Review of The Theater of Trauma: American Modernist Drama and the Psychological Struggle for the American Mind, 1900-1930.

Reviews the book, The Theater of Trauma: American Modernist Drama and the Psychological Struggle for the American Mind, 1900-1930 by Michael Cotsell (2005). For most of the 20th century, psychoanalytic theory and its myriad offshoots so pervasively influenced literary criticism in the United States that for many it is difficult to imagine examining American literature of that era through any other psychological lens. In his new book The Theater of Trauma: American Modernist Drama and the Psychological Struggle for the American Mind, 1900-1930, Michael Cotsell alerts us to the existence of an alternate psychological perspective that dominated the American landscape before Freudian analysis gained widespread acceptance on this side of the Atlantic--dissociationism. He makes a compelling case that from the waning years of the 19th through the early decades of the 20th century American modernist drama was primarily shaped not by psychoanalytic thought, but by dissociationist psychology. Cotsell argues that it is dissociationism that informed and sustained the modernist sensibility in American drama, and that once dissociationist psychology was eclipsed by psychoanalytic theory, the demise of modernist playwriting was inevitable. Despite the breadth of this book, it is no more realistic that a single work could provide the last word on the relevance of dissociationism to drama than that one volume could offer a comprehensive discussion of the pertinence of psychoanalytic theory to the theater. Cotsell reminds us of the existence of a conceptual framework that carries tremendous explanatory power in its capacity to cogently link the realm of the psychological and personal to that of the social and political. The continued ubiquity of trauma and dissociation in contemporary life render the dissociationist perspective as relevant today as it was in the modernist epoch. Consequently, the significance of The Theater of Trauma extends well beyond the specific territory it covers; it lies in its potential to open new vistas for psychology, for literary criticism, and a wide spectrum of other disciplines concerned with the interface between society and individual experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)