The Evil Hours Read Online Free PDF Page A

disaster.From
The
Iliad
to the Great War poets to the literature of the Vietnam War, writers have been wrestling—and wrestling quite well, I might add—with the mysteries of trauma. In a sense, nothing has changed, and today’s trauma survivors can take great comfort in knowing that they are confronting the same horrors that Achilles faced four thousand years ago. Moreover, as practically any therapist will tell you, many of the long-term effects of trauma are the product of the emotional interpretations of events by victims—interpretations that are informed by the archetypal narratives that exist within a given culture, a process that is explicitly literary. As Robert Stolorow, an influential psychoanalyst, argues, “The experience of trauma is context-dependent,” meaning its essence lies in the subjective experience of the victim; in other words, their story as
they
tell it to themselves.
    By reading the stories of Ernest Hemingway, Alice Sebold, Tim O’Brien, and others, survivors are doing more than simply being entertained, they are reifying literature’s essential function: to remind us that we are not alone and in the process demonstrating how trauma was processed by previous generations. Medicine itself is founded upon a kind of storytelling; Siddhartha Mukherjee, in his “biography” of cancer,
The Emperor of All Maladies
, explains that “patients tell stories to describe illness, doctors tell stories to understand it. Science tells its own story to explain diseases.”A number of the trauma workers I spoke to over the course of writing this book called my attention to this point; namely, that part of trauma’s corrosive power lies in its ability to destroy narrative, and that stories, written and spoken, have tremendous healing power both for the teller and the listener.Stories in the form of literature help us to understand the enigma of survival in a way that no other technology can. In short, literature makes meaning out of chaos. One senior VA psychiatrist I spoke to, who has treated PTSD for over thirty years, went so far as to say that “the central image of post-traumatic stress is that of Ishmael at the end of
Moby-Dick
, floating atop Queequeg’s coffin, looking out over the vastness of the sea.”
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    For better or worse, the popular image of PTSD is derived primarily from the image of the war-torn American veteran. There are good reasons for this. The idea for what became known as PTSD sprang from a group of American veterans opposed to the war in Vietnam. This group, a clique within the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), embarked on a decade-long campaign to have the disorder officially recognized by psychiatry. Without them, PTSD as we know it would not exist. For the first nine years of its existence, in fact, what we know of as “PTSD” was referred to as “Post-Vietnam Syndrome.”Since its inclusion in the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, the bible of modern psychiatry, the condition has been somewhat demilitarized, but its connection to the most divisive American war of the twentieth century remains strong. This military connection continues into the present day.While most PTSD sufferers are not veterans and have never seen combat, the Veterans Administration, the second-largest department within the U.S. government, remains a global clearinghouse for PTSD research and has an annual mental health budget that hovers around seven billion dollars.
    I have included aspects of PTSD from other causes, including rape, genocide, torture, and natural disaster, but have focused less on childhood and domestic abuse and PTSD arising from events like open-heart surgery and traumatic childbirth. By narrowing my view, I hope to sharpen it to probe into the origins of what some future “biographer” might simply call the problem of adult post-traumatic adjustment. Part of my reasoning behind this