William C. Porter Award Lecture. Trauma disorders and a psychology of external experience

The primary observation in this lecture is that there is a marked lack of attention to the actual, external objective reality and inherent objective meanings of the experiences of traumatic stress, which is due first to non-rational aversive responses in clinicians and researchers to traumatic events. Secondly, the inhibition is due to processes and structures inherent in behavioral sciences, including bias against memory, and preoccupation with the individual to the exclusion of the external environment. These factors produce confusion about etiology and pathogenesis in the vulnerable field of traumatic stress, undue burdening of the victim or survivor for accounting of events, and inadequate diagnosis and treatment. Certain exceptions are at hand, in the work of few researchers and in publications from centers for the treatment of torture victims. A psychology of external experience is needed, to more deeply explore the objective meanings of traumatic events and search for accurate recording of external events in memory, in correlation with the established areas of trauma research. This requires some partial paradigm shifts to better support traumatic stress studies.