Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

As far back as we know, there have been individuals incapacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post- traumatic stress disorder". Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria".Allan Young ... would disagree with the notion that [PTSD] has always been with us, arguing that the traumatic memory is a man-made object.... His book is a lucid case-study of the way medicine and society have managed to build up this man-made disorder over the past century and a half".--Gerald Weissmann, The London Review of Books"Allan Young has written a splendid and much needed book.... Young's book is an invaluable contribution to an emerging and exciting area of scholarship. Intellectually bold, analytically rigorous, and rhetorically compelling, The Harmony of Illusions will both delight and provoke--perhaps even infuriate--friends and foes of the PTSD diagnosis".--Eric Caplan, American Journal of Sociology