ABSTRACT
In this chapter, clinical apparatuses of trauma are contextualized within societies wherein forms of biopower reign. Pursuant to such arrangements, the psy-disciplines become implicated within schemes of governance that are premised on the well-being, health, and security of populations. Consequently, risk – and particularly the dangers occasioned in traumatic suffering – must be managed through technologies that, according to Foucault, discipline individuals, massify or aggregate knowledge of the species body, and form modes of ethical self-relation for the subject of clinical trauma. Consequently, approaches such as cognitive-behavioral treatments of trauma discipline the subject’s traumatic suffering to produce coherent autobiographies, and form an ethics of “redemptive rationality,” maintaining functionality within overall biopolitical strategies. Even as such, these technologies require the modern subject’s traumatic ontology for their operation.
