The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood
Author(s): Didier Fassin & Richard Rechtman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Print Length: 320 pages
Genre: Non-Fiction / Anthropology, Psychology, Social Science
Area: France, Palestine/Israel
Topic: Victimhood, Trauma, Suffering, Ethics & Morality, History, Change, Human Psyche, Psychoanalysis, Medicine & Healthcare, Care, Persecution, Torture, Restorative Justice, Politics & Power, Humanitarian Action & Humanitarianism, Asylum, Exile, Refugees & Forced Migration, Asylum & Refugee System, Migrants, Humanity, War
Today we are accustomed to psychiatrists being summoned to scenes of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, war, and other tragic events to care for the psychic trauma of victims — yet it has not always been so. The very idea of psychic trauma came into being only at the end of the nineteenth century and for a long time was treated with suspicion. The Empire of Trauma tells the story of how the traumatic victim became culturally and politically respectable, and how trauma itself became an unassailable moral category.
Basing their analysis on a wide-ranging ethnography, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman examine the politics of reparation, testimony, and proof made possible by the recognition of trauma. They study the application of psychiatric victimology to victims of the 1995 terrorist bombings in Paris and the 2001 industrial disaster in Toulouse; the involvement of humanitarian psychiatry with both Palestinians and Israelis during the second Intifada; and the application of the psychotraumatology of exile to asylum seekers victimized by persecution and torture.
Revealing how trauma has come to authenticate the suffering of victims, The Empire of Trauma provides critical perspective on some of the moral and political issues at stake in the contemporary world.
Table of Contents
Preface to the English Edition
Introduction: A New Language of the Event
PART ONE: THE REVERSING OF THE TRUTH
1. A Dual Genealogy
The Significance of a Controversy / The Birth of Trauma / Labor Laws
2. The Long Hunt
Cowardice or Death / The Brutalization of Therapy / After the War / A French History
3. The Intimate Confession
War Psychoanalysis / A Profitable Sickness / Victims of the Self / The Issue of Survival
4. An End to Suspicion
Women and Children First / The Consecration of the Event / The Last Witnesses / The Humanity of Criminals
PART TWO: THE POLITICS OF REPARATION
5. Psychiatric Victimology
Victims’ Rights / The Resistance of Psychiatry / An Ambiguous Origin / A Relative Autonomy
6. Toulouse
The Summons to Trauma / Emergency Care in Question / Inequalities and Exclusions / Consolation and Compensation
PART THREE: THE POLITICS OF TESTIMONY
7. Humanitarian Psychiatry
One Origin, Two Accounts / In the Beginning Was Humanitarianism / On the Margins of War / The Frontiers of Humanity
8. Palestine
The Need to Testify / The Chronicles of Suffering / The Equivalence of Victims / Histories without a History
PART FOUR: THE POLITICS OF PROOF
9. The Psychotraumatology of Exile
The Immigrant, Between Native and Foreigners / The Clinical Practice of Asylum / A Change of Paradigm / The Evidence of the Body
10. Asylum
The Illegitimate Refugee / Recognizing the Sign / The Truth of Writing / The Meaning of Words
Conclusion: The Moral Economy of Trauma
Bibliography
Index of Names
Index of Subjects
Didier Fassin is an anthropologist and a sociologist. Initially trained as a physician at Paris University Pierre et Marie Curie, he practiced internal medicine and taught public health at the Hospital of La Pitié Salpétrière, before turning to the social sciences. Having completed a Master’s degree at La Sorbonne and a PhD at EHESS (the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), he became Professor at the University of Paris North and later Director of Studies at EHESS, a position he still holds. At CNRS (the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique), he was the founding director of IRIS (the Interdisciplinary Research Institute in Social Sciences). In 2009, he was appointed at the Institute for Advanced Study as the James D. Wolfensohn Professor.
Source: https://www.ias.edu/sss/faculty/fassin
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Richard Rechtman is a psychiatrist and an anthropologist. He is the Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and Deputy Director of the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux Sociaux (IRIS). He is the Editor in chief of L’Evolution psychiatrique. From 1997 to 2010, he directed the Centre Hospitalier Spécialisé de la Verrière (MGEN) and took on the role of Manager of the Department for Adolescent Psychiatry, which he created in 1999. His current research is focused on the anthropology of subjectivity and the anthropology of psychiatry and mental health. He has conducted field research on the political and psychological consequences of the Cambodian genocide, and the invention of new psychiatric categories such as posttraumatic stress disorder, psychological suffering and adolescent psychopathology.
Source: https://static.ias.edu/morals.ias.edu/team/rechtman.html
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