About The Blog

This blog celebrates contemporary and historical explorations of psychological trauma from humanistic and artistic perspectives.  It's foundational assumptions are based largely in the work of 20th century political philosopher Michael Oakeshott who wrote *The Voice of Liberal Learning,* a powerful defense of liberal arts education, and that of Harvard psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, author of *Achilles in Vietnam,* which is based on his work with Vietnam War veterans suffering from combat trauma.

Oakeshott wrote about liberal arts education as a means of engaging what he referred to as "the ordeal of consciousness." His view is that people often endure significant mental strife, generated by an innate need to continuously examine ourselves and the world around us. Simply put: In order to survive, humans need to learn, and learning is hard.

"A human life is not a process in which a living organism grows to maturity, succeeds in accommodating itself to its surroundings or perishes. It is, in the first place, an adventure in which an individual consciousness confronts the world he inhabits, responds to what Henry James called 'the ordeal of consciousness,' and thus enacts and discloses himself. This engagement is an adventure in a precise sense. It has no preordained destination: there is no substantive perfect man or human life on which he may model his conduct. It is a predicament, not a journey." [1]

However, we are not alone in our struggle because we can avail ourselves of the intellectual and artistic work others, from across cultures and throughout human history, who have left records of their own mental ordeals through intellectual and artistic contributions to what Oakeshott calls "the human inheritance." He believed that liberal arts education is a powerful to resource to help individuals address the the needs of their own consciousness--of a powerful, innate drive to understand ourselves and the world around us. The human inheritance doesn't provide us with definitive answers, but it does offer mental and emotional fellowship.  As we struggle to make sense of ourselves and the world around us, we can find great intellectual, emotional, and spiritual companionship in the attempts of those who have come before us.

In Achilles in Vietnam, Shay explores combat trauma faced by Vietnam vets during t and after the war, largely through the lens of The Iliad, Homer's famous epic poem about Trojan War. He concludes that the best approaches to understanding and treating their symptoms must include not only witnessing their struggles during and after the war, but also acknowledging the broader cultural and political forces that shaped their experiences as soldiers and exacerbated their suffering at home. He also discusses the necessity of social and cultural commitment to their healing:

"I cannot escape the suspicion that what we do as mental health professionals is not as good as the healing that in other cultures has been rooted in the native soil of the returning soldier's community. Our culture has been notably deficient in providing for reception of the Furies of war into community... We must create our own models of healing which emphasize communalization of the trauma...We need a modern equivalent of Athenian tragedy. Tragedy brings us to cherish our mortality, to savor and embrace it." [2]

This mission of this blog is based in the following assumptions:

• The human inheritance provides innumerable resources for understanding and addressing the mental suffering that all people face, by virtue of being human. 
•  Psychological trauma is an acute form of such suffering, brought on by a form of specialized and hard-won knowledge of human nature, and exacerbated by the social devaluation and marginalization of that knowledge.  
•  Trauma can always be a source of deep learning, individually, socially, and culturally. The lessons of trauma can contribute profoundly to the human inheritance, and should be available for everyone to share. 
• All types of learning can be traumatic at some level. The shattering of believes and assumptions about ourselves, others, and the world around us, can feel threatening and disorienting. 
• Powerful insights into what it means to be human, gleaned from human responses to trauma, can be found across a wide variety of academic, artistic, and clinical  traditions. 

[1] The Voice of Liberal Learning, by Michael Oakeshott. Liberty Fund. 2001. p. 8-9.
[2] Achilles in Vietnam, by Jonathan Shay. Atheneum. 1994.  p. 194