Meanwhile, the authors' antidote to the American sicknessa quest for democratic community that draws on our diverse civic and religious traditionshas contributed to a vigorous scholarly and popular debate. Attention has been focused on forms of social organization, be it civil society, democratic communitarianism, or associative democracy, that can humanize the market and the administrative state. In their new Introduction the authors relate the argument of their book both to the current realities of American society and to the growing debate about the country's future. With this new edition one of the most influential books of recent times takes on a new immediacy.\

Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

Moses and Monotheism

This paper examines the impact of three types of victimization in childhood--sexual abuse, physical abuse, and neglect--on lifetime measures of mental health among adults. In contrast to research that relies on retrospective recall of childhood victimization, this work uses a prospective sample gathered from records of documented court cases of childhood abuse and neglect in a midwestern city around 1970. These subjects were interviewed about twenty years later. In addition, this research compares outcomes of the 641 members of the abuse and neglect group with a matched control group of 510 persons who did not have documented cases of abuse or neglect. The results indicate that men who were abused and neglected as children have more dysthymia and antisocial personality disorder as adults than matched controls, but they did not have more alcohol problems. Abused and neglected women report more symptoms of dysthymia, antisocial personality disorder, and alcohol problems than controls. After controlling for stressful life events, however, childhood victimization had little direct impact on any lifetime mental health outcome. This research indicates the importance of adopting an approach that places childhood victimization in the context of other life stressors and of prospective changes over the life course.

The impact of childhood abuse and neglect on adult mental health: a prospective study

c ovom broju Diskrepancije predstavljamo jednog od najutjecajnijih americkih drustvenih teoreticara druge polovice dvadesetog stoljeca. Jeffrey C. Alexander jos od svog cetverotomnog djela “Teorijska logika u sociologiji” razvija originalnu i utjecajnu teorijskoistraživacku tradiciju. Od uspostavljanja neofunkcionalizma kao teorijskog pravca do trenutnog rada na strogom programu u kulturnoj sociologiji, njegov je utjecaj bio sve snažniji, međutim, rijetko prelazivsi nacionalne granice Sjedinjenih Americkih Država. U knjizi “Znacenja drustvenog života” , njegovom glavnom djelu iz podrucja kulturne sociologije, sakupljeni su reprezentativni radovi koje je objavljivao posljednjih nekoliko godina u razlicitim strucnim casopisima. Cilj mu je bio demonstrirati mogucnosti strogog istraživackog programa u kulturnoj sociologiji, uzevsi u obzir lingvisticki obrat u filozofiji, novo otkrivanje hermeneutike, strukturalisticku revoluciju u humanistici, simbolicku revoluciju u antropologiji i kulturni obrat u americkoj historiografiji. Teme kojima se bavi protežu se od Holokausta, preko informacijske tehnologije i civilnog drustva, do sociologije zla. U ovom cemo prikazu ukratko navesti osnovne nalaze njegovih teorijskih i empirijskih studija predstavljenih u osam poglavlja, izostavivsi, međutim, programatsko prvo poglavlje prevedeno u sklopu temata “Strogi program u kulturnoj teoriji” . U drugom se, najduljem, poglavlju u knjizi (O socijalnoj konstrukciji moralnih univerzalija: “Holokaust” od ratnog zlocina do traume drame) Alexander bavi Holokaustom. Bez obzira sto je Holokaust jedna od najucestalijih tema u drustvenim znanostima nakon Drugog svjetskog rata, Alexander iz jedne nove, strogoprogramske kulturne perspektive, pokusava prikazati kako je teklo diskurzivno uspostavljanje “specificnog i situiranog historijskog događaja...koji je pretvoren u poopceni simbol ljudske patnje i moralnog zla” . Ta je kulturna transformacija, tvrdi Alexander, postigla takav status jer je izvorni historijski događaj, traumatican samo za određenu grupu (Židove), tijekom posljednjih pedeset godina bio redefiniran kao traumatican događaj za cjelokupno covjecanstvo. Polazeci od teorije nužno kulturno konstruirane kolektivne traume, kojom se posebno bavi u trecem poglavlju, preko pracenja razvitka progresivnog narativa koji se odvijao u americkom drustvu neposredno nakon rata, uokvirivanja masovnih ubojstava putem identifikacije sa žrtvama i prociscenja americkog drustva koje se kroz njega odvijalo, Alexander pokazuje kako je Holokaust zadobio svoju svjetsko-povijesnu univerzalnost kroz simbolicki generiranu, emocionalno nabijenu participaciju nežrtava u traumi-drami masovnog ubojstva Židova. Detaljnom je analizom masovnih medija i mnogobrojne relevantne literature uspio naslikati uvjerljiv portret trajektorija jednog “apsolutno zlog” događaja, smjestivsi u srediste analize kulturne strukture koje su bile kljucne u njegovoj konstrukciji. Trece je poglavlje, naslovljeno “Kulturna trauma i kolektivni identitet” , Valerio Bacak

