ABSTRACT
The chapter starts with PTSD as a call for a new mode of clinical listening. The history of the diagnosis begins with the creation of an alliance between scholars in stress studies and trauma studies and shows how the diagnostic offspring of this union was strained from the start. As soldiering emerged as the primary site for the production of PTSD symptoms, military settings became the primary site for clinical production of PTSD stories. Chapter 1 includes alternative ways of listening to disturbing war stories and explains how the diagnostic criteria produce highly scripted accounts. A case study of a veteran diagnosed with PTSD is presented to introduce a critical psychoanalytic frame and to foreground junctures in the story that invite alternative interpretations to DSM-authorized PTSD scripts. The chapter extends the currency of the diagnosis into the war stories of female service members and shows how military sexual assault emerged as a sub-genre of PTSD stories that both foregrounds the military as the primary source of the disorder while simultaneously narrowing the space for the expression of female grievances.
