A man cosplays schizophrenia, gets himself admitted to an insane asylum, and pens an exposé that indelibly alters U.S. diagnostic systems. A woman wheels 67 pounds of animal fat onto a stage on live TV and changes the shape of women’s bodies for a generation. He wasn’t insane, and she couldn’t keep the weight off, but institutions for the mentally ill closed en masse and liquid diets proliferated nonetheless. Catherine Liu revisits these puncta of cultural history in her slim, wrathful series of essays, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering.
In the book, Liu recounts the history of trauma as a medical diagnosis, a narrative structure, and a weapon of psychological class warfare. She traces the story of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’s codification in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) from victims of the first train accidents during industrialization to the aforementioned hoax that incited psychiatrists to reexamine their approach to diagnosis. Liu recognizes the slender, deceptively stalwart strings tying pop culture to politics and medicine, so she deftly pulls at threads connecting Oprah Winfrey’s promotion of extreme dieting to her devotion to on-camera confession as an avenue to healing from trauma to the primacy of trauma narratives in contemporary liberal storytelling to Democrats’ toothless legislative priorities.
Liu is a professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California Irvine and author of the surprise 2021 hit Virtue Hoarders. That book posited that the PMC (Professional Managerial Class—read: yuppies) had spent the prior decades carrying out a powerful semantic psyop, associating the religious language of virtue and morality with philanthropy, meritocracy, and identity politics—individualist pursuits that don’t threaten capital. Traumatized functions as a sequel of sorts, accusing the PMC and the liberal establishment of enthroning the trauma script at the expense of less individualistic narratives around suffering, ones that could spark revolutionary action instead of viral videos.
The rise of the trauma script, a “standardized narrative of rupture and reintegration,” whether carried out on daytime talk shows or a “Get Ready With Me” influencer video, Liu argues, sunders the connective tissue between a victim of trauma and the people who might help her process it. What secular prophets see in an audience is a witness, not a friend, co-conspirator, or even a combative peer who might poke a hole in your story and end up prying your heart open. When “sympathetic witnessing” is enshrined as “an act of political solidarity” akin to actual organizing, hearting a TikTok can be mistaken for civic action. In turn, economic issues become obstacles to be overcome through sharing narratives and feeling seen, rather than structural conditions we can change.
Liu’s next project, the Palm Springs School for Social Research, will facilitate the expansive, digressive, scintillatingly risky dialogues she sees thwarted by the primacy of the trauma script. Liu impishly describes the roving retreat series as a “Frankurt school tribute band for girls and gays.” Liu’s book is an instrument. It is knife-sharp, and a necessary addition to a leftist toolbox, if one designed for careful, delicate use: it quickly draws blood. Soon after her book’s release, Liu and I met up downtown to discuss crypto-religiosity, TikTok confessionals, Oprah, culture wars, and more.
Can you begin by telling me about the genesis—religious pun intended—of this book?
This is a book I’ve been wanting to write for years. Part of it is autobiographical. I was at Yale when the first trauma studies courses were being given, in which they discovered a new way of reading literature based on testimony and witnessing. I was already a baby leftist, and I knew there was something disturbing about this depoliticized act that allows the intellectual, the academic, and the critic to be very passive. What they were saying about how a witness can allow a survivor to open up about their story was compelling. What I didn’t realize was: this was laying the tracks for the commodification of this language.
That was framed by the end of the Cold War, during which the U.S. and the Western European powers could say, “We are the ethical carriers of witnessing.” I was living through this period of neoliberal consolidation, of the depoliticization of social problems as a function of the end of the class struggle, of what Francis Fukuyama would call the end of history. That would be playing a role in the emergence of a new ethical quasi-religious intelligentsia.
You use the hilarious and incisive phrase “trickle-up” to describe the impact of popular culture on academic and political discourses. Can you elaborate on how you see that functioning?
I remember saying to a senior colleague in the ’90s that I wanted to write about Oprah. And he goes, “She’s a really powerful, popular icon, you cannot criticize her.” When the left had been defeated by Reagan and Thatcher, a lot of cultural studies types, leftists, and liberals thought, We have to affirm popular culture. Think: 25 monographs on Madonna—who I love, but all the books about her were horrible. The idea of a critical, let alone negative, view was verboten, considered elitist. I’m always interested in what is being suppressed by mainstream liberal discourse. The attitude was: It’s the end of critique. Class conflict is not a big deal. We’re all going to vie for different regimes of recognition because we’ve resolved all political issues. Analysis focused on social class is so backward. Thirty years later, that paradigm has borne fruit. We have so many regimes of recognition and horrific levels of inequality.
