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This chapter examines the widely-held assumption that highly stressful and traumatic events are differentially remembered relative to events that are more affectively neutral or positive. This assumption is evaluated using data from a study of children's reports of the experience of a tornado that devastated the town of St. Peter, Minnesota, in March of 1998. The evaluation is multifaceted, featuring analyses of how much about the experience the children reported, the type of information they included, and the extent to which their reports were affected by the narrative style of their conversational partners, namely their mothers. It is shown that conversations about the tornado were longer than those about the nontraumatic events. Conversations about the tornado also had more breadth than those about the nontraumatic events. On the other hand, the level of detail provided about the traumatic and nontraumatic events did not differ. Similar patterns of relations between maternal verbal behavior and children's contributions were apparent for the tornado and the nontraumatic events.

This chapter examines the relation between cultural trauma and collective identity. It explains that cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks on their group consciousness, and that the scientific concept of cultural trauma illuminates an emerging domain of social responsibility and political action. It discusses a middle-range theory of the complex causes propelling the trauma process in developed and less-developed societies. It argues that the theory of cultural trauma applies, without prejudice, to any and all instances when societies have, or have not, constructed and experienced cultural traumatic events, and to their efforts to draw, or not to draw, the moral lessons that can be said to emanate from them.

This chapter discusses exposure to potentially traumatic events and the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), limitations of current knowledge and future research directions, and the psychometric assessment of PTSD in women. It argues that most current knowledge addresses biological sex differences in the prevalence of PTSD, without adequately accounting for gender differences (e.g., social influences) that potentially underlie variations in post-traumatic coping. The field awaits an increased understanding of the toxicity of the stressor (e.g., subjective level of fear or risk of serious harm or death in males and females exposed to the same trauma category) and the event characteristics, as well as the social, cultural, and economic factors influencing trauma exposure and post-trauma adjustment. Research to date has also failed to control sufficiently for age at exposure, the impact of chronic traumas (e.g., child abuse, partner abuse), attachment, and/or traumas involving betrayals of trust (e.g., child sexual abuse, abuse by intimate partners, sexual harassment, and stalking, which affect women disproportionately).

This chapter outlines the impact of stress and trauma on memory and its development. It begins by reviewing the relevant neural substrates related to the impact of stress and trauma on memory processing. It then reviews the literature on children's true memory for emotional information, both as it has been studied in relatively controlled situations (e.g., laboratory experiments) as well as in more naturalistic settings (e.g., medical experiences, hurricanes). Evidence indicates that children's memory for traumatic events, like their memory for more mundane experiences, is reasonably good for the core or central details, even though such recollections are reconstructive in nature. When recollections of traumatic memories are contrasted with nontraumatic memories in the same individuals, there is some evidence that traumatic events may be retained for relatively long periods of time (e.g., six years or more), but so, too, are non-traumatic events, especially if they are positive experiences (e.g., holidays, parties).

This chapter describes the multiple traumatic events encountered by emergency responders, drawing directly on interviews with emergency responders. While most discussed horrific events which contained much blood and gore, they were quick to add that these were not the events that “have left me sleepless.” The events that were most troubling for paramedics, firefighters, and police officers did not involve multiple deaths in a dramatic incident, but rather involved the death or injury of someone that the worker contextualized in relationship to others. These events connected personally with the emergency responder and often caused them to re-evaluate their own relationships, priorities, and achievements. These findings require a rethink of intervention models that focus on high profile, dramatic incidents and ensure that services are available to allow workers to discuss personal reflections of tragic, yet unsung events.

This chapter explores the concept of trauma and ways in which social workers can intervene. It discusses definitions of traumatic events and some approaches to assisting people who have experienced a traumatic event. While many professions intervene after traumatic events and provide support for survivors, the contribution of social work is the focus. The impact of traumatic events on children and their development is particularly highlighted. The chapter considers social work intervention along a continuum from individual to community and from a single traumatic event to a large-scale disaster.

This chapter examines the conditions under which traumatic events are remembered or forgotten, focusing on the frequently espoused belief that all trauma will be forgotten — a belief presumably based on the notion that too much emotion hurts memory. In particular, it reviews the evidence relevant to the debate about the extent to which trauma victims typically repress and then later recover memories of the traumatic event. In examining the reported evidence — from victims of childhood sexual abuse, concentration-camp survivors, war veterans, and alien “abductees” — the chapter distinguishes among phenomena that have more often collapsed in discussions of repressed memory as well as recovered memory. It argues that the forgetting of traumatic events can arise from quite “normal” phenomena — such as the absence of rehearsal or the initial lack of attention in some aspects of the event — instead of special mechanisms of motivated repression. The chapter also considers the laboratory research on forgetting mechanisms employed by people who have suffered through various types of trauma.

The chapter begins with a brief discussion of the need to consider ethnocultural status in mental health assessments and the limitations of current knowledge. It then reviews the impact of ethnocultural affiliation on the risk of exposure to potentially traumatic events (PTE) and the lifetime prevalence and conditional risk of PTSD in non-White, non Euro-American groups. This is followed by a discussion of how ethnocultural status is reflected in the expression of psychological injuries or symptoms and subsequent coping and help-seeking responses. The chapter also examines cross-cultural assessment issues and ethics. It ends with a discussion of current controversies and recommendations regarding future directions in the field.

This chapter discusses post-Nietzschean philosophers and other forms of the anachronous. One of these forms is within memory, which is seen as always productive of the traumatic event. It studies the sense of catastrophe that is outside chronology. This chapter also studies anachronoristics, the structure of language anachronistic, the use of flashbacks in the film 2046, and trauma.

