The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

About this book

As far back as we know there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse fright and horror or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently however have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder." Here Allan Young traces this malady particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Youngs view PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon newly discovered. Rather it is a "harmony of illusions " a cultural product gradually put together by the practices technologies and narratives with which it is diagnosed studied and treated and by the various interests institutions and moral arguments mobilizing these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the transcripts themselves the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.