Suffering and Trauma

Recommended Prerequisites

- Basic knowledge related to the experience and memory of trauma, from a cultural perspective.

- Basic knowledge of the relationship between Medicine, Spirituality and Religion.

Teaching Methods

Lectures with students’ participation.

PowerPoint presentation, videos and other pedagogical material.

Learning Outcomes

1. To understand the cross-cultural perspective of trauma, adaptation and resilience

2. To recognize the limits of biomedical speech concerning trauma

3. To value the importance of the different perspectives of trauma: biological, clinic and cultural.

 

To identify suffering. To understand the different perceptions of health and pain from a cultural perspective.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

Memory and trauma (Professor Luís Quintais)

The main goal of this program is to lead students through an array of debates related to the historicity and the implications of memory and trauma. The path will be centered around a particular nosology (the Post-traumatic stress disorder), while seeking to revisit an ethnography developed in the 1990s. It will be thus a work on memory that uses the memory of the anthropologist/ethnographer as a critical axis for revision and clarification. Particularly, it is intended to show the limits and the difficulties installed on the adopted perspective.

 

Suffering, pain and religion (Father Anselmo Borges)

a. Conceptions of Man and medicine, showing how different conceptions of Man (dualist, materialist or idealist, emergentist: dual monism) influence the medical attitude. b. Care, from a Heideggerian perspective. c. A holistic concept of health, shedding a different light on the conception of the WHO. d. Human existence, finitude and meaning, showing how, from Viktor Frankl’s perspective, the relationship towards meaning is crucial to the cure. d. Suffering, death and religion/s, from a conception that condemns dolorism while integrating suffering and death on life and showing, from (mostly American) scientific researches, how religion (which one?) aids the healing process.

 

Social suffering and violence (Professor Maria José Hespanha)

It is a complex problem –difficult to quantify due to its silence –, producing a lot of pain and negative consequences to health. There are no easy answers but it is an urgent problem to solve.

Social suffering affects all groups and social contexts, but is experienced differently.

One’s concrete life conditions determine their health condition.

We are currently undergoing fast-paced social changes. These changes create or exacerbate models that dramatize many forms of polarization, such as the impairment of institutional collectives, the excessive cult of individualism and new forms of social exclusion.

There are two prevailing imaginaries on contemporary societies: excellence and uselessness. The former highlights the idea of triumph, excellence, total quality, perfection and exceeding oneself (Erenberg, 1998). In this context, values such as integration, career, power and social qualification are given the spotlight. On the other hand, new forms of exclusion are arising, producing images of worthlessness, failure, lack of integration and disqualification.

These two imaginaries cohabit on society as a whole, and function in concert. Due to them, strong anguishes arise, generated by the instability they both produce, even though they are presented differently.

 

Wars and Psychiatry: war as a disaster – psychological consequences (Professor Monteiro Ferreira)

In more than 100 wars fought over the last 15 years, 80% of the victims were civilian. There has been a fast-paced, important development on research concerning the psychosocial consequences of war on civilians, which are the main victims of modern warfare. This communication comprises a reflection on the reasons why war is considered a disaster and a critical revision of the modern concepts of “total war” and disaster, the psychological consequences of war on civilians and the use of children as soldiers (which entails serious mental disorders), while also encompassing the problem of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Women, young woman and children are often kidnaped, raped and forced into sexual slavery or other forms of sexual abuse; they are vexed, humiliated and hurt on their deepest psychological, ethical and moral feelings, which then overflows into their community.  The deterioration or destruction of the economic, social and political infrastructure of nations in conflict hinders the provision of attention to the basic needs of the population. Post-traumatic stress disorder is the most frequent nosologic entity found among victims of war, but there are other mental disorders that require further consideration.

Assessment Methods

Continuous
Synthesis work: 100.0%

Bibliography

Hacking, Ian (1995), Rewriting the Soul: multiple personality disorder and the sciences of memory, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Hacking, Ian (1996), "Memory sciences, memory politics", in Paul Antze e Michael Lambek (ed.), Tense Past: cultural essays in trauma and memory, Londres e Nova Iorque, Routledge.

Kleinman, Arthur (1995), "Violence, culture, and the politics of trauma", in Writing at the Margin: discourse between anthropology and medicine, Berkeley, Los Angeles e Londres, University of California Press.

Quintais, Luís (2000), As Guerras Coloniais Portuguesas e a Invenção da História, Lisboa, Imprensa de Ciências Sociais.

Young, Allan (1995), The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Princeton, Princeton University Press.

Young, Allan (1996), "Bodily memory and traumatic memory", in Paul Antze e MIchael Lambek (ed.), Tense Past: cultural essays in trauma and memory, Londres e Nova Iorque, Routledge.

 

Religion, Health and Suffering (1999). Edited by John Hinnels and Roy Porter. Kegan Paul International

Eric J. Cassell (1991). The Nature of Suffering and The Goals of Medicine. Oxford University Press.