Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 July 2009
The chapters in this volume emerged from a series of workshops and a conference organized by the Foundation for Psychocultural Research that sought to bring neuroscientists, clinicians, and anthropologists together to address a common object of study and a common set of questions. We assumed that each disciplinary perspective and research program had something to contribute to a comprehensive view of the problem of trauma. We hoped that this encounter would lead to creative exchange – and some significant steps toward the integration of diverse models and levels of explanation.
In modest ways this integration occurred. In some cases, the integration reflected a preexisting connection between two disciplines. For example, the approach to treating PTSD symptoms by exposure, as advocated by Yadin and Foa, is based directly on the procedures and results of extinction learning, which the authors in Section I have begun to explain in terms of neuropsychological, physiological, and molecular mechanisms.
In other cases this effort made tentative new links. For example, the role of narrative in traumatic experience cuts across disciplines. This reflects the central importance of narrativity in human experience. Stories of suffering anchored in bodily experience, overarching cultural models, and ideologies of the person are all grist for the clinical encounter, and the transformation of narratives is a means both of effecting psychological change and of reconnecting the individual to his or her social and cultural contexts.
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