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“Trauma” may perhaps be the most socially impactful concept of the 20th century, casting its influence increasingly into the 21st century. Bridging legal and medical discourses and redefining moral categories, trauma reshapes not only concepts used in thought but also everyday affective responses to human behavior. The social thinkers Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman (2009) observe that “trauma has become a major signifier of our age” (p. xi). The term has, they observe, become an “unassailable moral signifier.” Trauma stories largely concealed in the many years before World War II, for fear of shame, are now expressed and accorded respect and sympathy. If the modernist world was concerned with anxiety and neurosis, the new century has shifted its attention to trauma as an overarching principle for understanding violence and its impact on social function.
An understanding of trauma, many argue, augurs a new epoch for cultural thought, in which old habits invested in an ideal of heroic individual agency are modified by new insights into the disabling impact of stress upon mental activity and neurological function. The legal scholar Alan Stone (1993) argues that “no diagnosis in the history of American psychiatry has had a more dramatic and pervasive impact on law and social justice,” giving a new legitimacy to people who suffer (cited in Haaken, p. 171). The revisionary use of the term in legal procedures mirrors its revisionary use in everyday social discourse. Trauma decisively alters our assumptions about human agency. As the power of the term’s impact widens, so do debates over its legitimacy in various fields of study. In the Humanities, the debates between Cathy Caruth’s largely psychoanalytic description of trauma’s “unclaimed experience” and Ruth Leys’s claims about trauma’s incoherence have resulted in a kind of paralysis of the term’s theoretical potential. In the sciences, debates between Bessel van der Kolk’s body-based account of trauma dysr