Can the state protect us from being traumatized?

Comment published on New York Times blog, in response to news article by Katherine Rossman, “Should college come with trigger warnings? At Cornell, it’s a hard ‘no’,” April 21, 2023":

What is at stake here is not just intellectual academic freedom; it concerns how we deal with traumatic experience generally, as individuals and as a society.

The notion that people can be "triggered" by appearances that evoke traumas is based on the assumption that the provocation that trauma's evocation makes possible is essentially harm, and so should be avoided. In the end, it's a wish that the half-remembered event would disappear without a trace.

That trauma and its evocation are associated with mental illness is consistent with policies of avoidance. This is one way psychoanalytic thought differs from that of the mental health industry. It aims to suppress the appearance of symptoms. But among the fundamental insights of psychoanalysis are that (1) trauma cannot be avoided, but must be worked through; (2) trauma of some sort is universal. It follows that people who have had traumatic experiences are not mentally ill, unless everyone is.

Traumatic experience can stimulate creativity. This too is widely recognized. But our therapeutic culture aims less at creativity than policing. It aims at safety, security, and protection from trauma. It expresses the wish that bad things can be considered to have never happened. It fears encounters, including with ideas. Health is a curious name of God that excludes not only justice but creative thinking, and thus the most useful education.