| Description |
x, 327 pages ; 25 cm |
| Contents |
Machine derived contents note: Table of contents for The harmony of illusions : inventing post-traumatic stress disorder / Allan Young. -- Bibliographic record and links to related information available from the Library of Congress catalog -- Information from electronic data provided by the publisher. May be incomplete or contain other coding. -- Acknowledgments Introduction 3 Pt. I The Origins of Traumatic Memory 1 Making Traumatic Memory 13 2 World War I 43 Pt. II The Transformation of Traumatic Memory 3 The DSM-III Revolution 89 4 The Architecture of Traumatic Time 118 Pt. III Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in Practice 5 The Technology of Diagnosis 145 6 Everyday Life in a Psychiatric Unit 176 7 Talking about PTSD 224 8 The Biology of Traumatic Memory 264 Conclusion 287 Notes 291 Works Cited 299 Index 321 -- Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: Post-traumatic stress disorder Philosophy, Social epistemology |
| Summary |
Western ideas about traumatic memory have changed profoundly over the last century. Allan Young argues that the transformation is connected to two other historical changes: the emergence of new conceptions of human nature and consciousness, and the evolution of psychiatry as an autonomous clinical specialty and branch of medical science. Young traces the psychiatric history of traumatic memory from its beginnings - in railway spine, traumatic hysteria, shell-shock, double consciousness, and mental parasites - to its contemporary manifestation, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In Young's view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon, nor is it a discovery. Rather, it is a cultural product: a reality that is glued together by diagnostic technologies, styles of scientific and clinical reasoning, and modes of self-narration and confession. Nor is PTSD simply a psychiatric phenomenon; it is also a moral development: a diagnosis that transgresses the boundary dividing victims from victimizers, and a contagion that crosses the line separating patients from therapists. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in a psychiatric unit specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of Vietnam War veterans with PTSD. Young argues that PTSD cannot be separated from the routines, technologies, and patterns of thinking through which it is encountered. At the same time, he allows the people in his book - these veterans and their therapists - to speak in their own words, and he vividly evokes the disorder's reality in their lives, as they struggle to make sense of their disturbing memories of a tragic war |
| Analysis |
Post-traumatic stress disorder Philosophy |
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Social epistemology |
| Notes |
Bibliography: p299-319. _ Includes index |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [299]-319) and index |
| Notes |
Also available online |
| Subject |
Post-traumatic stress disorder -- Case studies.
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Post-traumatic stress disorder -- Philosophy.
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Post-traumatic stress disorder.
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Social epistemology.
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Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic.
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Philosophy, Medical.
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| LC no. |
95016254 |
| ISBN |
0691033528 (cloth : alk. paper) |
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