[Note: Friends of Justice is a personal blog. I speak only for myself.]
“How to account for trauma’s creep? Take your corners. Modern life is inherently traumatic. No, we’re just better at spotting it, having become more attentive to human suffering in all its gradations. Unless we’re worse at it—more prone to perceive everything as injury. In a world infatuated with victimhood, has trauma emerged as a passport to status—our red badge of courage?”
Far too many people get their scientific “information” from best-selling novels and popular movies and TV shows. As a result, there is a vast misunderstanding of trauma and a concurrent belief in baseless theories, such as repressed memory. The consequences have been disastrous. For example, many innocent people are rotting in prison for committing crimes that never occurred.
In this essay, literary critic Paruh Sebgal argues that the reliance on trauma as a plot device has also led to a lot of over rated literary and theatrical fiction Read the entire article in The New Yorker.
