Critical Trauma Theory

Disability studies and critical trauma studies are both deeply concerned with the social construction of meaning and identity. However, these disciplines often remain mutually disengaged, inadvertently overlooking shared mechanisms of oppression that foster stigma. This article explores the novel depiction of disability and trauma in the play Amy and the Orphans by Lindsey Ferrentino. Amy, a character with Down syndrome, challenges disability stereotypes by exercising autonomy; she is not solely defined by her disability or her experiences of abuse. The theatrical narrative is one of both disability and trauma, encouraging a nuanced reflection on the origins of stigma and revealing how theatre can be used as a tool of resistance to reclaim agency through performances that challenge conventional 'disability' stereotypes.

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-- TOC and book summary in downloadable .pdf] 
According to the poet Elias Canetti, "All the things one has forgotten / scream for help in dreams." To the ancient Egyptians they were prophecies, and in world folklore they have often marked visitations from the dead. For Freud they were expressions of "wish fulfillment," and for Jung, symbolic representations of mythical archetypes. Although there is still much disagreement about the significance and function of dreams, they seem to serve as a barometer of current mind and body states.

In this volume, Deirdre Barrett brings together the study of dreams and the psychology of trauma. She has called on a distinguished group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers--among them Rosalind Cartwright, Robert J. Lifton, and Oliver Sacks--to consider how trauma shapes dreaming and what the dreaming mind might reveal about trauma. The book focuses on catastrophic events, such as combat, political torture, natural disasters, and rape. The lasting effects of childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse or severe burns, on personality formation, the nature of memories of early trauma, and the development of defenses related to amnesia and dissociation are all considered. The book also takes up trauma and adult dreams, including Vietnam veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, rape victims, and firestorm survivors. Finally, this volume concludes with a look at the potential "traumas of normal life," such as divorce, bereavement, and life-threatening illness, and the role of dreams in working through normal grief and loss.

Taken together, these diverse perspectives illuminate the universal and the particular effects of traumatic experience. For physicians and clinicians, determining the etiology of nightmares offers valuable diagnostic and therapeutic insights for individual treatment. This book provides a way of juxtaposing the research in the separate fields of trauma and dreams, and learning from their discoveries.

What is the relationship between trauma experience and the late onset of disability? What insights are to be gained by narrating experience as it may also be a process of de-shaming the experience of onset? Utilizing insights from current scholarship in trauma-informed care, I want to explore how the socioeconomic pressure to maintain ‘wellbeing’ neglects how trauma operates on bodies, minds, and communities, and how, in the important ways in which one could reframe or be liberated from the harms of complex trauma, disability identity can participate in this self-advocacy and create real, material social change.

When setting up the premises for a dialogue between disability studies and critical trauma studies and embarking on editing this pilot issue on ‘encounters’ between the two disciplines, we necessarily welcomed interdisciplinary approaches, ranging across disability studies, trauma studies, literary and cultural studies, media studies, as well as many other disciplines in the humanities. The first step in introducing this issue to our readers will be to present the histories of both disability studies and trauma studies in order to see how they evolved and see why our proposal that they should meet half way or at least more often can be considered a valid one.

Early evening in a neighborhood in Argentina: the demonstrators stop in front of a house and start shouting, "Assassin, genocide criminal, you should be in jail!" Escraches like this one are a way for people to mark the presence of unpunished criminals of the last dictatorship, who avoided prosecution and still live unnoticed among their neighbors. For us, they constitute a lesson in political subjectivity that interrogates our understanding of trauma. Discourses of trauma have usually centered on images of victims as passive receivers of violence. Instead, I propose focusing on people s potency, creativity, and agency. This article explores trauma as pertaining not only to individual experiences with violence but also to the different social ways to deal with conflict, namely, the politics of trauma. "Trauma" accounts for the entanglement of violence and subjectivity, but I use it as well to think of agency and political action; I discuss theoretical implications of an investigation on the political dimensions of trauma in Argentina s recent past. Focusing on the Argentine post dictatorship movement, I articulate theory produced in clinical and political contexts to contribute to a political psychology of trauma.

Disability studies and critical trauma studies are both deeply concerned with the social construction of meaning and identity. However, these disciplines often remain mutually disengaged, inadvertently overlooking shared mechanisms of oppression that foster stigma. This article explores the novel depiction of disability and trauma in the play Amy and the Orphans by Lindsey Ferrentino. Amy, a character with Down Syndrome, challenges disability stereotypes by exercising autonomy; she is not solely defined by her disability or her experiences of abuse. The theatrical narrative is one of both disability and trauma, encouraging a nuanced reflection on the origins of stigma and revealing how theatre can be used as a tool of resistance to reclaim agency through performances that challenge conventional ‘disability’ stereotypes.

Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly (1990), a reworking of the Victorian gothic classic Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) has been variably categorised by the critics as  neo-Victorian or neo-gothic fiction and postmodern historiographic metafiction. Marie-Louise Kohlke (2008) claims that neo-Victorian novel is a post-traumatic genre, where traumas can be both personal, i.e. “disease, crime and sexual exploitation,” (Kohlke 7) as well as collective, including military conflicts or racial and class oppression. The re-writing of these traumas in a form of historiographic metafiction might be an indication that our own century is not entirely free from similar ordeals and attempts to exorcise them through “liberatory repetitions with a difference” (Kohlke 10). A personal, familial traumatic experience is at the heart of the plot in Mary Reilly. The proposed chapter offers an interpretation of the core relationship of the novel, the romantically charged friendship between Dr Jekyll and his servant Mary Reilly, as an example of working through a childhood trauma. The paper shows how travelling back to traumatic memories of the past influences the main character’s present identity and relationships; moreover, it corresponds to the metafictional construction of the novel.