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That’s because it makes them focus on the threat and ignore other things like hunger or cold. Humans are programmed to respond with fear and anger when they’re in danger. Rivers promoted the idea that brave soldiers could suffer from “combat neurosis.” Advances in psychological trauma continued after WWII and Vietnam, with researchers focusing on sexual violence and domestic abuse as well as rape victims who suffered psychological trauma from these experiences. However, a British physician named W.H.R. Traditionalist thinkers believed that shaming those soldiers back into the field would cure them of their supposed cowardice. Soldiers’ reactions to battle were similar to what they had observed in abused women. Various psychologists studied hysteria in the late 19th century, and then again after World War I. However, he later realized this wasn’t true because many women who came into his practice had no history of child abuse but still suffered from hysteria. This idea became rooted in modern society when Freud published The Aetiology of Hysteria, which stated that child abuse was the root cause of all cases of hysteria. His followers (particularly Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud) found that hysteria was caused by psychological trauma, which led them to find ways to cure it through psychotherapy. He didn’t want to discuss what caused a patient’s symptoms and focused more on their physical manifestations instead. In the late 19th century, Jean-Martin Charcot performed studies on hysteria that were well received by his peers. The political environment can either support or impede the study of psychological trauma. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.1-Page Summary of Trauma and Recovery The Study of Trauma – A Brief History Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma.
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