Traum is the German word for dream and trauma is from the Greek τραῦμα meaning wound. We spell it traum/a in order to demonstrate the endowed nature of the wound in the shape of something ineffable, like a dream or a thought, but that is very real nonetheless. Trauma can be as endowed to us – phenomenally given to us – hurled at us – with the same level of spontaneity as a dream, a thought, or a bodily habit. Just as we can think of the self as ontologically or phenomenologically thrown into the world, we can also see ourselves as smashed against the traumas of the world and to which we end up belonging in various ways – as much as our traumas end up belonging to us. We spell it with a slash so as to express not only the disturbing characteristic that is proper to trauma when it bursts our sense of what's real but to also echo the perception that is oftentimes felt once it’s no longer there in the foreground of our life. We can think of trauma as an eventual background to our life: It gets creepier and creepier as it shifts from the focus of our thoughts toward the corner of the eye. To be traumatized is to experience something as erupting into our lives and creating some form of chaos, stoppings us from living as usual, and forcing us to adapt and deal with a new timeline.
And it shatters one’s life. Trauma shatters experience – it gets rid of metaphysical as well as psychological certainties. We get confronted to an event, an accident, a trigger, a something that in the blink of an eye – or in the culmination of decades – displaces us in the world. This displacement, in a philosophical fashion, can be interpreted as a questioning. What is happening? Should I have done otherwise? Is this for real? This questioning might not be explicit, but it may happen that trauma triggers a certain form of redoing, relearning, or revisiting things in a new way. Trauma encompasses these real-life disturbances that ultimately serve as repositionings of oneself.
This is just one way of conceptualizing it. And we want to know about all the other ways too. The Trauma Review (TRAUM/A) is a publication aimed at presenting the different ways in which trauma exists – both understood as post-traumatic stress disorder(s) and in the broad sense.
Unlike other scholarly journals on trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders, TRAUM/A is methodologically inclined toward the exploration of first-person experiences in order to highlight the phenomenological and philosophical insights of trauma. Our goal is to display these insights through the publication of literature, philosophy, and artworks coming from writers, thinkers and artists all over the world in order to showcase different understandings on this phenomenon.
We are currently looking for editorial members. If this is you, then send us an email at contact@traumareview.org.