Trauma and Aporetic Injury: A Method for Multi-Perspectival Triage Restricted; Files & ToC

Abstract

My dissertation develops a framework for understanding trauma as an aporetic and sociogenic form of suffering. My framework is structured in two parts:

 

First, I evaluate the limits of addressing trauma through isolated discourses. I situate these limits historically in relation to the hegemony of Western trauma theory, with particular emphasis on how Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the “unclaimable experience” models for diagnosing trauma are unable to address political traumas in the Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) region. I pursue this assessment through a comparative analysis of Ancient Greek and Medieval Islamic medical texts on trauma, Western, Arab, and decolonial clinical histories regarding the treatment of psychosomatic pathology, and historicized examples of trauma within the MENA region that problematize Western models of traumatic subjectivity and world-historical singularity. By reading these varied etiologies of trauma together, I show that trauma is an aporetic experience with no universal prognosis.

 

Secondly, I use this conclusion to propose a multi-perspectival method for addressing trauma more ethically, grounded in two concerns: its inescapably aporetic nature and the necessity of providing those living-with trauma sociogenically contingent ways to navigate their suffering. To address these concerns, I propose that instead of a multi-disciplinary model for approaching trauma, we focus on the first-, second- and third- person dimensions of traumatic experience. This allows us to approach trauma’s impact from the perspective of the people who are actually suffering from it. It also historicizes trauma, which I argue is essential for staging actual ethical interventions that can respond to people where they are at, not as ahistorical subjects of suffering. 

 

Table of Contents

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About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Philosophy
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Psychology, Social Philosophy Literature, Middle Eastern
Keyword	Frantz Fanon Trauma
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	John Lysaker, Emory University
Committee Members	Ernesto Blanes-Martinez, Emory University Noelle McAfee, Emory University George Yancy, Emory University Rick Elmore, Appalachian State University

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