ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

[S]elf has begun on a very high level what should be a long, involved conversation about how we should understand the cultural trend of claiming trauma. At its most basic level, a traumatic experience is one that does psychic damage to its victims, rendering them unable to process the ordeal at a conscious level and thereby producing nightmares, waking terrors, and generalized emotional fragility. The classic example is a solider experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after witnessing horrors on the battlefield. But the concept has by now been expanded to cover a much wider range of emotional experiences, even the observation of another's trauma.

Self begins by pointing to a single uncomfortable fact: Whereas schizophrenia appears in many cultural contexts (while being understood in a multitude of ways), trauma does not. As far as Self is concerned, this indicates that, far from being "a timeless phenomenon that has affected people in different cultures and at different times in much the same way," trauma is primarily a "function of modernity in all its shocking suddenness."

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