The Harmony of Illusions - Hardcover

Young, Allan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691033528 ISBN 13: 9780691033525

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1995

Synopsis

As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder." Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view, PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomenon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions," a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilizing these efforts.


This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the transcripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

About this title

About the Author

Allan Young is Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, in the Departments of Social Studies of Medicine, Anthropology, and Psychiatry.

From the Back Cover

"Young offers a brilliant acount of how post-traumatic stress disorder came into being. His detailed analysis of sessions with Vietnam Vetrens at Vetrens Administration hospitals is one of the finest pieces of up-to-date medical anthropology in existence."--Ian Hacking, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto

From the Inside Flap

"Young offers a brilliant acount of how post-traumatic stress disorder came into being. His detailed analysis of sessions with Vietnam Vetrens at Vetrens Administration hospitals is one of the finest pieces of up-to-date medical anthropology in existence."--Ian Hacking, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691033528
• ISBN 13: 9780691033525
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 328