PTSD

“Like the polythetic classifications described in DSM-III-R, they include members that share no single overt feature, but unlike these classifications, their unity is not imposed by convention, from the outside. Rather, cases are connected by something that is intrinsic to the classification but that does not appear on the official symptom list: a submerged feature . . . In the case of PTSD, the submerged is the traumatic memory. The traumatic memory is not merely hidden below the surface of the DSM text; it is also polymorphous, showing itself in diverse presences (creating an equivalence between outbursts of anger and sleeplessness) and signifying absences (products of symptomatic avoidances). It is the traumatic memory’s protean character that gives cases the appearance, on the surface, of sharing only a family resemblance. This is what Ribot, Charcot, Janet, and Freud wanted to call attention to when they compared the traumatic memory to a mental parasite. Lawrence Kolb evokes a similar image when he suggests that PTSD ‘is to psychiatry as syphilis was to medicine,’ that is, that both maladies mimic other disorders through their heterogenous symptomatology (Kolb 1989:811)” (A. Young, 119).