Trauma Drama

Abstract

Trauma Drama engages with a concept that has been so prominent in a number of contemporary Western discourses, among them psychiatric, psychoanalytical, artistic, journalistic, legal and cultural theoretical discourses, that scholars describe the contemporary North American society as “wound culture” (Seltzer 1997, 1998) and speak of a “traumaculture” (Luckhurst 2003) in the British context.¹ The term ‘trauma ’ was first used to indicate a general form of injury and came to be associated with a wounding of the mind by the end of the nineteenth century, when it designated the sudden prostration of the nervous system through surgical shock (Leys 2000: 255). As outlined in Chapter 1 on hysteria, Breuer and Freud — as well as other physicians such as Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet, and Morton Price — developed the concept of psychical trauma. Present-day psychiatric explanations of traumatisation are based on these accounts, and especially Freud ’s psychoanalytic theory has informed the current medical and, even more prominently so, cultural theoretical notions of trauma.