The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology

As far back as we know, there have been individuals inca-pacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder". Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomemon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions, a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilising these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in a psychiatric unit specialising in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the tran-scripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.@@@Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory.

This essay is the second of a two-part American Imago article on a social theory of trauma. Measures to disrupt the transmission of traumatic experiences and their social sequelae are discussed as an ongoing cross-generational challenge, in which traumatic pasts capture a portion of a nation’s self-understanding. The essay examines how to repair societies and to recover lives freed from past experiences when trauma felt by earlier generations impinges both on collective healing and on in-the-present autonomy. It focuses on post-apartheid South Africa, where recovery from past racist practice requires measures to reduce its continuing effects on those who survived or were born after the 1994 abolition of apartheid. Derived from lessons learned in the psychoanalytic consulting room, three propositions are offered to understand the phenomenology of traumatic experiences. These three insights can help undo trauma’s lasting impacts in subsequent generations, including the persistence of racism: trauma is a memory illness, whose healing can only be done in the present; traumatic transmission across generations often occurs unconsciously and affectively; and traumatic symptoms surface as the result of an in-the-present interpersonal or societal failure.

Danger and Deformation: A Social Theory of Trauma Part II: Disrupting the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma, Recovering Humanity, and Repairing Generations

The introduction conceptualises the notion of Post-Conflict Hauntings to foreground the globally pressing question of how countries deal with the traumatic aftermaths of mass violence Historically this question has been theorised through the important psychodynamically informed work of trauma theory in the post-Holocaust context However, the chapters of this book, as introduced in this opening chapter, seek to draw on, rethink and expand the trauma concept using the lens of haunted memory as reflected through a range of different historical case studies and disciplinary perspectives We explain the structure of the book as comprising three different parts: “Towards an Ethics of Haunted Memory”, “Local Expressions of Collective Haunting and Healing” and “Transforming Haunted Memory Through Artistic Interventions” Together the chapters offer theoretical, empirical and practical insights into the nature of historical trauma and practices of collective healing that include embodied, artistic and culturally relevant forms of wisdom

Introduction: Post-Conflict Hauntings

Shelby Steele's The Content of our Character, and John Wideman's Philadelphia Fire are contrasted for what they reveal about the two authors’ confrontation with self‐expression and self‐definition in a society that denies African‐American individuality. I argue that Steele's and Wideman's distinctive solutions to personal expression as demonstrated in these works constitute the discursive boundaries, the poles between which black male subjectivity oscillates in this racialist society. To explicate these particular positions, I draw on psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism, masculinity, and subjectivity. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice is invoked to articulate, albeit in a different society and context, the subjective crisis of the intellectual, the linkage between one's inner world and outer society, and the relation between personal identity and national self‐understanding. While Steele opts for an isolated, transcendent individualism, Wideman embraces a conception of self inextricably connected t...

Jeffrey Prager

Papers

Danger and Deformation: A Social Theory of Trauma Part II: Disrupting the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma, Recovering Humanity, and Repairing Generations

Introduction: Post-Conflict Hauntings

Self reflection(s): Subjectivity and racial subordination in the contemporary African‐American writer

The meaning of difference: A response to Michael Banton