Why Feminism? by Segal Lynne

Author:Segal, Lynne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509503674
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-03-11T10:05:00+00:00

Narratives in Context

Disputes over memory and trauma have kept pace with the growth of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), and the separate but increasingly popular psychiatric classification of Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder (PTSD); as mentioned above, these entered the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-III) in 1980. Surveying the cultural background to the extraordinary explosion of cases of MPD, primarily in the USA, Hacking notes that in the early 1970s there were only twelve cases of the disorder known in that country. However, by the mid-1980s there were over 6000, and the numbers have expanded exponentially ever since, with nine out of ten diagnosed ‘multiples’ being women.89 There has been a parallel growth in the diagnosis of the more general category of PTSD: seen as connected, in particular, with the psychological effects of repressing the horrors of combat, although MPD is currently understood by those who use the label as a similar type of post-traumatic effect to the repression of childhood sexual abuse. As Allon Young points out, belief in PTSD created new career prospects and resources for psychologists and psychiatrists, especially those treating the stresses and strains of war veterans.90 But it also meant that ex-soldiers often needed to mimic the trauma/repression model of psychological illness if they were to receive any psychological or material help.

Young and Hacking have both written of the ‘looping effect’ such notions of trauma and memory are likely to create on individual’s self-perceptions, when war veterans could obtain treatment and a special pension only if they showed the memory losses thought characteristic of PTSD (the less they could remember about the stresses they had suffered, the more help they could get): ‘The men who remembered very well the god-awful things that had happened were sometimes less able to benefit under this program, because PTSD was made to essentially involve not remembering but forgetting’.91 Without any doubt, one point which at least is clear is that when trying to understand the complexities of psychic life we need to remain attentive to the impact of particular cultural contexts upon individual processes of memory, and the way these help to shape the fashioning and refashioning of identity.

Here is a personal vignette. Frightened of the dark, as a young child who was frequently asthmatic and insomniac, I knew that if I could manage to creep along squeaky corridors, past the bedroom of my father’s mistress (the housekeeper), sidle into my parents’ bedroom, past the sleeping body of my father, and crouch beside the figure of my sleeping mother, all fear and wheezing would vanish. A state of blissful serenity descended. But if, aware of my presence, my mother accidentally awakened my instantly angry father, all would be lost. I would be shouted at, returned at once, in disgrace, to agitated sleeplessness in my own room and trouble the next day. If I eventually succeeded in waking only my mother (by silently stroking her arm), we would both creep into the bathroom, where I would be given a very strong sleeping tablet, usually a Nembutal.

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