The Theater of Trauma is a groundbreaking rereading of the relations between psychology and
drama in the age of Eugene O'Neill Susan Glaspell and their many brilliant contemporaries.
American modernist Theater of Trauma drew its vision from the psychological investigation of
trauma and its consequences - among them hysteria and dissociation - made by French and
American psychiatrists such as the great Pierre Janet Alfred Binet William James Morton
Prince and W.E.B. Du Bois the European and American «dissociationist culture» that developed
around their work and the resulting trauma of World War I. American dramatists' deep
resistance to Freud's suppression of trauma challenges the equation of Freud and modernism that
has become commonplace in modernist criticism.
