| Details | | Publication Date: | 1995-10-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 327 pages | | Height: | 10.0 in | | Width: | 6.8 in | | Thickness: | 1.2 in | | Weight: | 24.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
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 "post-traumatic stress disorder." 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. "Allan Young ... would disagree with the notion that [PTSD] has always been with us, arguing that the traumatic memory is a man-made object.... His book is a lucid case-study of the way medicine and society have managed to build up this man-made disorder over the past century and a half."--Gerald Weissmann, The London Review of Books "Allan Young has written a splendid and much needed book.... Young's book is an invaluable contribution to an emerging and exciting area of scholarship. Intellectually bold, analytically rigorous, and rhetorically compelling, The Harmony of Illusions will both delight and provoke--perhaps even infuriate--friends and foes of the PTSD diagnosis."--Eric Caplan, American Journal of Sociology
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.
Industry Reviews
"Young offers a brilliant account of how post-traumatic stress disorder came into being. His detailed analysis of sessions with Vietnam veterans at Veterans Administration hospitals is one of the finest pieces of up-to-date medical anthropology in existence."
Publisher's Catalog - Ian Hacking
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