The harmony of illusions

by Allan Young

Western ideas about traumatic memory have changed profoundly over the last century. Allan Young argues that the transformation is connected to two other historical changes: the emergence of new conceptions of human nature and consciousness, and the evolution of psychiatry as an autonomous clinical specialty and branch of medical science. Young traces the psychiatric history of traumatic memory from its beginnings - in railway spine, traumatic hysteria, shell-shock, double consciousness, and mental parasites - to its contemporary manifestation, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In Young's view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon, nor is it a discovery. Rather, it is a cultural product: a reality that is glued together by diagnostic technologies, styles of scientific and clinical reasoning, and modes of self-narration and confession. Nor is PTSD simply a psychiatric phenomenon; it is also a moral development: a diagnosis that transgresses the boundary dividing victims fr