Trauma, Culture, and Metaphor

Pathways of Transformation and Integration

John P. Wilson, Jacob D. Lindy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135926113
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Trouble de stress post-traumatique (TSPT)

In Trauma, Culture, and Metaphor, John Wilson and Jacob Lindy explore the language of both individual and collective trauma in an era dominated by globalization and interconnectedness. Through lucid, careful discussion, this important book builds a bridge between the etymology of trauma-related terms commonly used in Western cultures and those of other cultures, such as the Burundi-Rwandan ihahamuka. It also provides the clinician with a framework for working with trauma survivors using a cross-cultural vocabulary—one often based in metaphor—to fully address the experienced trauma and to begin work on reconnection and self-reinvention.

1 Understanding Psychic Trauma and Metaphors in an Era of World Globalization

Introduction

In centuries and decades past, especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the study and scientific analysis of psychological trauma revealed that it was becoming clearer to clinical investigators and research scientists that there were universal expressions of posttraumatic and complex self- and personality states after trauma but also multiple languages and metaphors cross-culturally for understanding them (Wilson, Friedman, & Lindy, 2001).

Intellectual inquiry, extending and broadening knowledge from that critical and historically pivotal scientific turning point on psychological trauma and abuse (1895–1945), the seminal European works of Freud (1895, 1914, 1923), Janet (1889), and Oppenheim (1895), amongst others, working respectively in Austria, France, and Germany, provided astute insights, discrete and clinical informative analyses concerning psychological trauma that would eventually transform dormant medical and psychological sciences in the study of traumatic stress syndromes. However, their medical discoveries did not converge and were subject to severe criticisms by prominent researchers, such as Jean Charcot in Paris in his investigations of hysteria.

Their scientific approaches ultimately laid new psychobiological bases of posttraumatic reactive patterns. Nevertheless, their seminal works began to establish and identify a structural-conceptual platform of intrapsychic dynamic processes that would allow future investigators a clear, useful, and heuristic pathway to follow. Later, these same scientific-medical patterns of prolonged stress reactions would reveal a coherent set of posttraumatic patterns of adaptive behavior.

The basic evolutionary stage was set in place for subsequent theoretical and scientific-empirical integration. Eventually, the findings would redirect professional inquiries in a set of complex investigative discoveries that recognized posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) phenomena, which later became a diagnostic entity of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in 1980. In less than a century (1850 to 1918), the long anchored history of psychic traumatic experiences became a new medical-psychological phenomenon, one that would forever transform empirical knowledge and scientific studies in the 20th century.

Moving forward, in the 20th and early 21st centuries these empirical, research, evidence-based, and clinical discoveries of traumatic stress processes created medical and scientific foundations and unique groundings that advanced psychological insights worldwide and culminated in deeper wisdom after subsequent global wars, catastrophies, and conflicts (i.e.,World War I,World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.). In time, other events throughout the world permeated two centuries of disharmony of the most unimaginable nature, including ethnic genocides (e.g., Bosnia, Cambodia, Congo, Croatia, Liberia, Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Syria, etc.), refocused medical, psychological, and political/humanitarian investigations and new knowledge in empirical studies. Later, within this same time period, terrorism, unbridled ruthless aggression, and, ultimately, world threats of mass destruction of the human race by nuclear holocaust, acts of terrorism, constitute to this day an omnipresent threat to peace and security on a worldwide basis.

Trauma, Culture, and Metaphor: Pathways of Transformation and Integration Through Metaphoric Expressions of the Human Condition

This book is an attempt to explore how the experience of overwhelming stressful life events, psychic trauma, articulates within the inner and outer worlds of basic brain functions and psychological processes, cultural complexities and norms, and results in verbalized linguistic metaphors. These metaphoric expressions include conscious and unconscious mental processes and the intrapsychic encodings of traumatic experiences and as such have illuminated the Rosetta Stone for deciphering recovery from PTSD in our times. How does this therapeutic discovery process occur?

