Abstract
Following the growing critique of the use of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in post-disaster interventions, a new type of intervention aimed at building resilience in the face of traumatic events has been making its first steps in the social field. Drawing on fieldwork of a resilience-building program for pre-clinical populations in Israel, we analyze the paradoxes and ambiguities entailed in three inter-related aspects of this therapeutic project: The proposed clinical ideology aimed at immunizing against traumas; the discursive and non-discursive practices used by the mental-health professionals; and, participants’ difficulties to inhabit the new resilient subject. These contradictions revolve around the injunction to rationally handle emotions in response to disruptive traumatic events. Hence, the attempt to separate between a sovereign rational subject and a post-traumatic subject is troubled in the face of experiences of trauma and social suffering. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these difficulties reconstitute unresolved tensions between mimetic and anti-mimetic tendencies that have been pervading the understanding of trauma in the therapeutic professions. Finally, we discuss how the construction of the resilient subject challenges the expanding bio-medical and neoliberal self-management paradigm in mental health.
Original language | American English |
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Pages (from-to) | 56-74 |
Number of pages | 19 |
Journal | Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry |
Volume | 41 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Mar 2017 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This study was funded by the Shaine Center, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York.
Keywords
- Israel
- Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
- Resilience
- Self-management
- Therapeutic interventions