Book Review: Catherine Liu’s ‘Traumatized’

The marriage plot was integral to the emergent middle-class novel. Consider how the pursuit of a spouse drives Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) or that the disappointments of married life shape George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871). Our middle-class culture, in contrast, is organized around the trauma plot, stories in which a person’s behavior, identity, or relationships are understood through the lens of a formative past trauma. Narratives of personal suffering are everywhere, from memoirs (Tara Westover’s Educated) to novels (Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine) to television (True Detective) to film (Manchester by the Sea), and more.

For Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, the trauma plot has deep roots and weighty political consequences. In her new book, Traumatized, Liu argues that, by treating poverty, overwork, and insecurity as individual and private traumas to be overcome via self-help, therapy, and corporate wellness, capitalism transforms the psychological wounds of exploitation into profitable and commoditized stories, shifting responsibility onto workers. The stakes are high: For Liu, the subjective and emotional trauma plot is not only a “tool of social control” that represses working-class politics and class analysis, it is a grand narrative that has destroyed our “responsibility to reason” about “an objectively shared material reality and history.”

For Catherine Liu, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine, the trauma plot has deep roots and weighty political consequences. In her new book, Traumatized, Liu argues that, by treating poverty, overwork, and insecurity as individual and private traumas to be overcome via self-help, therapy, and corporate wellness, capitalism transforms the psychological wounds of exploitation into profitable and commoditized stories, shifting responsibility onto workers. The stakes are high: For Liu, the subjective and emotional trauma plot is not only a “tool of social control” that represses working-class politics and class analysis, it is a grand narrative that has destroyed our “responsibility to reason” about “an objectively shared material reality and history.”

Flying in the face of postmodern theories of social class as obsolete, Traumatized is a bold Marxist critique: Liu deconstructs “the ideological mystification of suffering that trauma discourse and trauma studies provide in order to promote liberalism’s foreclosure of collective possibilities for health and healing.” Importantly, Liu’s overall goal is “not to correct the definition of trauma as a psychiatric diagnosis or to denounce incorrect descriptions of memory and forgetting.”

Her aim, rather, is to investigate the cultural, political, and economic ideas about and practices around the trauma plot that have obscured structural inequalities and class interests. Because Traumatized throws a wrench in what she sees as a conservative as much as liberal-built trauma machine that thwarts the liberation of the truly dispossessed, Liu’s book will encourage many readers to reconsider their political coordinates.

A 19th century illustration depicts a New York social worker removing children from the home of an abusive, drunken mother.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

In her next volley, Liu concentrates on second-wave feminists, who, from the 1960s to the 1980s, extended the struggle for women’s equality from legal voting rights to cultural issues, all the while taking up the trauma plot. For Liu, Judith Herman’s work in the 1980s and early 1990s set the standard script, which appeared at the end of the Cold War. Herman powerfully critiqued the medical establishment’s mistreatment of rape victims, but focused on working-class women’s experiences in the Boston area without examining the economic relations shaping their lives. Herman therefore obscured the class analysis and collective political action that characterized earlier socialist-feminist organizing. The trauma plot as a class weapon, as an instrument of social control, had entered a new phase.

Still more powerful elements composed the trauma script. In her third chapter, Liu investigates how post-1968 critiques of psychiatry, in part in response to Vietnam veterans, intersected with insurance companies’ negative assessments of psychoanalysts as “unscientific, authoritarian, and reactionary types.” Insurance companies instead encouraged psychiatrists to use checklists, such as the PTSD checklist, to prescribe drugs. Another important result of this trauma narrative was the ending of housing and treatment of the mentally ill in large state-run institutions. Advanced through “liberal and conservative policies and policymaking of the 1980s and ’90s,” a liberal trauma culture then emerged, wherein historical traumas—from the Holocaust to the transatlantic slave trade—are primarily understood through the meaning of an individual’s suffering, of a personal lived experience.

In her final demystification of the trauma plot, Liu focuses on the emergence of Oprah Winfrey, “the media mogul.” By watching when Winfrey revealed that she had been abused as a child, Americans did not simply witness “trauma and recovery in action.” Internalizing her “powerful message about the power of individual will,” they eagerly turned away from the intensifying structural inequalities of the Reagan era putting economic and emotional pressures on women and mothers. That President Bill Clinton signed the Winfrey-endorsed 1993 Child Protection Act confirms the star’s influence.