Orientation to the Book and Chapters

This first chapter is a foundation for those that will follow, especially in the initial forward and the foundational, critical Chapters of 1–5. We attempt to identify, analyze, and pursue inquiries into the linkage between traumatic experiences, their encoding in memory, their expression in behavioral manifestations and verbal metaphors that reveal or disclose to patients, clinicians, researchers, or others their relevance to posttraumatic psychological existence. Posttraumatic metaphors are lexical, real, and the product of intrapsychic mental processes. Traumatic metaphors, simply said, are the verbal expressions of deep internal states rooted in the complex, cognitive-emotional processing of these very difficult life experiences.

In basic respects, our approach is a psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, psychological-metalinguistic analysis that seeks to build on empirically research-grounded scientific data (i.e., evidence-based). In brief, it is a top down-bottom up approach to discovery and further clinical knowledge.

Trauma and PTSD disrupt the continuous flow to internal psychological processes at many levels. In the fractured state that follows trauma, the survivor invents new language, often disturbing metaphors that we do not want to hear, but that truly convey his or her posttraumatic condition (Chapters 2 and 3). The clinician, broadened by application of the Hero myth (Chapter 4), and the cross-cultural concept of the Nurturing Guide (NG) (Chapter 5), addresses these trauma metaphors in exploratory and healing-promoting manners (Chapter 6). In the process of recovery, the nature of each survivor's trauma metaphor changes in the direction of mastery and cultural re-integration (Chapter 7). In groups of trauma patients (in treatment), where leaders attend to trauma metaphors, there is a different quality to the depth and meaningfulness of exchanges than in groups that minimize them (Chapter 8). All this leads us to recommend some changes in how we currently teach about trauma and its recovery (Chapter 9). Finally, in Chapter 10, we chart out some considerations for future research and educational efforts that may facilitate changes and innovations in educational curriculum.

Rooted in linguistic analysis, metaphors can and do provide pathways to discovery, recovery, and psychic integration. At this point in time, however, we believe that the hypotheses-generating questions are more important than our reflective questions about diagnosis and clinical orientations. In this sense, there is no future expansive vision of these complex intrapsychic-psychobiological processes without new creative paradigms of the possible organismic complexities. How do the systems of mind-body synergize posttrauma? What is the basic connection between internal biological processes and their psychic representations in verbal metaphors and mental states?

The Historical Advent and Scientific Role of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): Global Impacts and Changes in Scientific Research and Clinical Directions

As a result of the historic and global-changing world and ubiquitous, traumatic events, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as a centrifugal, mostly American-Western psychological phenomenon, became an official diagnostic criteria subsumed under the rubric of Anxiety Disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual revision (DSM-III) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA, 1980). Beyond doubt, from then to the present time (2012), the study of PTSD, in all of its facets, has become center stage in scientific investigations in the behavioral sciences, medicine, neuroscience, anthropology, and other disciplines. The term PTSD is now a household word in America, Europe, and elsewhere and appears in documentaries, movies, and television talk shows and media news reports on war traumas, disasters, and acts of terrorism. In the United States, there have been many excellent documentaries on the personal realities for Iraqi and Afghani war veterans suffering from PTSD as well as TBI (traumatic brain injury). These reports concretize psychic reality.

Portals of Entry (POE) to the Inner World of Psychic Trauma

We believe that “opening our eyes” to new posttraumatic language and ideas, e.g., to trauma-specific metaphors (TSM), trauma-specific transference (TST), trauma-specific complexes (TSC), trauma-specific archetypes (TA), etc., offers a new and valid cross-cultural method to find portals of entry (POE) into the central impact of trauma to self-processes (Wilson, 2006). Looking beyond what we at first could not see, trauma in its cultural dimensions and the effects of traumatic and overwhelming experiences to the integrity of persons, no matter where they lived in the world. How, then, do we sort out the trauma-culture relationship in terms of its impact to self- and complex personality processes?

Trauma-Specific Metaphors (TSM)

The central and critical questions facing us, in our scientific journey, are ones of trauma focus.What is the relation of culture to the inner psychic understanding of traumatic experiences? In a relevant article, to quote Smith, Lin, and Mendoza (1993):

Humans in general have an inherent need to make sense out of and explain their experiences. This is especially true when they are experiencing suffering and illness. In the process of determining whether a particular explanation and associated treatment plan will make sense to the patient.Numerous studies in medical anthropology have documented that indigenous systems, such as ours, have health beliefs and practices persist and may even flourish in societies after exposure to modern Western medicine.

