Trauma as Explanation

 Since becoming a parent—or really starting a bit before then—my sister has immersed herself in the writings of an interconnected group of thinkers: experts in the psychology of child development and preadolescent trauma like Gabor Maté, educational theorists who are developing more contemporary forms of the Montessori method, and a host of less well-known writers, bloggers, vloggers, TikTokers, and cogitators expounding the concept and methodology of "gentle parenting." 

The common thread running through all these sources is a belief in the capital importance of autonomy in the growth of the healthy personality. To this way of thinking, every person needs autonomy, including—if not especially—small children. They therefore should be allowed to exercise the utmost degree of free personal choice consistent with their own and others' safety, and trauma is what results when someone diminishes and violates that freedom and personal autonomy. 

And if loss of autonomy is the root of all trauma, according to this theory, trauma in turn is the root of all illness, both personal and societal. You might be tempted to caveat that sentence by adding the adjective "mental" before "illness," but the advocates of these theories would not necessarily agree to this restriction. According to them—at least in my sister's telling—it is possible to explain a certain number of cancer diagnoses and other somatic ailments through the traumatic violations of personal autonomy suffered by the patients. 

I don't have the statistical findings at hand to either confirm or dispute these theories. I do know that my nephew has been the recipient of much gentle parenting based on these theories, and if you are willing to permit me a sample size of one, then the approach seems so far to have an excellent track record of raising a happy, healthy and well-adjusted kid. On the strength of his life alone, I've become an enthusiastic booster for my sister and brother-in-law's parenting methods and insights.

I am a somewhat less faithful disciple, though, when it comes to the broader thesis that trauma can be used to diagnose all personal and collective ills. The notion that various physical ailments, for instance, such as cancer, might be caused by interpersonal trauma seems to run afoul of Susan Sontag's warning against treating "illness as metaphor" for something other than itself. It risks taking us back to the school of thought she spent so many pages criticizing: the mid-century psychoanalytic belief in the power of the "cancer personality," for instance, to make people sick seemingly by their own choosing. 

As this example suggests, a psychological theory that starts by seeking to build empathy for sufferers can end by turning into yet another means of blaming the patient for their own disease. After all, if cancer was caused above all by sexual repression, as some twentieth century psychologists maintained with perfect seriousness at the time of Sontag's writing, then it was presumably society's fault for stifling people's natural drives, and it was also within the individual's power to liberate themselves from such restrictions (and their fault if they failed to do so). 

These days, psychologists appear to have moved on from the simplistic pseudo-Freudian focus on sexuality as the root cause of all human behavior, and embraced a broader set of concepts: autonomy as a core human need, and trauma as what happens when that need is denied or violated. But still, using these concepts to account for bodily ailments leads to much the same conclusion as the school of thought Sontag was criticizing. 

When someone gets cancer, the modern theory just like its predecessor prompts us to go looking for a culprit: people in the patient's life who violated their autonomy, or the patient themselves for being weak-willed enough to permit this treatment. Yet all along, what cancer may really be is simply a tragedy that befalls some human bodies irrespective of anyone's will. 

Of course, much of psychological theorizing is really an exercise in autobiography, and the insights of the trauma/autonomy school of thought will appeal to us the more they seem to account for our own experience and help us manage our own life's difficulties. By the same token, therefore, my own hesitation and resistance to the theory probably have autobiographical origins as well. All I know is that, even as my sister tends to find these theories personally liberating, I feel to the same degree constrained and stifled by their tendency to attribute so many diverse human phenomena to a single factor. 

Of course, any monocausal (and arguably reductionist) explanation of human affairs has a certain seductiveness, to which I am not immune. Once one is in possession of such a key to fit every lock, one feels equipped to decode an ever-increasing array of human events. Everything is potential grist for the mill. One sees ever new ways in which one's own behavior or problems, or those of others, could be explained by a lack of autonomy or a previous violation of one's personal boundaries. I think: Oh, so that's why I'm like that. That's why I'm so protective of my privacy, so guarded with my time, and all the rest of it. 

My skepticism intervenes again, however, as soon as I ask with what I am comparing my present fallen state. Implicit in the trauma and autonomy school of thought, after all, there appears to be a strain of what Joan Didion once called "period optimism"—the quasi-Rousseauian belief that the default state of each human being would be virtually unlimited happiness and fulfillment if only the obstacles of society could be cleared from their path. And the trouble with this assumption is the same it has always been: there is no self without society; nor is there any reason to suppose that happiness would be the default human response under any conditions to the existential conundrums of life. 

