Around 2009, I heard UCLA psychiatrist Stephen Marmer on the Dennis Prager Show recommend the book The Body Keeps The Score.
I bought it, I read it, and then it vanished in my thinking. I don’t think there was enough there for me to hold.
Danielle Carr writes for New York magazine, July 31, 2023:
* It’s bad news when your university creates a committee to ensure that you don’t publish any research papers without its approval. It’s worse news if the only other person facing similar scrutiny is a man investigating alien abductions. This was the situation facing the trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk in the mid-’90s when Harvard Medical School informed him that all of his future publications would be vetted for quality control. The other professor Harvard had slapped with a similar degree of oversight was psychiatrist John Mack, who had spent years studying people who claimed to have been taken by aliens and, by the mid-’90s, ended up believing them.
At the time, van der Kolk was in his early 50s and an academic star who looked the part: tall and winsomely thatched behind rimless glasses. “There was a sense that Mack and I were doing research that was equally wacky,” van der Kolk recalled. They did have one thing in common. Both studied people who claimed to have had experiences the scientists couldn’t definitively verify. But while Mack’s subjects gave detailed accounts of their alien encounters, van der Kolk’s patients had memories of horror that were more like fragments than coherent narratives, details that could lurch suddenly out of a dimly remembered past. The car-radio jingle that was playing before the explosion, the smell of the dollar-store deodorant he was wearing — these shards could hurl patients back into a state of panic. Traumatic memory, van der Kolk argued, is not so much a narrative about the past; it is a literal state of the body, one that can bypass conscious recall only to resurface years later.
This was the core of van der Kolk’s thesis: Traumatic memories are not ordinary memories. But then, trauma science is not ordinary science. By 1995, debates within traumatology had ignited a culture war that was beginning to devolve into a circus. Pruned of nuance by daytime shows like Oprah and Phil Donahue, van der Kolkian theories of traumatic dissociation had transmogrified into the “recovered memory” movement, in which masses of people, from well-meaning therapists to opportunistic grifters, coalesced around the idea that distinct memories of abuse could surface wholesale many years later.
As the idea of recovered memories went mainstream, growing ranks of middle-class women came to identify as traumatized, often by claiming to have resurfaced recollections of childhood sexual abuse. Patients with multiple personality disorder — with their shrink/co-author/agents in tow — sprang up to furnish harrowing accounts of the torture they had endured as children. People went to jail. It was fantastic television. Skeptics thundered that it was all gender radicalism and bullshit science, a culture of victimization — political correctness gone mad. As one of the researchers whose ideas formed a linchpin of the recovered-memory camp, van der Kolk was vulnerable to the backlash. After the psychiatry department closed down the trauma clinic he had spent 12 years building and put the quality-control order on his publications, van der Kolk stormed out of Harvard, shoulders chipped and with a determination to bend psychiatric orthodoxy back in his direction.
Nearly three decades after leaving Harvard, van der Kolk is currently the world’s most famous living psychiatrist and the author of The Body Keeps the Score, which has spent 248 weeks on the New York Times paperback-nonfiction best-seller list and counting.
* The Body Keeps The Score isn’t the kind of title you would expect to achieve cult status; it’s a technically dense overview of a theory of traumatic stress that once spurred 20 years of scientific controversy.
* In his ascent, van der Kolk has done for trauma what Carl Sagan did for the galaxy. Today, the prevalent trauma concept is fundamentally van der Kolkian: trauma as a state of the body, rather than a way of interpreting the past. This means that getting the patient unstuck from the past requires working with the body and teaching it to unbrace itself from a chronic “fight or flight” mode.
* Today, van der Kolk’s renown — built on translating neuroscience into language accessible to people searching for a cure for their pain — has placed him in a position straddling scientific celebrity and guru.
