Trauma, Narratives, Institutions: Transdisciplinary Dialogs

This special issue expands on research into the trauma of betrayal by caregivers (Freyd, 1996) and institutions (Smith & Freyd, 2014) to argue that institutional betrayal can act as a lens through which to understand historical events and political processes. Indeed, the development of contemporary traumatology itself can be understood as a product of, and a response to, the profound institutional betrayals of the Vietnam War. In 1970, the then-president of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War association, John Barry, asked eminent psycho-historian Robert Jay Lifton to moderate “rap sessions” so that the veterans who were returning from Vietnam could process the trauma they had undergone (Lifton, 1973, p. 75). While ostensibly therapeutic in purpose, these sessions surfaced the incommensurability between the official US Vietnam War story and the narratives of veterans themselves. As Lifton noted regarding the sessions, where the personal and the political were often discussed in the same breath,

rage and potential violence occurred around the theme of betrayal, the veterans’ sense of having been victimized, badly used, or as they often out it, ‘fucked over,’ in having been sent to Vietnam. They spoke about having been misled, put in a situation where they both slaughtered people and suffered for no reason, and then abused or ignored on their return. (Lifton, 1973, p. 140)

The emergence of a vocal social movement of Vietnam veterans who opposed the conflict, and who presented their own accounts of grim and pointless violence, was undoubtedly a major fracture point in the official narrative of American citizenship. Many veterans experienced the gap between government propaganda and the realities and aftermath of warfare in the starkest terms of betrayal, laying bare the systemic inequality and racist politics that for many voiceless citizens was daily life. As one Vietnam war veteran testifies in the 2018 PBS docu-series The Vietnam War, “we were the last generation to trust our government” (Burns and Novick, 2018). This betrayal persisted for many veterans in their encounters with the psychiatric system, where veterans who disclosed witnessing war crimes, or who evidenced significant traumatic symptoms, were at risk of being misdiagnosed as psychotic (Young, 1997). Their accounts were outside the bounds of medical as well as social possibility.

This conflict between official narrative, expert discourse and personal testimony was a pivotal moment in American history and culture. Competing narratives of the Vietnam war revealed the blind spots in the hegemonic mode of American optimism and triumphalism; exposed the manufactured machismo of World War II and the Korean War; brought laypeople and veterans alike to the streets in collective protest against the state apparatus; with an indelible and lasting impact twentieth century culture, politics and psychological research and practice. The formulation of “post-traumatic stress disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III in 1980 was driven to a significant extent by the agitation and activism of the veteran’s movement (Herman, 1992; Young, 1997). Since that time, psychological research and theory has documented the significant role of betrayal in traumatization, including institutional betrayal (e.g., Andresen et al., 2019; Freyd, 1996; Smith & Freyd, 2013). This special issue suggests that institutional betrayal can be understood as a social phenomenon with significant political and historical force.

The re-envisioning of the confrontation between accounts of the Vietnam War offered by veterans on one hand, and the US state on the other, as a form of institutional betrayal foregrounds the power relations and structures that privilege some narratives over others. The subterranean power of institutions is central to shaping the stories that are told about those institutions and the events that they catalyze (Linde, 2010, p. 243). Military and police structures, racist apparatuses, national dead-ends, and patriarchal imperatives not only drove the Vietnam War but they also created the conditions for betrayal on a national and international scale, promulgating and authorizing frameworks of meaning that privileged institutional interests over counter-hegemonic accounts. Psychiatric expertise can be wielded in ways that individualize and pathologise, rather than acknowledge and address, the impacts of these structures and processes. This special issue approaches the concept of institutional betrayal as a transdisciplinary research framework that can be employed to consciously remove institutions from their sometimes-historical pedestals, and to reveal the psychological, cultural, and sociological foundations on which traumatization is enabled or ignored.¹

The papers in this special issue were first presented at the conference Trauma, Narratives, Institutions, which took place and was supported by the Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, in November 2019. The focus on the conference was on the ways in which institutionalized narratives influence the experience and understanding of trauma at the individual and social level. Institutions are foundational to social reproduction; broadly speaking, they can be understood as any social collective that persist over time. Narrative is fundamental to institutional longevity, as agglomerations of fictions, facts, and conversations reproduce institutional identity and memory. Many of the essays presented at the conference argued that these narratives reflect the power relations and ideologies of institutions and reveal the politics of the larger structures that govern them, which are in turn implicated in processes of traumatization and disempowerment.