Yet, for Liu, Winfrey’s writing of herself into the by-then ubiquitous trauma plot not only cultivated “her brand,” paving “the way for our acceptance of smartphones and chatbots as confessional booths and soulmates.” It contributed to our post-Cold War trauma-culture liberalism, which, by focusing on private pain and anguish, “legitimatizes a more unequal, violent, and unstable social whole,” exposing “us to the reaction of conservatives who are willing to channel working-class resentment into a politics of rage against liberal hypocrisies.”

Talk show host and media mogul Oprah Winfrey speaks at a seminar in Toronto on Feb. 28, 1991.Boris Spremo/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Readers might question the causal link that Liu makes, say, between the popularity of Winfrey’s media presence and the massive inequalities of the neoliberal period. Liu would perhaps respond: If your impulse is to focus on Winfrey’s personal trauma or to search for an authenticity expressed through exclusively emotional stories of suffering, then the trauma plot’s sidelining of the “injuries of class” and “the slow violence and high psychological cost of being exploited in an economic system designed to de-skill workers, degrade craft, and generate profits” has done its damage.

Traumatized, while a short text, could have benefitted in spots from a wider historical lens. In Make Your Own Job (2025), Madeleine Baker investigates the deceptive charms that U.S. business culture, from the late 19th- and early 20th-century New Thought to the supposed COVID-era Great Resignation, has pushed about the idea of the entrepreneur. This valorization—and its harmful traps—of self-directed prosperity surely intersected with the self-directed trauma script and it destructive social and political effects. Similarly, in Left Behind (2022), Lily Geismer explores how young, elite-educated Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s abandoned New Deal-style state intervention and embraced a market-guided policy that disastrously placed the onus of overcoming poverty solely on the individual.

Baker, Geismar, and other historians suggest that, instead of being a quasi-foundational narrative of contemporary society, the trauma plot is one plotline in a broader and longer story about the political economy of the United States. What’s more, any discussion of “woke” politics—the prime example, according to Musa al-Gharbi, of how cultural elites use the language of social justice to accrue more power and status—is conspicuously absent from Traumatized. Also missing from Liu’s text: consideration of how the trauma script has been violently instrumentalized in the United States by centuries-old “white grievance” discourses.

Nonetheless, Liu makes a compelling point that the trauma plot’s destructive rule could soon be exerted to the rest of the earth. And yet, a recent wave, led by France and Australia, of strict new tech regulations across the globe that include youth social media bans, algorithmic transparency, and work-life digital boundaries, could upend the “surveillance capitalism,” pioneered by U.S. companies like Google and Meta, that, as Liu argues, transforms and monetizes private confession into public spectacle. These laws might blunt the class weapon of the trauma script, shielding users abroad against the U.S. imperial project and its “new politics of public suffering.” If the moral panic about “cancel culture”—hysteria that started in the United States and then spread to Europe, South America, and beyond—serves as any example, then we just might see further restrictions placed on this latest U.S. export.

And Liu’s railing is against the devastating political power that members of her own class exert by luxuriating in stories of private suffering, thereby obliterating the Wretched’s voices, crushing their pain. “In the past half century, left political organizations have found themselves hostage to destructive and repressive forces of personal testimony engineered to paralyze objective and material analysis of political goals and situations.” And for Liu, because “[t]he trauma script has been fully metabolized into the cellular structure of professional-class liberalism,” liberal (that is, establishment) political organizations must themselves be destroyed.

Liu pulls no punches: from JD Vance (in his memoir of working-class white Americans in Appalachia and the Rust Belt) to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (during a 90-minute Instagram livestream about her lived experience of Jan. 6, 2021) to Kamala Harris (whose Winfrey-sanctioned 2024 presidential campaign touted support from survivors of sexual and gun violence), Liu sees the trauma plot’s hegemonic power as undiminished. She rightly presents Vance as a mighty voice on the political right. But Liu’s placement of Ocasio-Cortez, a self-avowed democratic socialist, and Harris in that category scrambles common understandings of the U.S. political axis. And this is partly her aim. For Liu, they all exercise the trauma plot to extract power, prestige, and pelf.

For fellow travelers, Traumatized offers a persuasive analysis of our situation, beyond the customary left-right dichotomy and delivered with a marvelous sense of moral urgency. With Liu, we can fill the plot holes erased by the trauma plot and rewrite the grand narrative told by the trauma industry, a story that has for far too long enthralled, further entrenched social and economic inequalities, and led us toward worldwide catastrophe. To do so, we must resist the temptation to privatize—our feelings, our pain, our suffering—and recover plans to imagine our collective welfare and flourishing. We can still be the authors of our shared story, from its beginning to its middle and its end.