Prelude
Trauma can — and after a certain point surely will — cause disability. However, we need to be cautious about all of this, because it’s easy to use this information in a way that reinforces the medical model and carceral systems. Trauma is a failure of community — and government — not a problem inside an individual. [. . .]
— Katie Tastrom, A People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice[1]
Not only does humanity suffer trauma, but also humanity inflicts trauma. Thus, humanity is always both traumatized and traumatizing. As the first — how humanity traumatizes — was my focus in “Part One” of this combined two-part post, which went up two weeks ago on October 28 of this year, so my focus in “Part Two,” which I am posting today, will be on the second — how humanity traumatizes.
Katie Tastrom
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Part Two: Humanity Traumatizing
The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives the following definitions for the noun trauma:
1
a: an injury (such as a wound) to living tissue caused by an extrinsic agent
b: a disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury
c: an emotional upset
2
an agent, force, or mechanism that causes trauma
In turn, the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us this about the origin of that same word:
trauma (n.): 1690s, “physical wound,” medical Latin, from Greek trauma “a wound, a hurt; a defeat,” from PIE *trau-, extended form of root *tere (1) “to rub, turn,” with derivatives referring to twisting, piercing, etc. Sense of “psychic wound, unpleasant experience which causes abnormal stress” is from 1894.
The impending ecological catastrophe bears witness to how extensively humanity has been and continues to be an appallingly destructive force rubbing nature raw and turning it into a wasteland. We, humanity as a whole, are a destructive force attacking nature, inflicting deep wounds upon it from which—here on earth, at the very least—it is unlikely ever fully to recover.
Humanity has inflicted deep and destructive “injury” upon the “living tissue” of vast numbers of organisms that grow in nature. Think, for example, of the systematic and intentional “de-forestation” of vast stretches of the earth’s surface that for millennia provided rich soil for the roots of trees and plants to sink themselves deep and grow strong and tall. Vast forests have all around the globe been replaced by cities, highways, grazing lands, and cultivated millions of acres to be worked over to exhaustion by agricultural combines in pursuit of never-sufficient monetary profits for a small percentage of the human population.
Of course, wars are just another instance of trauma that humanity causes. In the case of wars, however, it is not just some “other,” such as plants and animals of varied species, that is traumatized. Rather, it is also human beings themselves. The bombs that the United States dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, for example, did not just kill off plants and non-human animals, but also masses of human beings themselves.
As Katie Tastrom suggests in the lines I cited above at the very beginning of my “Prologue” to today’s post, humanity today also inflicts trauma upon itself by way of the entire consumer corporate system itself causing and ceaselessly expanding what she calls “disablement,” by which she means the way in which segments of the population are split off and “othered”—most especially by way of being placed, one way or another, in one or another form of prison, whether that be in the form of jails or in some other form, including that form constituted by public schools, placed in such prisons by the coercive power (as I call it) that defines itself precisely in such “othering.”
That combined devastation variously wrought on itself as well as on other beings such as plants and non-human animals is one major way in which ”the trauma of humanity” is the trauma that humanity itself is. It is one way in which humanity is not only itself subject to trauma, but also engenders massive trauma, thereby itself constituting the greatest conceivable “agent, force, or mechanism that causes trauma,” to hearken back to the dictionary’s second major sense of the word trauma: one way in which “we,” humanity, not only undergo trauma, but also inflict it.
* * *
Psychoanalysis, I would suggest, can […] thus help us to think, and perhaps witness, a new kind of event that is constituted, paradoxically, by the way it disappears.
— Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History[2]
People’s capacity to speak, Freud was to find, depended on their childhood experience (people grow into their past, Freud realized, more than they grow out of it).
— Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst[3]
The Tower-Keeper: [. . .] Everywhere we must continually turn back to where we always already are.
— Heidegger, “The Teacher Meets the Tower-Keeper at the Tower-Rise Door”[4]
Until and unless we are brought to face ourselves, we, both collectively and individually, will continue to be not only traumatiz-ed but also traumatiz-ing.
Please do all you can to face that fact!
Cathy Catch
[1] Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2024, p. 180.
[2] Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, p. 77.
[3] New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, p. 29.
[4] In Gesamtausgabe 77: Feldweg-Gespräche (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995), p. 176, in my own freely interpretive translation (the italics are in the original German text).