Image and Trauma

Bibliographic Data

ID4516670
AuthorsRuth Leys (0000-0002-1629-2832, Johns Hopkins University, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume19
Issue1
Pages137-149
Publication date2006-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueScience in Context (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0269-8897 • E-ISSN: 1474-0664
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0269889705000797
PMID17147219
OpenAlexW2112215008
LanguageEN
Citations received6

ArgumentIn 1980, when the diagnosis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was introduced into the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), survivor guilt - a symptom long associated with trauma of the Holocaust and other extreme experiences - was included in the list of symptom criteria. But in the revised edition of the manual of 1987 (DSM-IIIR), survivor guilt was demoted to the status of merely an "associated feature" of the condition. Now that survivor guilt has disappeared from the official lexicon of trauma, shame has come to take its place as the emotion that most defines the traumatic state. This paper examines the rationale for the shift from survivor guilt to shame in the context of the American Psychiatric Association's revisions. It argues that the shift can be understood as yet another manifestation of the oscillation between mimetic and antimimetic theories of trauma that, I have argued in my book Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), has structured the understanding of trauma from the start

Posttraumatic stress · Psychiatry · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Shame · Clinical Psychology · History · Medicine · Psychology · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Social Psychology · Torture, Ethics, and Law

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