Who's Slothrop?

[pynchonoid]

Likewise, the epidemic of personality fragmentation 
that swept through US youth since the publication of
_Gravity's Rainbow_ in 1973, with its depiction of the
troubled veteran Tyrone Slothrop.


[...] The best evidence that MPD can be invented is
the skyrocketing of its prevalence following the
release in 1977 of the film Sybil, the true story of a
woman who supposedly had sixteen discrete
personalities. Prior to the movie, there were between
50 and 200 recorded cases of documented multiple
personality disorder. By the 1990s, estimates climbed
as high as 20,000 to 40,000. The story of Sybil
provided the prototypic narrative: a young child
subject to systematic and extraordinary cruelty by a
parent is literally shattered by the abuse and vacates
herself during the ordeal, thus creating other
identities ("alters") to protect the main personality
from overwhelming terror. 

[...] The story of PTSD starts with the Vietnam
veteran. In the late 1960s, a band of self-described
antiwar psychiatrists—spearheaded by Robert Jay
Lifton, who was well known for his work on the
psychological damage wrought by Hiroshima—formulated a
new diagnostic concept to describe the psychological
wounds that the veteran sustained in the war. In 1972
they proposed "Post-Vietnam Syndrome," a disorder
marked by "growing apathy, cynicism, alienation,
depression, mistrust, and expectation of betrayal as
well as an inability to concentrate, insomnia,
nightmares, restlessness, uprootedness, and impatience
with almost any job or course of study." Typically,
the symptoms did not emerge until months or years
after the veterans returned home. 

The efforts of Lifton and his group would shape the
dramatic image of the Vietnam veteran as the kind of
"walking time bomb" immortalized in films such as Taxi
Driver and Rambo. In the summer of 1972, The New York
Times ran a front-page story on Post-Vietnam Syndrome.
Titled "Postwar Shock Is Found to Beset Veterans
Returning From the War in Vietnam," the article, by
Jon Nordheimer, alleged that 50 percent of all Vietnam
veterans—not just combat veterans—needed "professional
help to readjust." The story contained phrases like
"psychiatric casualty," "emotionally disturbed,"
"mental breakdowns," and "men with damaged brains."
According to the sociologist Jerry Lembcke, a Vietnam
veteran, "the story provided no data to support the
image of dysfunctional veterans that it spun; what it
did provide was a mode of discourse within which
America's memory of the war and the veterans' coming
home experience would be constructed." [...]

The Trauma Society
by Sally Satel 
Post date: 05.09.03 
Issue date: 05.19.03 

Remembering Trauma
By Richard J. McNally
(Harvard University Press, 420 pp., $35)

<http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030519&s=satel051903>



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