amoralization of trauma!

Although rejecters found imaginative ways to get around this as well – for example, by minimizing the assessed percentage of reduction in earning capacity – the law change simplified the claims process considerably.(109)One great problem with the ascent of PTSD, however, and inevitably, was that it relativized and blurred the differences between victims and perpetrators – not just between survivors of concentration and death camps, on the one hand, and US soldiers returning from Vietnam, on the other, but also between a soldier who had been tortured as a prisoner of war and a soldier who had been a war criminal. (And at the same time, the possibility that the Vietnamese victims of US violence might be traumatized was not even taken into account.) Or as the German- born (but longtime Chilean-resident) psychoanalytic psychotherapist David Becker has put it, the effect was an “amoralization” of trauma. (113)There was thus no agreement on truth or facts, no space where loss or injury could be acknowledged. (115)as Lira had put it already in 1984, “Within the therapeutic space we tried to find a path to make it possible to re-acquire the present, one that made it possible to resist the radical process of dehumanization to which we were subjected. In this connection we understand psychotherapy as a process of profound interhuman obligation.” (120)Becker came to see Vietnam as “one of the last great imperial wars” and to rethink PTSD’s emergence as a striking compromise, a compromise which, at one and the same time, managed both to acknowledge and to disavow its late colonial context (121)