ABSTRACT
In the final decade of the "century of historical trauma", cultural institutions in Washington, DC, became susceptible to a pervasive "climate of fear" that triggered several instances of outrageous censorship. The discourses on post-war national memory and psychotherapy converge in the current trauma paradigm, which was significantly influenced by historical circumstances. In the aftermath of World War II, American psychiatry took to combining Freud's theory of personality and intrapsychic conflicts with more pragmatic and environmentally oriented ideas about mental health, which became the dominant paradigm. While mental health professionals sought to control their patients' posttraumatic anxiety and intrusive memories of their combat-related experiences, they could not prevent the Vietnam War from having wider social repercussions that turned out to be more difficult to manage. The coalition between trauma theory and the American culture of commemoration thus serves to distract the attention from past national and international conflicts that challenge national unity and the myth of American innocence.
