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The concept of trauma merges psychology and history, or blurs boundaries between them. The event is external, the response internal.1 Cognitive systems that previously sustained stable connections to the world collapse. Psychological disturbances such as dissociation or amnesia are common. A traumatized subject may become disconnected from both self and society. “The traumatized person,” writes Cathy Caruth, “carries an impossible history within them [sic], or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (1991, p. 4).
Historically, our belated cultural awareness of trauma in the 1970s and 1980s arose partly from the population of Vietnam War veterans who brought the war home in their heads. The diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) entered the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980 (DSM-III). Of course this illness was well known before its latest clinical categorizing as “battle fatigue,” “shell shock,” or “war neurosis.” The 1980 APA diagnosis focused on the nature of the traumatic event: war, assault (rape, child abuse), or natural disaster. The next edition in 1994 (DSM-IV), focused on the individual's response to the event. PTSD as a pathology depends on the severity of personal reaction. The horrors of war do not traumatize all soldiers, but perhaps as many as half.
Trauma as concept extended as well to other areas of psychic injury. Partly as a belated response to political feminism, media in the 1980s displayed greater social sensitivity to rape. Interest in Holocaust narratives was growing in political and academic arenas. In 1982, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies opened in the Yale University Library. In 1980 the U.S. Congress approved the construction of a