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In her scholarly text, Trauma: A Genealogy, Ruth Leys essentially charts the development of classical psychoanalytical thinking pertaining to trauma from several well-known Freudian cases onward.
She begins the book with descriptions of traumatized African girls abducted by a guerilla group fighting the Ugandan army. She speaks of publicized scattered trauma throughout the world, suggesting that there is a great deal everywhere occurring in pockets—occurring everyday with horrible sequelae.
Leys speaks of the Holocaust as the major and defining “trauma of the century,” which has focused our society and profession on trauma, trauma-related phenomenology, and the psychic mediation of trauma as a process.
She carefully reviews and discusses two major psychoanalytic figures—Sandor Ferenczi, a disciple of Freud, and Mikkel Borch-Jacobson, their ideas and theories, related to these—and issues.
Leys gives an interesting review of efforts during World War II to develop and test psychological and psychopharmacological treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and acute post-traumatic Stress Reactions. She is clearly focused on identifying the “mechanism” of development of “traumatic experiences”—and comprehensively reviews existing postulated theories, especially those of mimesis; antimimesis; personality dissociation; memory as either an effortful or passive (automatic) process; lying versus hysteria with primary or secondary gain; and the effect and process of suggestion and simulation as they pertain to trauma.
Her last two chapters review the work of Bessel A. Van der Kolk and Cathy Caruth, both major figures in the investigation of PTSD.
Leys discusses traumatic memory as a “literal imprint” different from ordinary memory in its literal, exact memory quality and its separateness from