This chapter presents developmental and attachment theory approaches to understanding the impacts of political violence on children and families. It argues that each developmental period provides unique resources and vulnerabilities. The chapter focuses particularly on infancy and adolescence. Both are periods in human life when the most intensive socioemotional, neurocognitive, and psychophysiological reorganizations take place. The chapter suggests an attachment theory approach as a way of increasing the understanding of fetal and infant well-being, dyadic interaction, and parenting in conditions of war and political violence. Research based on attachment theory also guides our understanding of adolescents’ socioemotional, cognitive, and behavioral responses to political violence and trauma. The chapter discusses the developmental and attachment theoretical implications for interventions with victims of violence and trauma-affected infants, adolescents, and their families.

This introductory chapter explains the theme of this book, which is about contemporary forms of public remembrance or memorial culture based on Gilles Deleuze's concept of desire. The book presents a series of case studies concentrating on certain contemporary traumatic events and the cultural activity of memorialisation. The chapters are structured around the legitimate and illegitimate forms of the three syntheses of desire: connective, disjunctive and conjunctive. It offers a paradigm of memorial culture being where memory either affirms, legitimates and advances a paranoid investment of social desire, or it stirs forth an open polyvocal one.

This chapter explores the social reality and function of remembering traumatic events such as the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack (9/11). It argues that the news coverage and mass media's appropriation and repetition of 9/11 images, along with the public's will to consume these, constitutes a repressive and authoritarian social organisation, one which comes from converting the libidinal effects and energies of memory labour into a habitual, albeit paranoid memory. The chapter discusses Gilles Deleuze's concept of reterritorialisation and explains that metaphysically engaging memory is what constitutes a reterritorialising memory.

This chapter reviews the mechanisms and features that are considered to be unique to Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir. It explains how animation is used in conjunction with the documentary format and how the construction of plot manipulates the understanding of events. It also looks at the tension between the general and specific that are maintained throughout Waltz with Bashir and examines how the Holocaust narrative is employed. The chapter summarizes the function and significance of Waltz with Bashir and examines the retrospective viewpoint of Folman's film, which creates a narrative of traumatic event first then memory later. It points out how Waltz with Bashir is framed within a recognizable historical and political setting that is specific enough to appeal to an interested audience, though vague enough not to overwhelm the spectator with facts and figures.

In various unreflected forms, the concept of "social memory" has been at the foundation of much modern archival organization and development. The U.S. National Archives, for example, were organized in part to assure that the "great American story" was properly remembered and told, something of paramount importance to many when the archives opened their doors in 1934. More recently, however, social memory has become a set of claims to identity, civil rights, and political position, contesting and complicating great national narratives. As such, the social memory problem presents a series of difficult problems about the kinds of “memory” archives can and should reflect as they acquire and preserve paper and digital documents. Social memory has taken on an authoritative role in historical understanding once reserved solely for the archive.

This chapter presents the emotional feelings of Robert when he was taking his son, with serious brain injuries, from a hospital, where he was initially admitted after the accident, to a rehabilitation center. Robert sat close to Erik, who reclined throughout the trip, in an ambulance, charting their progress on the road and linking present conditions to memories. The medical staff at the rehabilitation center remained more on the periphery, addressing residual or secondary problems such as removing trachea tubes or gastrointestinal feeding lines, and monitoring neurological changes that might signal a delayed reaction in the brain to the original traumatic event. Rehabilitation aimed to restore as much capability as possible in three months and to give an admittedly altered sense of purpose to Erik, through standardized protocols. The psychologists and social workers, who might have helped most in the momentous spiritual tasks of assimilating loss and of self-redefinition, focused principally on diagnostics and on preventing the psychological denial of disability.

This chapter discusses factors that are associated with (i) individual differences in crying and (ii) remarkable changes in an individual’s crying. In addition to gender and age, genetic factors very likely play a role, which in turn, may or may not be associated with personality characteristics such as neuroticism or empathy, one’s attitudes towards crying, and environmental factors and socialization. Factors that may have a strong (temporary or longer lasting) impact on an individual’s crying behaviour include one’s physical and psychological state, substance abuse and medication, exposure to traumatic conditions, transition to parenthood, and, probably, being in love/ engaged in a romantic relationship. The chapter argues that in order to understand why individuals or groups differ in crying, one has to focus on (i) differences in exposure to emotional stimulation; (ii) differences in the appraisal of potentially emotional stimulation; (iii) the individual’s crying threshold; and (iv) the degree of control over one’s tears.

This chapter is a photo essay on a dance performance that was inspired by a chapter in Life and Words in which Veena Das describes her struggle with ‘writing pain’, with the language of social science and its ability to describe violence and the pain of the traumatic event. Her meditations on pain become the starting point for an improvisatory dance project conceptualized by Ein Lall in which words, gestures, paintings and video projections were made to interact with each other to produce a flow of affects sustained by the bodies of the dancers. The chapter describes the multiple mediations through which passages in Das’s text become transformed to make the viewer and now reader experience what it is to let the pain of the other happen to your body.

This chapter considers the debates concerning the accuracy of repressed childhood memories. Many psychologists reject the notion that when psychologically disturbed people came to ‘recover’ memories for traumatic events that occurred in their childhood those memories were necessarily accurate, particularly if those memories had been entirely absent for years or decades until ‘recovered’ in psychotherapy.