ABSTRACT
The extensive psychodynamic and psychological literature on the effects of social and individual trauma begins perhaps with S. Freud’s development of the theory of sexual trauma within families, and later his positing of the death instinct in the shadow of the First World War. This chapter examines the major two levels of trauma, the social and the domestic. It shows how the wider level of social trauma has an impact on the intimacy of developmental trauma. An important paper by Arthur and Joan Kleinman, medical anthropologists who focused on China for many years, explores the incorporation of the social body into the physical body, extending Freud’s early discussion of conversion of mental trauma into bodily symptomatology. Their theoretical examination of how collective experience is incorporated into individual experience focuses on how undiscussable national traumatic situations of the kind that China has experienced are expressed in individual bodily symptoms, and that is how ‘culture infolds in the body.
