Experiencing Trauma Before Trauma: Posttraumatic Memories, Nightmares and Flashbacks Among Finnish Soldiers

Abstract

This chapter discusses the appearance of trauma symptoms among the Finnish soldiers of World War II. Kivimäki analyzes three kinds of sources: wartime psychiatric patient files, war veterans’ dream reminiscences and war-related fiction movies in the postwar era. These materials reveal that posttraumatic memories, nightmares and flashbacks were a wide-spread phenomenon already in the 1940s, although the concept of trauma was not yet developed within Finnish psychiatry. The chapter suggests that traumatic symptoms are not simply born out of psychiatric paradigms, but that the culture that shapes and produces the symptoms must be understood more broadly. In the end, Kivimäki proposes the concept of experience as a move forward in the historical analysis of human reactions to trauma.