Trauma 
Subtitle: A Genealogy
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Published: June 15, 2000
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9780226477657
Subjects: Neurology & clinical neurophysiology; Philosophy & theory of psychology; Trauma & shock; Mental Disorders; Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders; Psychology; History: World; Psychopathology - General; Psychology & Psychiatry / Pathological Psychology; Psychopathology - Eating Disorders; Psychic trauma; Traumatic neuroses
First sentence: In the spring of 1998 Elizabeth Rubin, in an article in the New Yorker, described what had recently happened to a group of young Ugandan girls who had been abducted by a guerilla group, the Lord's Resistance Army (L.R.A.), in order to force them to serve as "wives" and fighters in its war against the Ugandan army.
Description: "Psychic trauma is one of the most frequently invoked ideas in the behavioral sciences and the humanities today. Yet bitter disputes have marked the discussion of trauma ever since it first became an issue in the 1870s, growing even more heated in recent years following official recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In a book that is bound to ignite controversy, Ruth Leys investigates the history of the concept of trauma. She explores the emergence of multiple personality disorder, Freud's approaches to trauma, medical responses to shellshock and combat fatigue, Sándor Ferenczi's revisions of psychoanalysis, and the mutually reinforcing, often problematic work of certain contemporary neurobiological and postmodernist theorists. Leys argues that the concept of trauma has always been fundamentally unstable, oscillating uncontrollably between two competing models, each of which tends at its limit to collapse into the other."--Pub. desc.