A classic in trauma studies...first complete translation into Korean!
A classic in trauma studies

This is the 20th anniversary expanded edition of a must-read book on trauma studies that has been widely read and cited in various academic fields, including humanities, social sciences, and art studies, both domestically and internationally since its first publication in 1996.
As the author, Carus, recalls in his “Afterword,” the book played a decisive role in establishing “trauma studies,” which had not yet established itself as an independent field of study at the time of the first edition’s publication, as a central field in the humanities.
The insights Carus presented in 1996—including the testimony scene and reader ethics, clinical discussions on the dimension of structural violence, the ethics of historical narrative, the genealogy of the concept of trauma, and intergenerational memory and image mediation—are still being accepted, varied, deepened, and expanded across various academic horizons, even now, 20 or 30 years later.
In this 'classic study of trauma' that approaches the essence of the concept of trauma across literary criticism, psychoanalysis, cultural criticism, hermeneutics, and philosophy, the legacy Carus leaves behind is not a definition or answer to a specific concept.
It is a complex and ongoing question in itself: 'How did you listen and how did you respond?'

What does the metaphor of the wound and the voice tell us? And what lies at the heart of Freud's writings on trauma, whether in the words it conveys or the story it unwittingly tells? It is that trauma appears to be more than a pathology, or a simple illness of the wounded psyche.
That is, trauma is always a story of a crying wound, an attempt to speak to us to tell us a reality or truth that cannot be known otherwise.

--- p.24

The traumatic nature of history could be said to mean that events are historical only to the extent that they implicate others.
It is precisely in this respect that Jewish history has been one of suffering caused by the trauma of others.

--- p.54

He listens to her because he does not know, because he cannot face his past, and because he has no self to refer to in his questions.
And because he speaks from this very impossible point, asking questions that even he himself does not fully possess, he is able to enter into her story and allow the answers to that story to say more than it could originally say.
Not because I know her truth, but because I don't know my own truth.

--- p.96

Post-traumatic stress disorder provides the most direct link between mental health and external violence, and appears to be the most devastating mental disorder.
In this essay, I will argue that trauma is not simply the impact of destruction, but fundamentally a puzzle of survival.
Only by recognizing traumatic experiences as a paradoxical relationship between destructiveness and survival can we recognize the legacy of incomprehensibility that lies at the heart of catastrophic experiences.

--- p.132

Today, trauma theory is one area where this survival is taking place precisely.
This is true not only in the conviction that psychiatry has transformed and internalized trauma theory, but also in the creative uncertainty of this theory, which remains an unsolved puzzle for both psychiatry and psychoanalysis.
That riddle is trauma as destruction and survival at the same time, and it is this that lies at the heart of Freud's insight itself.

--- p.163

Traumatic experiences suggest a paradox that goes beyond the psychological dimension of the accompanying pain.
The paradox is that the moment of most direct witnessing of a violent event can manifest itself as an absolute inability to know about it.
Paradoxically, so to speak, immediacy can take the form of belatedness.
Recurrences of the traumatic event continue to intrude into our vision, even though we are still unconscious of it.
This repetition thus extends beyond what can be simply seen or known, and suggests a larger relationship to events that are intimately connected to both the belatedness and the incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of this repetitive seeing.

--- p.199