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.