(p. 38)

Pathways of Metaphor in Daily Life, Social Relationships, and Psychotherapy

The Nature of Trauma-Specific Metaphors (TSM): They Are There for Everybody: Just Pay Attention

What are common trauma metaphors and how do we identify them in usual life encounters, clinical practice, research interviews, and assessment protocols? What makes them unique and so important to our understanding of psychic trauma? Moreover, how do psychological and culturally-tied metaphors express themselves in interpersonal relationships and everyday life? How, specifically, are they manifest in psychotherapy? In this regard, the definitions of trauma archetypes and trauma metaphors and archetypal traumatic experiences are provided in Tables 1.1 and 1.2, and we will explore their essential relevance in later applications and chapters in this book. These initial tables provide a foundational basis of understanding how universal, archetypal traumatic experiences become the germinal ground for trauma-specific metaphors.

The Essential Definitions of Trauma Metaphors

The critical and essential definitions of trauma metaphors defined in Table 1.2 have direct applications to all forms of psychotherapy: (1) cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT, CPT, PE); (2) psychodynamic treatment (analytic and insight-oriented); and (2) group-oriented counseling approaches or treatments (see Wilson, Friedman, & Lindy, 2004). What are the dimensions and components of trauma metaphors in psychotherapy? And how do they relate to modern CBT, CPT, and other current clinical trials of medication and psychotherapy or other non-traditional forms of healing?

A critical question is how to decode and apply trauma metaphors to psychodynamic and other (i.e., cognitive-behavioral, CBT, CPT, or EMDR, etc.) psychotherapeutic treatment processes? How to use them in prolonged exposure (PE) treatments of CPT or CBT? Are there mythological and metaphorical pathways to undiscovered traumatic phenomena and their expressions in language? How does this assumptive reality of PTSD appear in concrete forms of psychotherapy? How to generate empirical, evidence-based

Table 1.1 Trauma Archetype (Universal Forms of Traumatic Experience)

---

Dimensions:

1. The Trauma Archetype is a prototypical stress response pattern present in all human cultures, universal in its effects and is manifest in overt behavioral patterns and internal intrapsychic processes, especially the Trauma Complex.

2. The Trauma Archetype evokes altered psychological states, which include changes in consciousness, memory, orientation to time, space and person and appear in the Trauma Complex.

3. The Trauma Archetype evokes allostatic changes in the organism (posttraumatic impacts, e.g., personality change, PTSD, allostatic dysregulation) which are expressed in common neurobiological pathways.

4. The Trauma Archetype contains the experience of threat to psychological and physical well-being, typically manifest in the Abyss and Inversion Experiences.

5. The Trauma Archetype involves confrontation with the fear of death.

6. The Trauma Archetype evokes the specter of self-de-integration, dissolution and soul (psychic) death (i.e., loss of identity), and is expressed in the Trauma Complex.

7. The Trauma Archetype is a manifestation of overwhelmingly stressful experien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Psychosocial Stress Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Understanding Psychic Trauma and Metaphors in an Era of World Globalization
• 2 The Language of Trauma in Metaphors
• 3 Metaphor and Disturbed Internal Posttraumatic Psychic Structures
• 4 Trauma Recovery: Perils in the Journey from the Abyss of Trauma to Self-Integration
• 5 The Nurturing Guide (NG)
• 6 Trauma-Specific Metaphors (TSM) and Mapping Clinical Pathways
• 7 Transforming Metaphors and Metaphoric Transformations of Trauma
• 8 New Configurations: Trauma Metaphors and Cognitive Behavioral Therapies (CBT)
• 9 Traumatic Stress Disorder Pedagogy: Teaching the Complexity of Posttraumatic Intrapsychic Processes, Trauma Metaphors, and Adaptive Mechanisms in Psychotherapy
• 10 Future Implications: Metaphors of Trauma and Where Do We Go From Here?
• Bibliography
• Index