Healing Trauma, Preventing Violence: A Radical Agenda for Literary Study
Much of the social and personal destructiveness of trauma is due to its capacity to reproduce itself. In the common understanding, this reproduc tion is seen as a vicious circle in which abuse produces trauma, and then the traumatized victim becomes a perpetrator in turn, thus producing another traumatized victim who becomes a perpetrator, and so on, ad infmitum. While this vision is not inaccurate, in that most perpetrators have themselves been traumatized, the picture it paints fails to encompass the full scope of the damage done by trauma. Its limitation lies not primarily in its tendency to give the mistaken impression that most victims of trauma become perpetrators (most, in fact, do not [see Grand 3 but in the fact that the circle of trauma is much wider than j ust a relation of reciprocal causality between perpetration and victimization. The circle of trauma is more like a vicious spiral or vortex, comprising not only the perpetrators and victims of abuse but also the perpetrators and victims of most other acts of individual and collective violence. Further, trauma also includes within its vortex most supposedly unvictimized, law abiding citizens as well, whose participation involves a second order of perpetra tion and victimization that is responsible for perpetuating traumas of the first order and hence violence in general. My purpose in what follows will be, first, to explain how trauma? by threatening, depleting, or disintegrating identity?is the root cause of cultural, institutional, and structural violence as well as interpersonal and intergroup physical violence. I will then argue that the perpetuation of the physical violence (such as murder, rape, and acts of terrorism) that both produces and results from first order traumas is also perpetuated by second order traumas?lower grade, chronic erosions of identity that are produced by (and in turn function to reproduce) institutional, structural,