Our Traumatic Neurosis and Its Brain

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4516089
AutoresAlma H Young (0000-0003-2291-6952, McGill University, autor de correspondencia), Allan Young
Año2001
Volumen14
Número4
Páginas661-683
Fecha de publicación2001-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaScience in Context (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0269-8897 • E-ISSN: 1474-0664
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0269889701000291
PMID12180467
OpenAlexW2140434934
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11

Argument During the nineteenth century, physicians either discovered or invented a variety of clinical autobiography called "traumatic memory." Freud produced two versions of this memory, the final version in the 1920s. A revolutionary nosology (DSM-III), adopted in 1980, promised to extirpate Freud and the concept of neurosis from American psychiatry. However, it made a tacit exception for Freud's concept of traumatic neurosis, renaming it "posttraumatic stress disorder." The following decades have been a period of intense clinical and scientific interest in this disorder. An influential research program has investigated traumatic neurosis and its brain through variations in cortisol excretion. I describe the history of this program and examine its distinctive knowledge product: its running narrative of its achievements. The narrative's structure is analyzed and found to resemble a crossword puzzle constructed from heterogeneous kinds of inference, recalling The Interpretation of Dreams. My conclusion is that, far from extirpating Freud's neurosis, biological research has secured a place for it in today's post-Freudian psychiatry

Neurosis · Psychoanalysis · Medicine · Migration, Health and Trauma · Neuroscience · Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Research · Psychology · Traumatic Brain Injury Research