Young people who sexually abuse: a historical perspective and future directions.

This article presents a historical overview of research on sexually abusive youth. The evolution of the field over the past 30 years is discussed-from the initial development of treatment interventions to contemporary efforts of professionals to move from traditional, adult-oriented interventions toward developmentally sensitive assessment strategies and practice models. Focus is on two critical areas: risk assessment and trauma-informed care. The article reviews contemporary research on risk assessment tools, stressing the need for validated tools that can accurately assess youth and follow changes in risk over time. Etiological models for understanding effects of trauma (Trauma Outcome Process Assessment and Family Lovemap) are presented. Discussed are new ecologically based therapy models for working with sexually abusive youth that approach the youth holistically and are attuned to youths' needs, including providing interventions to address effects of past trauma.

Perpetual bodily trauma: wounding and memory in the Middle English romances.

In the 21st century, the concept of trauma is deeply ingrained in psychological discourse despite the term's origins in literal, physical wounding and affecting experience. However, to understand the sources or causes of trauma, psychologists recognise the paramount importance of somatic evidence. The body provides corporeal systems for inputs that might trigger a later remembrance which might be auditory, visual, even tactile. The same body will continue to experience the trauma throughout its life, only alleviated, perhaps, by an appropriate therapeutic or chemical treatment. The body is therefore an important source of the trauma as an affected entity inscribed with experience, but the corporeal form also offers a way in which to identify and understand traumatic suffering itself. In the medieval period, trauma or violent experiences were similarly viewed as corporeal inscriptions which may fade but, metaphorically, remain immediately wounding. This paper explores the presentation of trauma in medieval romances, narratives strewn with injured bodies and correspondingly altered personalities and reputations, and compares this with contemporary research relating to trauma and the neurobiology of consciousness. The core issue is one of experience and expression: how an individual feels and continues to suffer trauma, and the ways in which that suffering can be communicated to those around. Through considering this issue, the paper argues for a relationship between the human experience of trauma across the centuries, and with this the combination of corporeal symbol and affect, and the dynamic interaction of a wounded body with time and its later life.

Towards a phenomenology of civil war: Hobbes meets Benjamin in Beirut.

Based on interviews with Beirut intellectuals and architects, this essay endeavours to trace the contours for a phenomenology or anthropology of civil war. Thomas Hobbes serves as a guide, with his idea of civil war representing a relapse into the 'state of nature'; as absence of sovereignty resulting in a 'war of everybody against everybody'. The effects of ever-latent civil war in Beirut are far-reaching: the fragmentation of urban space and the disappearance of public space, the loss of memory and the fragmentation of time, even the reification of language. In the collective imagination and in the arts, Beirut appears as a ghost town, a spectral city with a spectral civility. What we discover is a city, its inhabitants, its social behaviour, but also its art and literature, in the grip of post-traumatic stress syndrome. From all this, we take home two things: first, any city can (at least in principle) relapse into a similar state of nature ­ Beirut can become a paradigm of latent civil war; and second, the traumatic modernity of Beirut mirrors the traumatic artistic expressions of modernism ­ the shock of modernity is also always a modernity of shock.

[Psychological events--organic interpretations: concepts of trauma in German psychiatry since 1889]. / Psychische Ereignisse--organische Interpretationen: Traumakonzepte in der deutschen Psychiatrie seit 1889.

This paper examines the debate on psychological trauma in German psychiatry since 1889. A content analysis of five leading German psychiatric journals between 1889 and 2005 is realised. An organic concept of psychological trauma has been prominent in the professional debate until today. Psychiatrists frequently referred to physical traumatisation, constitutional factors and genetic predisposition, exogenous reaction types according to Bonhoeffer, and to biological markers in the context of the PTSD concept. The biological tradition in German psychiatry resulted in a specific adoption of concepts on psychological trauma. However, integrating various models of psychological trauma into a psychiatric tradition focusing on a biological model proved to be difficult and inconsistent.

Narrar o trauma: a questão dos testemunhos de catástrofes históricas / Narrating trauma: testimonies of historical catastrophes

O trabalho propõe uma reflexão sobre algumas das características do gesto testemunhal enfatizando as aporias que o marcam. Partindo da idéia de que o testemunho de certo modo só existe sob o signo de seu colapso e de sua impossibilidade, o texto enfatiza os dilemas nascidos da confluência entre a tarefa individual da narrativa do trauma e de sua componente coletiva. Nas 'catástrofes históricas', como nos genocídios ou nas perseguições violentas em massa de determinadas parcelas da população, a memória do trauma é sempre uma busca de compromisso entre o trabalho de memória individual e outro construído pela sociedade. O testemunho é analisado como parte de uma complexa 'política da memória'.(AU)

The text carries out a reflection about some of the main issues concerning the gesture of testimony, highlighting the apories of witnessing. Departing from the idea that testimony only exists under the sign of its collapse and impossibility, the essay stresses the dilemmas raised from the convergence between the individual task of the trauma storytelling and its collective component. In historical catastrophes, as in the cases of genocides or violent mass persecutions of particular groups of people, the memory of the trauma is always a search for a compromise between the individual memory work and another, more collective. The testimony is analyzed as a part of a complex 'politics of memory'.(AU)

Narrar o trauma: a questão dos testemunhos de catástrofes históricas / Narrating trauma: testimonies of historical catastrophes

O trabalho propõe uma reflexão sobre algumas das características do gesto testemunhal enfatizando as aporias que o marcam. Partindo da idéia de que o testemunho de certo modo só existe sob o signo de seu colapso e de sua impossibilidade, o texto enfatiza os dilemas nascidos da confluência entre a tarefa individual da narrativa do trauma e de sua componente coletiva. Nas "catástrofes históricas", como nos genocídios ou nas perseguições violentas em massa de determinadas parcelas da população, a memória do trauma é sempre uma busca de compromisso entre o trabalho de memória individual e outro construído pela sociedade. O testemunho é analisado como parte de uma complexa "política da memória".

The text carries out a reflection about some of the main issues concerning the gesture of testimony, highlighting the apories of witnessing. Departing from the idea that testimony only exists under the sign of its collapse and impossibility, the essay stresses the dilemmas raised from the convergence between the individual task of the trauma storytelling and its collective component. In historical catastrophes, as in the cases of genocides or violent mass persecutions of particular groups of people, the memory of the trauma is always a search for a compromise between the individual memory work and another, more collective. The testimony is analyzed as a part of a complex "politics of memory".

Trauma and traumatized populations in Israel: the Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 1963-2002.

In Europe and the U.S., awareness of interpersonal traumatization has disappeared and reappeared, seemingly connected to socio-historical conditions. The authors wanted to explore this phenomenon in Israel, a complex, multicultural, society that has yet to know peace. Content analysis of a professional journal, the Israel Journal of Psychiatry, was the method of choice. This journal has existed since the fifteenth year of Israel's existence and, because it is published in English, is in active dialogue with the rest of the world. Striking parallels were found between the timing and focus on traumas in the published articles and the socio-cultural context.

The European history of psychotraumatology.

The history of European psychotraumatology shows that opposing cultural, social, economic, and political forces have influenced scientific development. Inevitably, the theories of traumatic stress reflect the spirit of the age. Several of today's controversies were already evident during World War I: the risk of reinforcing evacuation and compensation syndromes by legitimising diagnostic labels, increased somatization when the psychological nature of the trauma or symptom is not understood, and the deleterious effect of treating the individual removed from his primary group setting. Towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century the study of psychic trauma identified important intrapsychic phenomena, and, consequently, there was a neglect of the external stressor.