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The past decades have witnessed an increased interest in the area of trauma both in psychology and psychiatry. This professional interest reflects a wider cultural concern with trauma that eventually led to the inclusion of the psychiatric construct of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM-III) (American Psychiatric Association, 1980).
Even though men, women, and children have been exposed to traumatic events since prehistoric times, attempts to understand the adverse impact of such exposure are quite recent. Breslau and colleagues established that even if between 50% and 90% of individuals will encounter a traumatic event during their lifetime (Breslau et al., 1998), only 5-7% of men and 10% of women will develop post-traumatic stress symptoms (Ozer & Weiss, 2004).
Despite the impressive advances of psychiatric empirical research, no definitive answer currently exists as to why (and when) some of those who have experienced trauma develop post-traumatic symptoms while others, following identical or similar events, do not. Indeed, due to insufficient understanding of the traumatic experience, we are not able to account for the fact that while some people develop PTSD symptoms following traumatic events, others do not.
In this seminar, we will deploy both philosophical and empirical resources to trace the origin of the reflection on trauma that led to current psychiatric classification. Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and psychiatry, we will attempt to evaluate the validity of the current conceptualization of trauma, improve our understanding of the traumatic experience and the factors which result in the development of post-traumatic symptoms, as well as consider the philosophical and scientific fruitfulness of the reflection on trauma. It will be made clear, that trauma not only offers an opportunity in terms of unveiling certain aspects of cognition, but that it may as well bear some potentiality for personal development as in the case of post- traumatic growth.
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