Those regimes of recognition rely on religious language to endow suffering with virtuous connotations, which reminded me of the argument about linguistic manipulation in your prior book, Virtue Hoarders. Both books accuse liberal elites of a linguistic plundering of the Bible.
There was always a really positive, prophetic element to progressive language, especially in the Civil Rights Movement. But a lot of this language, which is very Old Testament, becomes transformed in the “Me Generation” with the help of New Agey guru types, who step in as the movements are collapsing and offer people succor and salvation. What really angered me the most was seeing how the notion of the survivor becomes transmogrified into the station of the prophet. That takes place through the intervention of a Professional Managerial Class-educated elite: a psychiatrist, a feminist, an anti-war Vietnam veteran, for example. So you have these experts pioneering language about people who had been through a hellish experience, who returned to civilization with this new, righteous vision.
How do those liberally educated professions theorize, and then enact, that transmutation? How do these figures render a traumatized subject a visionary survivor?
Robert Jay Lifton, an early PTSD expert, thought that survivors of Hiroshima and the Vietnam War would be able to come to American society and advocate for peace and disarmament. First of all, the proportion of Vietnam War veterans who became anti-war was small. Second of all, you have troubled young men who’ve been through hell, and you want to endow them with special power. Third of all, you know who’s never given this prophetic survivor role? The actual Vietnamese people who kicked ass and rebuilt their country. The original survivor Lifton talks about, who becomes a case for the enshrinement of PTSD in the DSM, was a passive participant to the My Lai massacres. He testifies to the fact that they started killing old men, children, and women because there was a body count requirement.
What happened to the people who survived that? My anti-imperialist self wonders, is Vietnam just the desert in the Old Testament in this story? Judith Herman rightfully pointed out that the PTSD symptoms of women who survived sexual assault were misunderstood by male psychiatrists who couldn’t understand why women would stay with men who were abusing them. But there’s no mention of their social contexts, which are important. She was treating women from a working class Boston suburb, and she’s at Harvard, describing how the healing process will involve these women becoming social workers, lawyers, and judges. How are they going to do that? How are they going to pay for school?
Who’s going to watch their kids? Your writing on Oprah is salient here, because her rags-to-riches story proffers a capitalist fable rooted in trauma. But the trauma stories we hear on shows like hers, and see on social media, are told across such a limited time horizon. Are you arguing not for fewer trauma stories, but longer, wider ones?
Yes, with a deeper context. One of the most horrific things about being the victim of violence is that you’re radically decontextualized: you’re made to feel powerless. Power might come from putting yourself in the context of a social, familial, political whole. Oprah creates this field where women, allegedly, can express emotions they haven’t been allowed to express. But she is not making decisions based on emotionality, and by the way, kudos to her. She’s encouraging people to purchase solutions, go through self-help regimes. She’s selling.
That’s what I wanted to emphasize when I mentioned the episode in which she brought 67 pounds of animal fat onto the stage after she’d done the Optifast Diet. It’s short-term gratification. If you listen to Oprah talk about her experience, it’s very flattened. It has very few details. The way to heal is to give time to telling your story. She tells it in a three-minute snippet. It’s damaging to her consumers, because they think that doing a three-minute confession is going to relieve them. A lot of this self-help testimony and the branded therapies for everything from body image issues to post-traumatic stress disorder, they’re short-term.
You write that the trauma script “removes the subject from history and places her in an airless room” where she becomes “the spectator and the consumer and the producer”—a line that brought to mind TikTok, where people are trapped in the feed, telling extraordinarily brief, highly dramatic trauma stories in a stunningly limited temporal window, in the hopes of accessing catharsis.
If we thought Oprah was providing people a shortcut to temporary relief from suffering, the TikTok-ization of personal testimony has shortened even that time horizon. It’s an attempt to find not only a shortcut to healing, but a shortcut to intersubjectivity and intimacy. When I was growing up, there was room to have a private life. When you were in school, you were doing academic stuff. You were not establishing your enlightened self to further the cultural revolution of the DNC.
Now, young people have been given false tools, and they’re not creating real relationships. So this kind of confession—it’s a cry for intimacy. People ask me, “Well, are you saying you should never talk about your trauma?” I’m saying, “No, if you’re going to talk about something really painful, make sure someone is there to be able to hold your hand, and make sure there’s a shoulder to cry on. This is painful, so make sure you have a human being you can trust physically next to you.”
That vision reminds me of what consciousness raising groups were reaching towards—swerving, lengthy stories about identity-forming pain, told in person. Your chapter on second-wave feminists is a righteous, and rightful, takedown of their abandonment of working class feminists.What elements of the manifestos that came out of that movement might you find worth studying?
