Post-Traumatic Culture Post-Traumatic Culture:
A Website Exploring American Culture at the Millennium.

Kirby Farrell

University of Massachusetts
Department of English
kfarrell@english.umass.edu

Trauma is an acute injury from shock or stress. In the words of one psychiatric textbook, the core experience is "intense fear, helplessness, loss of control, and threat of annihilation." For a century medical scientists have searched for a biological explanation of traumatic symptoms without success.

This website is organized around my book Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), which argues that trauma is psychocultural, since injury always entails interpretation of the injury, and all interpretations are shaped by culture.

In American culture today, the idea of post-traumatic stress is everywhere. Journalists use childhood trauma to explain the careers of criminals and celebrities. The idea may influence employees who go berserk in the workplace, but also business executives who trigger what The New York Times calls "traumatic downsizing."

Trauma, then, is an explanatory tool that people may use when they feel overwhelmed by historical change or need to justify lives threatened by serious conflict. It may function as a personal call for justice and compensation, or it may support predatory rage. When mass entertainment routinely invokes traumatic abuse to motivate characters, it implies a world in which character and the stories people live by are exhausted. This website explores cultural sources of traumatic stress and forms that post-traumatic thinking may take. It considers criticism an important resource in uncovering and sorting out the conflicts and confusions that so often produce symptoms of traumatic stress.

The site's pages contain excerpts from Post-Traumatic Culture and some new work. Materials are copyrighted and may not be reproduced without permission.