Does Trauma Have a Race?

Abstract

Abstract The task of theorizing and “curing” psychological trauma posed an unprecedented challenge to Western medicine during World War I. In this article, I analyze linguistic and thematic patterns across influential French medical journal publications (1914–1919) to elucidate the dominant medical model of psychological trauma in white men. My approach highlights the centrality of la volonté (“willpower”), historically a critical aspect of Western masculinity, to experts’ conceptualization of trauma itself. I expand this analysis to consider key differences between the model of trauma in white men and the so-called “facsimiles of pathology” in North African soldiers. This comparative analysis illuminates a larger cultural schema of the healthy (white, masculine) self as discrete, sovereign, impermeable, and “justified” in its occupation of colonial spaces.