Trauma: phenomenological causality and implication

The relationship between traumatic experiences and subsequent distress is not well understood, and little research focuses on the lived experience of psychological trauma. I draw on Louis Sass’s phenomenological taxonomy to address this lacuna. I present his differentiation between relations of phenomenological causality and implication and demonstrate that his taxonomy can be applied to experiences of trauma. Relations of phenomenological causality and implication can be identified in the genesis and constitution of post-traumatic distress. My adaptation of Sass’s taxonomy will furthermore offer an extension and development of his account, applying it to the study of post-traumatic experiences and elaborating it in the process. I shall demonstrate that whether experiences occur synchronically or diachronically is not essential to their categorization in terms of phenomenological implication and causality, respectively. I will show that an alteration in perception or behavior post trauma might temporally succeed the traumatizing event while, at the same time, being implied in the experience of the event. Thereby, I demonstrate how phenomenology may contribute to a detailed understanding of experiences of trauma. Scrutiny of traumatic experiences furthermore promises to contribute to the philosophical discourse on causality, implication, and temporal experience.

RESTORATION OF PARITY SYMMETRY THROUGH PRESYMMETRY

Presymmetry, the hidden symmetry underlying the charge and generational patterns of quarks and leptons, is utilized for repairing the left–right asymmetry of the standard model with Dirac neutrinos. It is shown that the restoration of parity is consequent with an indispensable left–right symmetric residual presymmetry. Thus, presymmetry substantiates left–right symmetry and the experimental search for the latter is the test of the former, with the nature of neutrinos as a crucial feature that can distinguish the left–right symmetry alone and its combination with presymmetry. This phenomenological implication is in accordance with the fact that Majorana neutrinos are usually demanded in the first case, but forbidden in the second.