| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Methods/Theory

Ruth Leys. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2000. Pp. x, 318. Cloth $55.00, paper $19.00.

In this book, Ruth Leys outlines the intellectual and medical zeitgeist that governed those who have "grappled tenaciously with [the] intractable material" (p. 307) of psychic trauma, principally Sigmund Freud, Morton Prince, Pierre Janet, Sandor Ferenczi, Abram Kardiner, William Sargent, Bessel A. van der Kolk, and Cathy Caruth. Her stated purpose is to explore the history not only of remembering but of forgetting by means of a Foucauldian analysis of a central conceptual struggle among, and within, these individuals between competing models of what she labels mimesis and antimimesis. According to Leys, the mimetic model argues that the subject is unable to integrate the trauma into the cognitive or perceptual system. The result is a type of hypnotic imitation. The antimimetic model holds that trauma is a completely external event that the patient, with the proper handling, can recall and master. Leys maintains that the genealogy—not, as even she sometimes interchanges, the history—of trauma represents "a tension or oscillation between the two paradigms" (p. 10) that has led not to integration and resolution but to a series of historical constructions marked by ambiguity and dissonance. Leys finds that even the work by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen that has inspired hers is marked by the turn from an early mimetic point of view to a later antimimetic one, a change Leys finds less than satisfactory in its attempt to resolve the issue, its apparent rejection of unconscious dynamics, and its resultant flirtation with the reduction of traumatic neurosis to malingering. . . .

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