* But well into this echelon of success, van der Kolk remains palpably embattled. That first night, one attendee joked that, like everyone else there, he had come to learn from “his high holiness here, the holy man of trauma.” He gestured at van der Kolk, who was seated on the ashram’s dais. “Don’t call me that,” van der Kolk snapped back, suddenly on edge. “I’m not a holy man.” In response to questions indicating less than total buy-in, he may give the sense that he’s not exactly talking to you; it’s more like he’s letting you listen in while he corrects the errors of some invisible antagonist.
* As a traumatologist luminary, van der Kolk served as an expert witness for the prosecution in a series of clerical-abuse cases brought against the Catholic Church, testifying that it was scientifically plausible that a victim might not remember or recognize abuse until years later. Opposing the traumatologists were researchers like Elizabeth Loftus and Richard McNally, who argued that, actually, memory does work in a pretty straightforward way.
* Harvard Medical School undertook an investigation into the work on recovered memories done by van der Kolk’s research assistant; the data was later revealed to have been faked. When traumatology antagonist Richard McNally published Remembering Trauma in 2003, it was a victory lap at the end of the memory wars. Trauma had been reduced to its vulgarization and pronounced junk science.
* But the appeal of traumatic literalism is not so much its scientific rigor as its scientific sheen, which seems to promise objective, graspable solutions to our defining political crises.
* It was hard to think of a problem to which trauma therapy wouldn’t be the answer.
Danielle Carr is an anthropologist and historian of science at UCLA. Her piece is a historically informed account of how trauma became America’s dominant explanatory category, with van der Kolk as its central figure and primary beneficiary. Her abiding interest is less in whether trauma is real and more in what it means that the term has become such an important public concept, at once malleable and vague, ubiquitous and capable of explaining both highly personal experiences and large cultural and political events like immigration, refugee camps, and economic inequality.
I started thinking today about my past performance of suffering, which I usually experienced as genuine, and how it can be a useful way to get love and attention. Then I wondered if I was the only person in history to perform suffering to get love and attention. Then I wondered about the most famous example of suffering — the Holocaust. Over the past week, I’ve been writing about Peter Novick’s 1999 book, The Holocaust in American Life. It was brave stuff.
I want to be a brave man like Peter Novick. I want to write something valuable like Peter Novick did. I want to apply things I know to things yet to be published anywhere so that I can get status, attention and love.
I studied Economics at UCLA. Status claim! I know that supply and demand is a powerful explanatory and predictive framework. From The Holocaust in American Life, I know that after WWII, there wasn’t much of a demand for hearing the stories of Holocaust survivors. If you referred to the Holocaust, apparently, in 1946, nobody would have known what you were talking about. The “Holocaust” only became dominantly known as the “Holocaust” in the late 1950s. Then after the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961, demand exploded for Holocaust stories, but not just any Holocaust story, but particular Holocaust stories (according to Peter Novick’s book).
How did the demand for Holocaust stories shape Holocaust stories? I have no doubt that approximately six million Jews died in Europe during WWII, but the demand for information about this genocide has varied in time and space.
Then I started thinking about the modern centrality of trauma and how it has no equivalent in the history of halakha (Jewish law). I heard a rabbi say once that if something isn’t found in Torah, it’s not a real moral category. That statement doesn’t have to be 100% true to be interesting and useful. You have to stake your morality on something, and Torah is my moral foundation. If it is not in Torah, then, if I so choose, I can dismiss it, which is intoxicating.
There is a social construction of trauma as a professional and cultural category (which does not mean it is not real). Scientists criticize van der Kolk’s work for promoting pseudoscientific claims about trauma, memory, the brain, and development, and for popularizing ineffective therapies over evidence-based treatments. Richard McNally called recovered memory therapy, which van der Kolk’s work inspired, is the most serious catastrophe to strike the mental health field since the lobotomy era. The expansion of trauma as a category has served the interests of the mental health industry with the same structural logic that Jeffrey Alexander documents in the Holocaust memory apparatus. Carrier groups, in this case therapists, publishers, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance billing systems, created demand for a diagnostic category that expanded their jurisdiction over ordinary human suffering. The medicalization of grief, disappointment, and the ordinary difficulties of childhood is a real phenomenon with real costs, including the displacement of older frameworks, religious, philosophical, communal, that handled the same material with less pathologizing but sometimes more wisdom.
