Description
Though psychic trauma may be an essential part of the human condition, in recent decades its interpretation via the PTSD diagnosis has had profound political consequences. This article examines the political roots of PTSD’s codification in 1980’s DSM-III and the disorder’s subsequent impacts on American foreign policy discourse, drawing on historical analysis and comprehensive datasets of presidential papers and debates from 1969-2016. Its chief findings are twofold. First, even though PTSD was added to the DSM in 1980 and emerged in academic trauma studies during the 1990s as a potent cultural script, American leaders only began commonly referencing the disorder and its cognates in public rhetoric around the 2008 presidential cycle, five years after the US invaded Iraq. But while PTSD was introduced in these discourses most explicitly in the context of Democratic criticisms of the Iraq War, it has since become a common trope across the political spectrum. Second, critical examination reveals that increased attention to PTSD has served to blur important lines around the concept of war. The PTSD diagnosis and the therapeutic governance it inspires have subtly eroded war’s implicit spatiotemporal limitations, extending its consequences into an unknown future and outside the warzone, onto the home front. Further, this erosion has blurred the pivotal distinction between victim and perpetrator, with profound normative consequences. These findings not only problematize key assumptions in American foreign policy discourse, but also help reveal the larger fragility of psychic assumptions embedded in key International Relations’ theories.
