How trauma became a status symbol

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Cultural theorist Catherine Liu joins Christine Emba to discuss her book 'Traumatized,' which critiques the modern 'trauma script.' The epis

Key takeaways

• The concept of 'railway spine' in the 19th century served as an early precursor to modern psychotherapy, born from legal needs regarding railway liability.
• Trauma has become a commodified asset for the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) to build personal brands and social capital.

Main topics

• The Trauma Script
• Class Struggle vs. Identity Politics

Notable quotes

The political sphere is just mutual recognition.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a warning that prioritizing individualistic trau

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I'm Mitch Purse, and this week on Confessions of an Elite Athlete, I'm sitting down with Matt Fries, goalkeeper for the U.S. Men's National Team and New York City FC. We discuss how to prepare for one of the biggest moments of your life. You can hear it all by listening to Confessions of an Elite Athlete on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Who Speaker 4 (0:29) hurt you? We've all become familiar with the trauma script, the use of mental health issues as identity markers. People disclosing personal pain and psychological suffering has become ubiquitous in our culture and media. Publicly proclaiming your traumatic experiences and detailing your recovery and what you've learned, or how you're still suffering and deserve continued forbearance, feels like one of the ritual performances of our age. Speaker 4 (0:59) But it hasn't always been this way. And in fact, some would argue that it shouldn't be. Are we overusing the language of trauma? And if so, what effect is this having on our culture? I'm Christine Emba, sitting in for Sean Illing. And this is The Gray Area. Speaker 4 (1:25) My guest today is Catherine Liu, a cultural theorist and professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of a scathing new book, Traumatized, The New Politics of Public Suffering. Catherine is a bold voice from the left, incisive in her critiques of how political action is being eclipsed by performance. And while her positions are fresh, they aren't hot takes. They're well grounded in her research, history, and observations. Speaker 4 (2:15) Catherine, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Christine. Good to see you. You too. So I guess I wanted to just jump right into it. Sure. So Catherine, introduce us to the trauma script, which is a phrase that you use in your writing. What is it? And just, I guess, in brief, where did that particular script come from as we use it today? Speaker 1 (2:40) Our contemporary ideas of trauma are actually really linked to a late 19th century diagnosis of what happened to businessmen traveling on the British rail system, which was a brand new technology. People were terrified of the effects of speed on the human body even. And then there were railway accidents once the railways were built. And men, businessmen who traveled on these trains between London and the North, would often be shaken up to such a degree and experience such enormous fear that they would return home and be unable to prosecute their professions in the way that they had. And it became a question of litigation and medical knowledge when these men tried to sue the railway companies for damages, even though they weren't physically wounded. And railway spine was a diagnosis that... late 19th century British doctors came up with to describe the kind of neurasthenic shock that these businessmen would go into because of this shaking of the system, the shaking of the spine, they thought concussed these men and made them unable to work. This became a question of liability because if you were a wealthy businessman, you were in a railway accident, you came home, you couldn't work, you were suffering from lying around in bed, flashbacks, what we would call flashbacks today. And the railway companies had their doctors, the businessmen had their doctors, and they came up with this idea of a physical thing that happened to your spine. during the accident that made you unable to resume your normal activities. Speaker 4 (4:27) Companies would say, well, Speaker 1 (4:29) okay, Speaker 4 (4:29) we Speaker 1 (4:30) can't find anything that's like physically wrong with you. You have railway spine. So you should just go to your doctors and talk about this and then you'll get better. This is like the inadvertent invention of psychotherapy that came out of this very specific notion of damage and shock to the body of a wealthy, competent, professional man. And then they need medical treatment and they can sue for damages and liabilities from a very powerful company that was controlling a new technology. Christine, you have to imagine like people not traveled faster than horse cart. Speaker 4 (5:07) Suddenly they're traveling 35 miles an hour. I mean, that seems stressful to me. I can imagine feeling a little bit traumatized. But okay, modern technology creates modern afflictions. But surely trauma occurred and injury occurred, not just in wealthy, you know, businessmen traveling for the first time, but even in, you know, non-capitalist early societies. I mean, we're all still talking about the movie The Odyssey. even for soldiers or factory workers or farmers, what was the difference between, you know, the injury that they endured, which presumably was traumatic to the body and mind, and this new idea of trauma? Like, why do we think of the two Speaker 1 (5:52) separately? So suffering and pain and shock and a blow of fate were given meaning in human civilizations well before the invention of the railroad because they had a... A social and religious meaning. A blow of fate could be punishment from God, punishment from the gods, if you like. But it wasn't necessarily seen as psychological. Speaker 2 (6:20) The Speaker 1 (6:20) question of the inner life was not something that people thought could be repaired. It was something that you had to endure. And endurance and persistence itself becomes of high value in cultures where there's a deep sense of communitarian connection. And this idea that there's a recovery, that there's a treatment, that arises when trauma is secularized, when it's given meaning through medical and legal institutions. If we could just talk about how Christopher Nolan psychologized the Odyssey, all of the blows of fate that Odysseus endures. are attributed to the anger of the gods and to all of these different things that he doesn't do with regard to the gods. Christopher Nolan made that story, though, about Odysseus' PTSD. He did such bad things in Troy. He felt so guilty. He needs to work it through. And Charlize Theron is like a yoga. teacher, Bali, new age healer, who's going to help him get in touch with his feelings because he's trying to forget, eating the lowest root. And finally, when he can get out, when he understands that it's because of his trauma about what he saw at Troy, he can forgive himself and he can go home to his wife. Now, just think about this. Like there's this powerful figure of a seductive, desiring goddess that comes from like 2,000 years ago, more, like 4,000 years ago, oral history. She's reduced in Hollywood by Christopher Nolan to a therapist. Speaker 4 (8:02) Yeah. And I think maybe the distinction worth pulling out there also, in comparison to injury just being a blow of fate that you deal with, is that If you're thinking about it as, well, this is trauma, a medical diagnosis, it's personal and you can personally pay someone to fix it for you. And you can presumably also identify yourself as a suffering person, even if you're actually generally part of a winning group. I mean, rich rail men can say, well, I was hurt too, as opposed to. only workers being able to say that or having injury be something that happens, you know, to the poor that we have to address there. Does that, am I reading that right? Yes, Speaker 1 (8:52) yes, absolutely. And then there are all these accounts of people dropping dead in front of the looms of Lancashire, right? We don't think of them as having, or their families as having had a traumatic experience. That's just working class life. Speaker 4 (9:09) I mean, E Speaker 1 (9:10) .P. Thompson tries to paint a portrait of that in the invention of the English working class. And it's always like macroeconomic. It's always like statistics, numbers, psychology. The outrage builds when you think about the... mass suffering, not individual suffering. It's very hard to pull out the stories because many of them were like nameless Irish migrants from escaping the potato famine and then working 16-hour days in factories. So I just think about injury, like workplace injury and the Industrial Revolution, and then this very specialized trauma that has to do with a man who feels irreplaceable. whose work capabilities become a question of money, investment, liability, either for his company or for himself, the risk that he undergoes becomes monetized. When you have someone drop dead in front of a machine, you move them aside and you put another person in front of that machine. We don't live with that kind of industrial capitalism anymore. quite as raw. But I think the long-term effects, damaging effects of stress