Shock effects

The psychological trauma, understood as an excess of stimuli, an overload of experience or reality, serves as the starting point for this historical-epistemological investigation. At its core is the metaphor of shock: precisely because the traumatic impact on the psyche and body can be described as a singular, overwhelming jolt or blow, as shock, this central thesis posits that it became a recurring model for a psychiatry and clinical psychology oriented towards the natural sciences. However, the metaphor of shock was also utilized by its critics, alongside the behavior sciences employing experimental methods. The history of its circulation thus illustrates how trauma could become a model for both a scientistic medicine and for critiques of knowledge and culture.