Consider the roles of institutions and narratives that led to the traumatization of Vietnam War veterans: the organization of the US military and its presentation of the Vietnam conflict as a “just war”, the psychiatric positioning of veteran experiences and distress as ‘bizarre’ and psychotic, against a backdrop of cultural and media institutions that promulgated narratives of American exceptionalism and John Wayne masculinity. The institutional betrayal experienced by veterans occurred directly through their encounters with military and psychiatric authority and then indirectly, but more pervasively, in a cultural milieu in which their experiences did not “make sense”. The stakes of this conflict could not have been higher. In one American veteran’s words, “it was no longer a case of my government and I having different ideals [but] of a life and death struggle between me” and the government (Lifton, 1973, p. 141). Arguably, it was a key contributor to cultural and political divisions that still hold fast in the US.

The contributors to this issue show that there are other, more recent examples of the complex relationship between institutional narratives and traumatization; still, the example of the Vietnam War is ideal for delineating the controversial effects of narrative. Employed by institutions, narrative fuels medical and psychiatric diagnoses,² justifies political choices, delineates the bounds of institutional membership, and functions as a set of instructions that ensure “the daily work of the institution” can be performed by its members (Linde, 2010, p. 243). In this issue, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and film and literary theorists employ the various mechanisms of trauma theory, narratology, and history (Zinnari), postcolonial critique and gender studies (Kim), film theory and queer studies (Caprioglio), sociology and institutional theory (Smith), and psychology and history of science (Wu) in order to map, untangle, and eventually question the daily work of the institution, performed, seemingly uninterrupted, for decades.

Each of the contributors employs the concept of institution differently. Soyi Kim explores the tensions between two historically established institutions, that of US’s neocolonial occupation of South Korea and Korean patriarchal nationalism through Jane Jin Kaisen’s video work. Kim historicizes the US’ relationship with racist policies and misogynist institutions, using the example of a former STD treatment center for prohibiting the spread of STD among the US GIs as part of the “Clean-Up Campaign” during the 1970s, located in South Korea. By close-reading Jane Jin Kaisen’s artwork and the ambiguous colonial history of the US, Kim demonstrates that institutional memory is often masculine memory and proposes that the performance of “diasporic identities” challenges century-old institutions. Through a close analysis of Kaisen’s video art, Kim demonstrates that femicide, neo-colonialism, and bilateral institutional betrayal serve the masculine vision of nationalism.

Alessia Zinnari continues the examination of institutional narratives from a critical feminist point of view and historicizes Italian poet Alda Merini’s memoir of oppression during her initial, in 1964, and subsequent instances of hospitalization for ten years in a “mental asylum.” Via close-readings of Merini’s memoir and the medical treatment that she received, Zinnari draws out attention to the critical role of life and illness writing for bringing to the fore instances of institutional betrayal, and argues that being betrayed by a medical institution goes hand in hand with social stigmatization and a rejection from cultural and community institutions, too. Paying attention to the history of psychiatry and the unofficial narratives (both fictional and non-fictional) shows not only the multiple traumas that have been endured by individuals, but also the entanglements of psychiatric, social, and carceral institutions, “portrayed in society as […] places of care, but [being] in fact a place of sorrow, abandonment and violence.” Institutional betrayal, Zinnari shows, reveals unofficial narratives that re-name institutions as “false” and their affected dependents as “shattered subjects;” in that sense, the narratives produced offer “counter-diagnoses” whose articulation is the building block of resistance and whose recognition is essential for the path of institutional courage.

