The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

This judge rolled everything up into one, starting with the police-reports and the vagrancy, and then presented it to Moosbrugger as his guilt. But for Moosbrugger it all consisted of separate incidents that had nothing to do with each other, each of them with a different cause, which lay outside Moosbrugger and somewhere in the world as a whole. In the judge's eyes his acts came towards him the way birds come flying along. For the judge Moosbrugger was a special case; for himself he was a world, and it is very difficult to say something convincing about the world. There were two kinds of tactics fighting each other, two kinds of unity and logical consistency; but Moosbrugger had the less favourable position, for even a cleverer man could not have expressed his strange shadowy arguments. …

It was like a vapour that is always losing its shape and taking on other forms. He might, of course, have asked his judges whether their lives were essentially different. But such things never occurred to him.

(Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities)

PTSD IS TREATED with both pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. The most commonly prescribed medicines are antidepressants and minor and major tranquilizers, and they are used mainly against conditions that cooccur with PTSD: depression, generalized anxiety, and alcohol and chemical substance abuse (Silver 1990:36; Solomon et al. 1992:634). Although pharmacotherapy is less often used for symptoms specific to PTSD, several drugs have been found to have a modulating effect on intrusive phenomena, such as nightmares and dream recollections, and symptoms of auto

-176-