τραῦμα C 1 of 1

‘Trauma’ comes to us from the Greek word for ‘wound’, indicating a serious injury not only to the body but also the psyche (the ancient concept of the self, encompassing the modern ideas of soul, self, and mind). Hippocrates, the founder of institutionalised Western medicine, employs the word to denote a ‘lack of consciousness’1 while Homer uses the term in the Iliad so as to present Teucer as both physically injured and unconsciously affected: ‘numbed [in both] hands and wrist’ from an attack by Hector.2 From its very inception then, trauma has been considered a damage able to cloak its presence under the severity of its own assault. Unlike a physical wound however, psychological injuries sustained through trauma resist even their own treatment. As Cathy Caruth, a writer instrumental in the resurgence of trauma theory in the 1990s, observes: ‘the wound of the mind — the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world — is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and heala