In the 1880s, a French neurologist named Jean-Martin Charcot became famous for hosting theatrical public lectures in which he put young, “hysterical” women in a hypnotic trance and then narrated the symptoms of the attacks that followed. Charcot’s focus was on documenting and classifying these symptoms, but he had few theories as to their source. A group of Charcot’s followers—among them Pierre Janet, Joseph Breuer, and Sigmund Freud—would soon eagerly compete to be the first to discover the cause of this mysterious affliction.

Where Charcot showed intense interest in the expression of hysteria, he had no curiosity for women’s own testimony; he dismissed their speech as “vocalizations.” But Freud and his compatriots landed on the novel idea of talking to the women in question. What followed were years in which they talked to many women regularly, sometimes for hours a day, in what can only be termed a collaboration between themselves and their patients.

That collaboration revealed that hysteria was a condition brought about by trauma. In 1896, Freud published The Aetiology of Hysteria, asserting:

I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experiences, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili in neuropathology.

Herman, Trauma and Recovery, page 13

Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery, notes that The Aetiology remains one of the great texts on trauma; she describes Freud’s writing as rigorous and empathetic, his analysis largely in accord with present-day thinking about how sexual abuse begets trauma and post-traumatic symptoms, and with methods that effect treatment. But a curious thing happened once this paper was published: Freud began to furiously backpedal from his claims.

[Freud’s] correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients’ stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called “perverted acts against children” were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice. This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credibility.

Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients. The turning point is documented in the famous case of Dora. This, the last of Freud’s case studies on hysteria, reads more like a battle of wits than a cooperative venture. The interaction between Freud and Dora has been described as an “emotional combat.” In this case Freud still acknowledged the reality of his patient’s experience: the adolescent Dora was being used as a pawn in her father’s elaborate sex intrigues. Her father had essentially offered her to his friends as a sexual toy. Freud refused, however, to validate Dora’s feelings of outrage and humiliation. Instead, he insisted upon exploring her feelings of erotic excitement, as if the exploitative situation were a fulfillment of her desire. In an act Freud viewed as revenge, Dora broke off the treatment.

Herman, Trauma and Recovery, page 14

That is, faced with the horror of women’s experience, Freud rejected the evidence in front of him. Rather than believe the women he had collaborated with, and so be forced to revise his image of the respectable men in his midst, he chose to maintain that respectability by refusing the validity of his own observations. He would go on to develop theories of human psychology that presumed women’s inferiority and deceitfulness—in a way, projecting his own lies onto his patients.

Is this not how all supremacy thinking works? To believe that one people are less human or less intelligent or less capable is to refuse to see what’s right in front of you, over and over and over again. In order to recant his own research, Freud had to cleave his mind in two.

We must refuse to tolerate supremacists in our midst because their beliefs do real and lasting harm, because their speech gives rise to terrible violence. But we must also refuse them because they are compromised. They cannot trust their own minds. And so cannot be trusted in turn.

In documenting the history of our understanding of trauma, Judith Herman follows the investigations into hysteria out into the battlefield. During the First World War, psychologists began to observe symptoms of what was initially termed “shell shock” among soldiers. An early theory posited that the men suffered from some physical ailment, perhaps a consequence of repeated concussions caused by proximity to exploding shells. But it rapidly became clear that a great many of the men affected had suffered no physical harm and yet had been entirely incapacitated: they wept or howled, sat frozen and speechless, became forgetful and detached. In short, they behaved like hysterical women.

The first wave of responses to this behavior was unforgiving: accused of laziness and cowardice, the soldiers were shamed and punished. But another psychologist, W. H. R. Rivers, approached the problem more humanely, and arrived at a different conclusion:

[Rivers] demonstrated, first, that men of unquestioned bravery could succumb to overwhelming fear and, second, that the most effective motivation to overcome that fear was something stronger than patriotism, abstract principles, or hatred of the enemy. It was the love of soldiers for one another.

Herman, Trauma and Recovery, page 22

In other words, “hysteria” and “shell shock” were the same thing, both the result of psychological trauma, including the trauma of bearing witness to horrors which you were powerless to stop. Moreover, it was love for one’s comrades that offered the greatest defense against that trauma—both during the events themselves and in the days and years that followed.

Herman traces the ways that our understanding of trauma was discovered and then conveniently (in Freud’s case, intentionally) lost again, making yet future discoveries inevitable. Each time, it was survivors who drove awareness of the sources of trauma and its most effective treatments, forcing established practitioners of medicine and psychology to follow their lead. In the middle of the last century, survivors of sexual trauma formed consciousness-raising groups, while veterans of the Vietnam War created rap groups; in both cases, the efforts combined demands for better treatment alongside those for political awakening.

The purpose of the rap groups was twofold: to give solace to individual veterans who had suffered psychological trauma, and to raise awareness about the effects of war. The testimony that came out of these groups focused public attention on the lasting psychological injuries of combat. These veterans refused to be forgotten. Moreover, they refused to be stigmatized. The insisted upon the rightness, the dignity of their distress. In the words of a marine veteran, Michael Norman: “Family and friends wondered why we were so angry. What are you crying about? they would ask. Why are you so ill-tempered and disaffected. Our fathers and grandfathers had gone off to war, done their duty, come home and got on with it. What made our generation so different? As it turns out, nothing. No difference at all. When old soldiers from ‘good’ wars are dragged out from behind the curtain of myth and sentiment and brought into the light, they too seem to smolder with choler and alienation….So we were angry. Our anger was old, atavistic. We were angry as all civilized men who have ever been sent to make murder in the name of virtue were angry.”

Herman, Trauma and Recovery, page 27

Calls for healing and for reparation are the same call: to heal a wound is to account for the wounding. And anger is the appropriate response when that accountability is withheld. Anger, like love, can be useful: it is a shield against further harm, a defense against erasure. It is a weapon that tears down the curtains of myth and sentiment. It is the refusal to be forgotten, even as each new generation tries so hard to forget.