Author(s): Ran Zwigenberg (Contribution by)

History

In 1945, Researchers on a Mission to Hiroshima with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey canvassed survivors of the nuclear attack. This marked the beginning of global efforts to tackle the complex ways in which human minds were affected by the advent of the nuclear age. Ran Zwigenberg traces these efforts and their interpretations across communities of researchers and hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bomb, to explore how the weapon's psychological impact was understood before we had the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, psychological and psychiatric research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rarely referred to trauma or similar categories. Instead, institutional and political constraints-most notably the psychological sciences' entanglement with Cold War science-led people to concentrate on short-term damage and somatic reactions or even, in some cases, on denial of victims' suffering. But, Zwigenberg argues, it was not only that doctors "failed" to issue the right diagnosis; the victims' experiences also did not necessarily conform to our contemporary expectations. As he shows, the category of trauma should not be used uncritically in a non-Western context. Consequently, this book sets out, first, to understand the historical, cultural, and scientific constraints in which researchers and victims were acting and, second, to explore how suffering was understood in different cultural contexts.