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(1995) Human Studies 18 (4).
The time of trauma
Husserl's phenomenology and post-traumatic stress disorder
Mary Jeanne Larrabee
pp. 351-366
The phenomenology of inner temporalizing developed by Edmund Husserl provides a helpful framework for understanding a type of experiencing that can be part of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). My paper extrapolates hints from Husserl's work in order to describe those memories — flashbacks — that come so strongly to consciousness as to overtake the experiencer. Husserl's work offers several clues: his view of inner temporalization by which conscious experiences flow in both a serial and a nonserial manner; a characterization of process memory as distinct from representational memory; and the notion of telos, which takes human subjectivity as intrinsically changeable, for example, by means of a retroactive cancellation that would allow the PTSD experiencer to re-process the original meaning of the traumatic experience into a meaning that fits the current situation and thus allows a recovery.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/BF01318616
Full citation:
Larrabee, M.J. (1995). The time of trauma: Husserl's phenomenology and post-traumatic stress disorder. Human Studies 18 (4), pp. 351-366.
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