Of course, I, like other people, feel happy plenty of the time. But not all of the time. I have a great deal in my life that I value, and I am able to sustain much happiness through the cultivation of personal habits that meet my needs on a daily basis for achievement, relationship, joy, and a sense of meaning. But I also sometimes have a free-floating sense of dread about the state of the world, the direction of human history, and what I imagine to be my personal failures and inadequacies. These feelings are often uppermost when I wake in the middle of the night after having had too much wine with dinner and I find that I must exorcise them by writing a blog at 4 AM. 

Is such a condition of life the inheritance of past trauma? Or is it simply being human? Is there some other psychological condition I would have attained had I never felt constrained and compromised as a child in my personal autonomy? Or is my present and imperfect psychological state about as good as one could expect from any human life, especially seeing as mine has been in so many ways uniquely fortunate? 

We could only know the answers to such questions through empirical study and the testing of hypotheses, and this is where I fear the psychological theorizing falls short. In order to have any real explanatory power, after all, a theory must not only be able to account for the past but also to correctly predict the future. Yet so many books of psychology—particularly those that descend from the psychoanalytic tradition—provide only retroactive explanations. They are founded upon "case histories," in which an individual's plight is described, and then causes sought for and detected in their childhood and upbringing. 

Such accounts are always possible to construct in hindsight. Take any human life and you will find material in abundance for a tale of past wrongs and present inadequacies. Even the most blessed childhood has its moments of bitterness and injustice. And even the most successful adult often feels like a failure in their own eyes, at least in certain moods and certain hours of the day or night. There is no reason why any of us couldn't attribute the latter to the former, and say that the present sense of defeat must stem from something that happened to us as children. 

Such a theory, however, is as underdetermined as they come. It could account for the known facts, but so could an infinite number of other explanations. In order to test whether this account is actually true or not, it is necessary to see whether it accurately predicts outcomes for others with a similar personal history. 

I, of course, haven't conducted such a research project myself, complete with statistical controls. But I have a hunch what it would find. Based on anecdote and acquaintance with other people, I can say that there is a range of psychological outcomes among people with similar pasts. I am certainly willing to grant that there are people in existence more happy and psychologically well-adjusted than myself, just as there are other people considerably less so. 

What I don't believe, however, is that these two categories of people would be found to correspond perfectly to the measures of autonomy or trauma they experienced as children. Rather, I suspect that some people who had exactly the same life history as me would make of it the basis for either considerably more or considerably less existential angst than I have experienced. The reason is to be found not in external events, but in what Nabokov called the "individual vagaries" of human beings that defy all psychological theorizing and generalizing.

The poet Gottfried Benn once observed (in Michael Hofmann's translation): "I have met people who/grew up in a single room with their parents/and four brothers and sisters, and studied at night/ with their fingers in their ears at the kitchen table,/and grew up to be beautiful and self-possessed as duchesses[.]" His point, one takes it, is that—in much the same way that there are people who can make of every life advantage a recipe for disaster and despair, there is also the mystery of people who have endured every trauma and come out of it more decent, more put-together, more well-adjusted than we—the vastly more fortunate—could ever hope to be. 

I short, there are people who could have had exactly my life and turned out far better or far worse from it than I did, and this poses a final limit to the explanatory power of psychological theories that attribute our adult outcomes exclusively to childhood experiences. 

But how then are we to explain our individual personalities, if they do not stem from this source? Benn concludes that it is simply a mystery, and the best we can do is humble ourselves before it. "I have often asked myself," he finishes, "and never found an answer/whence kindness and gentleness come,/I don’t know it to this day, and now must go myself." 

If there is one thing one misses in the all-encompassing and monocausal psychological theories of human life we have been discussing above, it is Benn's sense of humility in this regard. The causes of human personality are more subtle, I submit, and less predictable, than a monocausal explanation is able to accommodate. 

I don't say that we should reject such theories entirely or ignore them. But I would suggest we adopt a bit of Benn's humility before and Nabokov's respect for the "individual vagaries" of human life. We may find that certain theories help explain aspects of our lives. But we should treat them always cum grano salis, and remember that for every life they seem to explain, there will be a thousand others that defy them at every turn.