The Epistemological Significance of Psychic Trauma

This article analyzes three short stories of refugee expulsion, immigrant displacement, and exilic return by contemporary writer Trần Vũũ. Beyond the binary of nostalgia and assimilation, Vietnamese diasporic identity emerges in these narratives as the tenuous subject of physical and psychic trauma. Informed by postcolonial theories of diasporic identity, Asian American scholarship on racial abjection, and psychoanalytic and feminist analyses of trauma and sexual deviance, I argue that the characters in these stories either succumb to or subvert the unwitting repetition of trauma in their attempts to challenge, if only precariously, patterns of domination through sadomasochism and counternationalist historiography.

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The effects of psychic trauma on mind: Structure and processing of meaning.

Interface of psychoanalysis and psychology. ◽

10.1037/10118-022 ◽

1992 ◽

pp. 489-500 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Mardi J. Horowitz

Keyword(s):

Psychic Trauma

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Sources of internal psychic trauma

Trauma and the Destructive-Transformative Struggle ◽

10.4324/9780429319587-15 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 195-199

Author(s):

Maxine K. Anderson

Keyword(s):

Psychic Trauma

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Hysterical Bias and Democratic Representations

Beyond Bias ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197551219.003.0002 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 29-54

Author(s):

Scott Krzych

Keyword(s):

Short History ◽

Psychic Trauma ◽

General Overview ◽

History Of ◽

Political Media

This chapter offers a general overview of the short history of conservative political documentary and likewise offers a thorough explanation of the relation between political media and the psychoanalytic conception of hysteria and hysterical discourse. In addition to surveying key texts in the psychoanalytic canon concerning the etiology and reproduction of hysterical discourse, I argue in favor of distinguishing two distinct forms of psychic trauma: hysterical complaints (which are singular, contingent, and emergent) and hysterical discourse (which is self-perpetuating). In the case of conservative political media and rhetoric, hysterical discourse magnifies the affective trauma of political complaints for more cynical ends, as a means to forestall change and to keep the hysterical subject at a significant remove from its perceived competitors even as the hysteric’s discourse appears to engage in sustained dialogue.

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Introduction

The Good Kill ◽

10.1093/oso/9780197515808.003.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-14

Author(s):

Marc LiVecche

Keyword(s):

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder ◽

Posttraumatic Stress ◽

Moral Injury ◽

Psychic Trauma ◽

Important Distinction ◽

Critical Understanding ◽

Just War Tradition ◽

The Difference ◽

Definition Of ◽

Realist Perspective

The introduction provides an overview of the book’s content. Opening with an illustration attending the issue of killing in war, it gestures toward the important link between killing and psychic trauma. To interrogate this linkage, it introduces critical distinctions between different kinds of killing, divergent warfighter attitudes toward killing, various Christian responses to killing and war, and between moral injury and posttraumatic stress disorder. Because it endorses a definition of moral injury as a psychic trauma that occurs when one does something that transgresses a deeply held moral norm, it stresses a critical understanding of the difference between grief and guilt and posits an important distinction between “moral injury” and what it terms “moral bruising.” To elaborate on these distinctions, it introduces the just war tradition as a Christian realist perspective best able to help warfighters navigate the morally bruising battlefield without becoming irreparably injured morally.

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