Psychological Trauma Research

Early Studies

Although the exponential growth of psychological trauma research is a relatively new phenomenon, the notion has been explored in scientific literature for [Page 495]more than a century. Often quoted among the historical sources for contemporary research on trauma, the vast number of railway disasters in Europe and the United States during the 19th century, for instance, led to large-scale victimizations that provided the context for reflections on the aftereffects of highly stressful events. As victims apparently unharmed during the accidents began to undertake legal actions against train companies for their ulterior incapacitating symptoms, extensive research developed in an attempt to determine the psychogenic or somatogenic nature of these difficulties. Authors such as John Eric Erichsen attributed the recurrent reports of fatigue, depression, tremors, and anxiety following train accidents to damages to the spine, but other medical authorities such as Hebert Page understood these symptoms as hysterical. By 1895, when Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer published their Studies in Hysteria, the role of traumatic events in the development of psychological difficulties was already well researched in scientific literature. Freud continued to explore the psychological consequences of traumatic events throughout his career, particularly in the context of World War I. When a significant number of soldiers came back from the front with disorders that prevented them from returning to fight, the war provided—along with railway disasters of the previous century—some of the first large groups of cases to explore the aftereffects of traumatic events. Like Freud, many medical authorities thus began to document the hallucinatory revival of painful memories experienced by soldiers.

Much of today's renewed interest in psychological trauma can be attributed to the convergence in the 1960s and 1970s of the feminist movements' growing attention to the psychological consequences of physical and sexual abuse along with the increasing evidence of high rates of stress disorders in returning combatants of the Vietnam War. At the same time that women's movements in the United States were promoting heightened awareness of the prevalence of rape, abuse, and domestic violence, Vietnam veterans began to suffer from a series of negative behavioral and psychological responses. These became the object of a significant number of studies and the “post-Vietnam syndrome” entered the scientific literature to describe the veteran's symptomatology. In 1980, the considerable interest in the aftereffects of abuse and warfare led to the inclusion of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) that defined a separate category of psychological disorders resulting from extreme life events. The recent decades have witnessed a constant expansion of scientific literature on psychological trauma. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in New York; the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; and the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, among many other incidences of large-scale devastations, now frame new contexts of research on the national and international scene as they heighten public awareness of traumatic events throughout the world.

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