PTSD

Conventional genealogy of traumatic memory “represent[s] the traumatic memory as a found object, a thing indifferent to history. Research into this memory and the associated pathogenic secret is portrayed as a process of discovery. I have argued for something else: the traumatic memory is a man-made object. It originates in the scientific and clinical discourse of the nineteenth century; before that time, there is unhappiness, despair, and disturbing recollections, but no traumatic memory, in the sense that we know it today” (A. Young, 141).