Harry Wu follows a similar route to exploring trauma and institutional memory. Wu historicizes the science that traced and diagnosed trauma from the beginning of the twentieth century, and argues that image-based art, such as photography and cinema, heavily influenced psychiatric trauma diagnoses, as well as societal constructs of what trauma is. Detailing the ways through which psychiatry has used narratives of images to offer diagnoses and communicate the effects of disorders, Wu discusses Lisa Cartright’s “neurological gaze” in relation to institutional power, and the supposed “mechanical objectivity” that this power is conveyed through. Institutional memory, Wu writes, is inextricably connected with the image-based technologies that provided ways for the individual to organize emotions and ultimately “altered the ways in which people make and articulate memories.” For Wu, to “critique the film-based science related to trauma studies, we need to reappraise the nature of film as a technologically mediated aesthetic form” and its use as an instrument of institutionally mandated narratives. Teresa Caprioglio is equally suspicious of visual media’s institutional presence. Examining queer representation and trauma narratives on television, Caprioglio first provides a review of TV queerness declaring that “increased visibility contingent upon trauma […] provides institutional justification – through the mass medium of television – for the acceptance of queerphobic violence and queer trauma as ‘to be expected’ or otherwise key to forming a queer identity.” The question that Caprioglio asks through her essay is does the institutionally sanctioned representation of traumatized queerness encourage LGBTQI+ inclusivity or does it normalize queerphobic violence and exclusion? This penultimate essay of the issue urges audiences to consider the manifestation of patriarchal structures through queer identities that are seemingly rooted in traumatic rupture and thus forgetting: as a priori traumatized and therefore vulnerable subjects, mainstream TV also hints at queerness as a debilitating and depoliticizing factor.

In the final essay of the issue we return to present institutional dynamics, where Robert Dean Smith takes on the challenge of untangling the various roles and power dynamics inherent in university institutions. Dean explores institutional inaction and accountability dispersal as structuring elements of what Veena Das has termed “critical moment.” In this essay, the instance that establishes an institution as the site of potential traumatization is structured by sustained inactivity, akin to what Smith and Freyd (2013) term institutional betrayal by omission. Specifically, Dean focuses on two such critical moments that took place at the Johns Hopkins University between 2018 and 2019, namely the attempt to establish an armed private police force throughout JHU campuses, and the de-funding of a number of interdisciplinary academic programs, most notably the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Graduate Teaching Fellowships (WGS). Drawing on sociological and anthropological criticism as well as his own interactions with JHU stakeholders, Dean provides a factual narrative of events, and interprets the symbolic as well as pragmatic activities performed by JHU at critical moments as forming “the conditions of possibility for trauma to arise” by explicit articulations of “dispersed accountability.”

Through a synthesis of institutional betrayal theory with the humanities, this special issue examines the psychological and social workings of institutional narratives and their impacts on individual wellbeing and collective empowerment. The essays included in this issue highlight the contributions of institutional activity to trauma and underline the importance of collective action in order to recognize, protest and heal from institutional betrayal. These papers are only the beginning of what the editors of this collection deem necessary work for the future developments of transdisciplinary trauma studies, as well as the consolidation of a more holistic approach to institutionally induced or tolerated traumatization that might simultaneously include contributions to history, sociology, literature, psychiatry, and policy-making. A consistently transdisciplinary approach to institutional critique has the potential to change narratives, and binaries, of inequality, further establishing links between clinical and scientific diagnosis and treatment of traumatization and social and political responsibility, citizenship, and ideology.

Notes

¹ For an analysis of military violence and college campus trauma from the point of view of institutional betrayal, see Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence–From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, Hachette UK, 2015. For an insightful analysis of the links between institutions, literature, and trauma, see Martin Willis’ Literature and Science, Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Lastly, for a historical discussion of military institutions, the construction of narratives, and PTSD, see Carrie H. Kennedy’s Military Stress Reactions: Rethinking Trauma and PTSD, Guilford Publications, 2020.

² Allan Young has famously traced the medical manifestation of PTSD during the Cold War and argues that its medical articulation is a result of institutional narratives and practices. See Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Princeton University Press, 1997.