This is a rich and diverse collection of papers on trauma and trauma theory, written from a variety of perspectives, including psychoanalysis, philosophy, cultural studies, and religious studies. For the book's editors, it is also an attempt to grapple with some central challenges of trauma theory. To appreciate the nature of these challenges, it is necessary to understand what is meant by “trauma theory,” which is not the same thing as the theory of trauma.

The theory of psychic trauma has a long and continuous history. Psychoanalysts hardly need to be reminded of this, for the nineteenth-century roots of the theory of trauma—in the work, most notably, of Charcot, Janet, and the early collaboration of Breuer and Freud—are the