Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis(II) 

SPEAKER: Jen-Yu Peng

Associate Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica

TOPIC: “I Got PTSD!” — Questioning the Gap Between Diagnosis and Experience

TIME: 16:00-18:00, Monday, 27 October, 2025

VENUE: 2009R, 2nd Floor, College of Liberal Art, National Sun Yat-sen University

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has entered everyday language, as if any negative life experience might qualify as trauma. Are we, as Fassin and Rechtman (2007) suggest, now living in a world thoroughly permeated by an “empire of trauma”? This talk offers a critical reading of mainstream trauma theories from the perspective of psychoanalytic anthropology and, through clinical cases, explores the gap between pathological diagnoses and the lived reality of subjective experience.