (122)