Moderns might say that Orthodox rabbis failed to recognize genuine, severe, and legally actionable harm because their formation gave them no adequate tools for it. Traditional Orthodox Jews might say that moderns sway with the winds and that their trendy theories of trauma are simply power moves by the mental health and legal industrial complexes.
I like what Martin Luther said. “Here I stand. I can do no other! So help me God.” My father said that at Glacier View in 1980. I was 14. I hoped to exploit my father’s fame to get a girlfriend. That didn’t work out for me, which was a trauma.
Besser Van der Kolk illustrates the alliance structure running through my entire essay series. He was recently banned from the Omega Institute after comparing what Israel is doing in Gaza to what the Nazis did, and reportedly asserting that Orthodox Jews prioritize their tribe over truth. The world’s leading trauma theorist, whose entire career rested on making Jewish suffering at Auschwitz the founding case for his somatic theory, deployed that framework against the Jewish state and then turned on Orthodox Jews.
The trauma framework was never philosophically neutral. It was a coalition technology, and when the coalition’s interests shifted, the framework shifted with them.
The most exhausting topic I’ve ever blogged about is rabbinic sex abuse. Many of the people I spoke to about it were not easy going and placid. They burned with anger.
I get that. One rabbi who read my work on this topic said to me, “I get the feeling that somebody abused religious authority in your life when you were young and you’ve been angry about it ever since.”
Bingo.
Halakha operates through categories that were developed before the modern psychological framework existed and that have no obvious place for trauma as a clinical or social concept. The relevant categories are ritual purity and impurity, legal testimony, financial liability, communal standing, and the prohibition on mesirah, the handing over of a fellow Jew to secular authorities. None of these maps cleanly onto the harm framework that trauma discourse requires. When a child or an adult is sexually abused, the halakhic questions that naturally arise in a traditional framework concern whether a sin was committed, by whom, against which prohibition, and what the legal consequences are for the perpetrator’s standing in the community. The psychological damage to the victim is not a halakhic category. It does not generate legal obligations in the same way that financial harm does.
This is not a failure of compassion in any simple sense. It is a failure of category. The rabbis who were least responsive to child sex abuse scandals were often not indifferent to suffering. They were operating within a framework that had no adequate conceptual tools for the harm described, combined with a framework that had very strong tools for protecting communal reputation and avoiding secular entanglement. Mesirah and the institutional interest in not generating hillul Hashem, desecration of God’s name through public scandal, filled the conceptual vacuum that trauma left empty.
The lay Jews who led the naming and punishment of abuse were typically operating inside the psychological and legal framework of the surrounding secular culture, where trauma is a well-developed category with institutional backing, legal recognition, and social prestige. They had absorbed Alexander’s trauma apparatus without necessarily knowing it. The victim’s psychological damage was legible to them in a way it was not to the posek reasoning from halakhic sources.
Orthodox rabbis were not reasoning badly within their framework. They were reasoning well within a framework whose tacit formation made certain harms invisible. The formation produced the blindness without requiring bad faith.
There is also an Alliance Theory dimension. The institutional interest in protecting the community from external scrutiny, and the transitivity logic that made accused community members allies and accusers potential threats, generated the perpetrator bias automatically. The rabbis who protected abusers were not necessarily corrupt. They were applying the standard biases of coalition members to a situation where the coalition’s interests and the victim’s interests were opposed, and the coalition’s interests were legible within their framework while the victim’s interests were not.
The sacred incomprehensibility framework that Novick documents as the Holocaust memory apparatus’s primary tool operated in the opposite direction here. Holocaust memory required that Jewish suffering be maximally visible, institutionally amplified, and morally central. Child sex abuse within Jewish communities required that Jewish suffering be minimized, institutionally suppressed, and kept from secular attention. The same communal organizations that built the apparatus for performing Holocaust victimhood externally were often the ones resisting the naming of victimhood internally. That asymmetry is worth an essay on its own.
