Summary, Questions, & Quotes

In chapter three, Herzog (2016) traced the history of PTSD; it’s development and application in psychoanalytic work. Herzog began his history by presenting the debates about trauma and holocaust survivors. PTSD was not fully acknowledged by the psychoanalytic community until the 1980s. This was after decades of discussion and revelations coming out of the war in Vietnam. Herzog presented the complex history of PTSD in relation to political developments. He also highlighted the narrow frame that tied trauma to childhood development. Below I have included helpful quotes for understanding the reading: 89 - “Most scholarly accounts of the evolution of the PTSD idea go back to railroad and industrial accidents at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries and above all to the ‘shell shock’ experienced by soldiers in World War I. Without a doubt, the renewed high attention to the phenomenon of PTSD in the second decade of the twenty-first century due to the USA’s recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has only fortified the assumption that the relevant precursor developments that influenced how the category of PTSD was formulated in 1980 primarily involved the experiences of soldiers, especially the experiences of veterans of the US war in Vietnam.” 93 - “But no less significant is a countervailing and complicating point: The sympathizing doctors were acutely aware of the extreme messiness of their evidence.” 95 - “Over and over, the doctors who rejected survivors’ claims denied that there could have been any causal link between symptoms and experience.” 103 - “The battle between the two sides got deeply personal, and ‘objectivity’ – especially the relationship between evidence and expla- nation – became the key point of contention. Rejecters saw to it that doctors considered too sympathetic were denied the right to evaluate survivors. And sympathetic doctors in the USA and West Germany and Israel self-censored and deliberately approved fewer claims for pensions than they thought were medically warranted, so as to retain the right to produce evaluations at all.53 “ 113 - “In sum, and to put the overall point another way: initially the battle over reparations for survivors had forced advocates for survivors to articulate an early case for the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and the utter noncomparability of racial persecutions and concentration and death camp experiences with the experiences of soldiers or even of civilians during wartime. Yet, by a twist of historical fate, it later took the catastrophic decline in the USA’s moral authority internationally due to the war in Vietnam and the rise of a passionate antiwar move- ment to bring not just soldiers’ but also survivors’ traumas into Americans’ public consciousness and into official medical nomenclature and professional policy.” 122 - “In addition, he noted that it was apparent in hindsight that the theorization of survivor trauma post-Holocaust had actually marked the high point of professionals’ understanding of the complexities of interaction between context and psyche. One of the many troubles with the pervasive application of PTSD, and the development of ever-new quick-fix treatment modalities, was that ‘the specific treatments are split off from awareness of the sociopolitical dimensions.’ In sum: the creation of PTSD had been, at once, a triumphant outcome of the battles over post-Holocaust trauma as they were fought through in the specific historical context of post-Holocaust resentment and antisemitic animus against survivors and, because it had mixed perpetrators together with victims and depoliticized the experiences of both, it was – as Becker expressly observed – already ‘a regression from the achievements and developments in the wake of the Holocaust.’” Questions: Why did “objectivity” hold such a prominent role in psychoanalysis? What ways are conceptions of trauma being challenged in contemporary psychoanalytic theories? What was lost for those whose PTSD was dismissed or mislabeled? Why did psychoanalysis remain so focused on childhood (instead of taking a holistic approach which included adulthood)?