That feminism allowed for a deeper understanding of human subjectivity, of the idea that we were psychological and emotional beings who could control our emotions, embrace our emotions, have empathy for each other, and still be confident political actors. That’s really powerful. That deeper human interaction was cut off by social media. The difference between the dialogic model of confession versus the monologic model of confession is, in the latter, we just want a mirror, or a witness who won’t talk back to us. When you have a dialogue with someone, you have friction. You’re going to be mad at your girlfriends. My closest friends are people I’ve struggled with for years. I can let my guard down, to the point where I can be really angry.
My students don’t know how to disagree. They’re afraid that you’re enacting harm by disagreeing. Or the other extreme is that in graduate seminars people yell at each other and storm out—they want to do internet-style cancellation in person. The professors are afraid to exercise authority. We’re seeing a de-skilling of human interaction. Second wave feminism said, “Look at these men who have no access to their emotional world.” It valued emotional integrity that is now sold to the highest bidder.
To connect that to my favorite dying and decadent industry, literature, you write that the trauma plot artistically suppresses the genres of “satire, criticism, and dissent.” What genre would you slot this book into? Archival polemic? Historical manifesto?
I’m not writing a polemic against trauma. It’s deeply researched, and pro-research: I think you should research your own trauma, both with yourself and with others. This language comes out of second wave feminism, and out of the counterculture, and out of the railway accident. I want to restore historical context to make us understand where we come from, because the culture industry is now erasing history. We’re walking amnesiacs, and I don’t want to enable that. When I was younger, all of my mentors were into post-modernism. What that failed to transmit to us was historical materialism. The Cold War and the end of the Second World War distorted American education, because we had to reiterate that we are fighting against communists, and showing ourselves to be superior. The Culture War is a function of post-Cold War cultural politics.
I want to restore a richer sense of our present impasses to readers, to people in pain, to people who are curious, and on a quest, fighting for some more authentic political-emotional way of being. The New York Times readers, they’re not curious people. They want to tell you the headlines, and they hold so much power and wealth, and they are the worst consumers of media, because all they want is superficial content—it’s creating cultural philistinism. If we don’t know the history of how identity politics is rooted in trauma culture, we’re going to be doomed to repeat it. The next time there’s an Occupy Wall Street, I hope your children will not be too busy policing each other to organize power. If my book is a historical polemic that helps to prevent that from happening, then I feel like my job is done.
What would you call the genre the trauma plot exists in?
I think identity politics is trapped in melodrama without realizing it. I love Golden Era melodrama, but it has limitations. Take Imitation of Life, one of my favorite melodramas—it tries to solve racism by presenting tragic suffering mothers. It’s trapped in the social world of the family, not the political world. Now, the social justice movements say they want social progress, but because they’re trapped in melodrama, they believe that all social progress takes place through internal transformation.
What is a truly progressive political genre in fiction, in film? It’s film noir. You start out with the rules of the game so broken, but you have to survive. Who are the female avatars of power that all the ’70s feminists hated? The femme fatales. And because of the Hays Code [a set of moral codes governing the Hollywood film industry from 1934 to 1968], femme fatales had to be punished. But they represent female power as an object of desire and survival. I love melodrama, but if you’re trapped in it, if you’re modeling your identity on it, it’s a dead end. It just takes you into this weeping female role where everything is resolved by the recognition of pain, rather than the seizure of power.
You call the “genteel scholar” the “most aggressive cold warrior,” a literary spy decoding art in order to reinforce existing power structures. That reminded me of Eve Sedgwick’s work defining paranoid and reparative reading—the former motivated by suspicion, and the latter rooted in an optimistic, pleasure-seeking attempt to find healing in literary analysis. What are your thoughts on the reparative approach, given that it can also feel trauma-informed in its emphasis on the reader’s feelings?
I never got into reparative reading. I love Jane Austen; we ladies love Jane Austen. But how do I read that reparatively? The reason I love Jane Austen is because she marries emotionality with stock market-level calculation. It is financial reason and sentimentality merged in worlds where female survival was about making the good match. I find the coldness of those calculations, and the clear language deducing sentimentality as a function of calculation, fascinating. Sometimes my confusion and passion is not the most interesting thing about reading.
Always our last question: What do you find overrated, underrated, and accurately rated lately?
Underrated: I think a stylish but wide-legged trouser is not a bad idea for middle-aged women, so that you don’t look like you’re trapped in Seattle in 1996. On the other hand, most commodities are overrated, so it’s hard for me to think of only one. On the left, what’s really underrated is physical enjoyment of sports. Properly rated: wonton soup and bone broth.
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