Trauma, history and memory
Trauma, history and memory

The trauma of populism

The increasing likelihood of another four years of a Donald Trump presidency is a reminder that populism is a political phenomenon that is very much alive and present. And even though, in the UK, Brexit was supposedly ‘done’ after the election of another populist politician, Boris Johnson, in late 2019, …

Nachträglichkeit revisited

In a number of articles on this site I have explored Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit, which, in one reading at least, is based on the rather peculiar notion that trauma only occurs retroactively. What’s more, it’s not simply a case of a later experience ‘triggering’ the memory of an ‘original’ …

PTSD and its vicissitudes

The invention of PTSD According to the standard narrative, prior to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) there were a range of psychological ‘conditions’ or ‘disorders’ that were essentially describing the same set of symptoms, which included nightmares, flashbacks, panic attacks, depression, anxiety, difficulties in concentrating, and so on. Much of this …

A materialist Lacan?

I wonder sometimes if the current Covid-19 crisis is encouraging some Lacanians and fellow-travellers to rethink the whole question of the ontology. And I’m thinking especially of those who in the past have tended to be dismissive, or at least suspicious of, any form of ‘biologism’ or ‘essentialism’ in psychoanalysis. …

The time of Nachträglichkeit

One of the most peculiar aspects of Nachträglichkeit is that it appears to violate the basic laws of causality. In other words, rather than traumatic past events ‘causing’ trauma symptoms in the present, the memory of such events appears to construct the trauma retroactively. It should be said at this …

Trauma Without End

The Great War and its Aftermath A hundred years on the Great War still casts its shadow over our society, and in some ways, even more so over mainland Europe. The legacy of the war was not only the collapse of empires, but also the rise of new ones – …