ABSTRACT
This chapter examines conceptions of trauma in different clinical, cultural, and historical contexts. It describes the relationship between trauma and the new technologies of modernity, focusing particularly on John Erichsen’s work on railway spine in the UK and Hermann Oppenheim’s theories of traumatic neuroses from industrial accidents in Germany in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. The chapter examines the origins of hysteria in the research of three seminal figures in early psychiatric practice: Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, and Sigmund Freud. For many veterans, the traumatic combat conditions to which they were exposed in Vietnam were compounded by their return to an ambivalent, and at times hostile, homeland. The chapter examines the emergence of a master paradigm of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, in America in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, and the final part considers the evolution of a broader trauma culture at the end of the twentieth century.
