Social and Political Trauma
Why is PTSD problematic?
Trauma is commonly understood as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Yet, I argue within my work that this concept is problematic.
It is problematic because it remains stuck in what is called a Philosophy of the Subject. This means that trauma is reduced to a psychological problem of the mind, and no longer regarded as a social breach of norms. This psychologisation of trauma not only results in its depoliticisation, but also in an overemphasis of the traumatic "event" over structural trauma (such as poverty or authoritarian violence).
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It is also problematic because, as I explain in my book, the psychologisation of trauma makes it impossible to establish the causal relation to the event. Rather, these relations are based on assumptions, and thus possibly false correlations.
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What is a critical theory of trauma?
Hence, drawing on Frankfurt School critical theory, I argue that we should rethink the concept of trauma: trauma should not be understood as impaired subjectivity but rather as broken intersubjectivity.
Employing the philosophies of Jürgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi and Heideggerian trauma theory in particular - I argue that trauma entails the violent imposition of traumatic status subordination.
In traumatic status subordination, the counterfactual presupposition of being treated as an equal human being - intersubjective parity - is so violently betrayed that the symbolic realm of the lifeworld collapses.
As the lifeworld collapses, one suffers an atomized state of speechless disorientation, wherein the potential of creative collective becoming is destroyed. In this sense, human induced trauma should thus be understood as a political tool par excellence.
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The uses of a critical theory of trauma
Such a critical theory of trauma enables a multilevelled analysis of traumatisation, namely its political constitution, social embedding and existential impacts.
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I have thus extensively applied this criticical theory of trauma not only to Middle Eastern politics (particularly Egypt), but also to Long Covid and chronic illness (Matthies-Boon, 2025 forthcoming).
Political trauma in Egypt
In my articles and book on counter-revolutionary trauma in Egypt, I have shown that the Egyptian military have used traumatic status subordination was a counterrevolutionary tool. They used it to put the revolutionary genie (of the 2011 revolution) back into the bottle.
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Importantly, the Egyptian military not only sought to get the demonstrations of the street and "create order", but rather sought to destroy the underlying existential structures of the very possibility of a new creative collective becoming.
And thus, in the violent instrumental pursuit of economic and political power, the counter-revolution inflicted multileveled status subordination. This multilevelled status subordination consisted of three mechanisms:
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1) the infliction of grave (deadly) violence, ​2) the procedural colonisation and repressive juridification of the public sphere, and 3) the acceleration of neoliberal economic rationalism.
This not only accumulated in Sisi’s prisonification of society and his politics of death, but rather also threw activists ever deeper into an atomized state of demoralized silence as it destroyed the very potential of revolutionary and transformative becoming.