Harmony of Illusions (eBook)

Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Allan Young (Autor)

eBook Download: PDF

1997
328 Seiten
Princeton University Press (Verlag)
978-1-4008-2193-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Allan Young is Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, in the Departments of Social Studies of Medicine, Anthropology, and Psychiatry.

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As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "e;post-traumatic stress disorder."e; Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "e;harmony of illusions,"e; a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilizing these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the transcripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 27.10.1997
• Zusatzinfo: 5 line drawings
• Verlagsort: Princeton
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Erkenntnistheorie / Wissenschaftstheorie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Klinische Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Medizinische Fachgebiete ► Neurologie
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Medizinische Fachgebiete ► Notfallmedizin
• Themenwelt: Medizin / Pharmazie ► Medizinische Fachgebiete ► Psychiatrie / Psychotherapie
• Themenwelt: Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Geschichte / Ethik der Medizin
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Biologie ► Humanbiologie
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Ethnologie
• Themenwelt: Technik
• Schlagworte: Abram Kardiner • abreaction • Albert Ellis • Ambivalence • Amusement • Analogy • Anecdote • anesthesia • Anxiety • anxiety disorder • attempt • Automatic behavior • avoidant personality disorder • Benign Neglect • Beyond the Pleasure Principle • Borderline Personality Disorder • character structure • Cognitive Distortion • Cognitive restructuring • Consciousness • Cortisol • Culpability • Cure • Diagnosis • disinhibition • Dissociation (psychology) • distraction • Dizziness • double consciousness • Dynamic psychiatry • effeminacy • Ego ideal • Ego integrity • Embarrassment • emotional reasoning • Endorphins • extraversion and introversion • face validity • facticity • Free association (psychology) • fugue state • Grandiosity • Group Psychotherapy • Habituation • Henry Head • hypertonia • hypnosis • Hypnotherapy • hypomania • hysteria • Imagination • Impossibility • inference • Josef Breuer • Malingering • Mental disorder • morale • Morality • narrative • natural experiment • Natural kind • neurosis • N ray • Opiate • optimism • originality • Personality • Posttraumatic stress disorder • Predictive validity • Psychiatry • Psychic numbing • Psychoanalysis • Psychological repression • Psychological Trauma • psychotherapy • Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy • Reality testing • Reduced affect display • Relaxation technique • Repressed Memory • self-consciousness • sensibility • shell shock • Siegfried Sassoon • somatization • Special senses • Subconscious • suggestibility • Suggestion • Symptom • Tacit Knowledge • talking cure • The Discovery of the Unconscious • The Interpretation of Dreams • Theory of Mind • The Other Hand • therapeutic effect • Thought • transference • uniqueness
• ISBN-10: 1-4008-2193-2 / 1400821932
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4008-2193-8 / 9781400821938