Achilles' brain: philosophical notes on trauma

Abstract

The article investigates the relevance of the concepts of truth and truthfulness in culturalistic, psychoanalytical and neuro-biological theories of trauma from a philosophical point of view. The background for this is the recent claim of some brain scientists to produce an overall view of the human situation. This claim is shown to be false. The article comes to the conclusion that the subjective perception of a traumatic event is indispensable in order to understand the phenomena of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). History and other moral sciences are always concerned with the reconstruction of past internal perspectives. The example of trauma shows that this work is indispensable wherever brain research might lead us to.

Symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress among Child Welfare Workers Who Experience a Maltreatment Fatality on their Caseload

“…Both of these findings are similar to research which has found that workers who feel that they cannot do enough for their clients have higher levels of trauma symptoms (Horwitz, 2006). Other research has emphasized the important role that perception of the traumatic event plays in the development of PTSD (Hampe, 2007;Simmons, 2007). This finding has important implications for supervisors and administrators in the social work fields.…”

Mental realities—the concept of mental disorder and the mind-body problem

“…While being an inerasable part of the historic reality of the person, it cannot at the same time be accepted as truly belonging to oneself and therefore cannot be integrated into the persons' narrative reality (Jungert, 2013, p. 202). Thus, there remains a foreign body in the life story of the person that constantly causes flashbacks and induces the persons' suffering from his past (Hampe, 2007, p. 92).…”

“…Instead, by trying to describe psychological phenomena exclusively by using somatic terms and categories, they in fact eliminate those perspectives, because “nothing is true for somatic structures on their own, i.e., they cannot be treated as something with an internal perspective” (Hampe, 2007, p. 100). Saving the sphere of internal perspective, however, does not necessarily imply to invoke substance dualism.…”