ABSTRACT
“Trauma paradigm”, “trauma culture”, “post-traumatic age” – these academic buzzwords capture the impact that the notion of the psychological wound has made within and beyond literary studies. S. Freud’s model of a breach in the protective barrier provided the starting point for the American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner’s systematic account of war neurosis, which in turn became a source for the symptomatology of post-traumatic stress disorder in current psychiatric nosology. The manifold developments that conditioned the emergence of the trauma diagnosis in the second half of the nineteenth century, from the industrial revolution to the rise of the welfare state, are modern phenomena. Besides the booming field of memory studies, trauma has informed numerous fields and disciplines, including law, sociology, philosophy and literary studies. As a social theory, the trauma concept has recently experienced a decisive turn toward transcultural approaches. Histories of the trauma concept may similarly need to adopt a more global approach.
