ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on the social psychology of PTSD and explains how social movements shaped the diagnosis as a response to demands on psychiatry to respond to politically produced suffering. The diagnosis offered a way of both registering harms suffered within a medical classification system and avoiding the pathologizing that accompanies many forms of psychiatric labeling. The chapter enlists critical psychoanalytic traditions in tracking the migration of the diagnosis in the global field of humanitarian psychiatry and explains how it acquired defensive functions for practitioners carrying out relief work in conflict zones. Psychoanalytic approaches to the intergenerational transmission of trauma are taken up, theories that similarly generate critiques. Critics argue that the diagnosis and speculations on intergenerational transmission of trauma obscure key political dynamics in conflict zones. Case examples illustrate how the PTSD constellation of symptoms narrows the field of observations in ways that obscure important dynamics at both the societal and individual levels.
