A Realist Account of Stress, Ptsd, and Resilience: Lessons from the United States Marine Corps

ISBN-13: 9781138283527 / Angielski / Twarda / 2021 / 400 str.

Frank Tortorello

Opis

In much of the discourse on stress, distress and resilience (SDR) in the US Marine Corps there is the recognition that the social somehow plays a role in the development of stress and distress. However, these arguments are most often grounded in the same fundamental and largely unchallenged assumption that stress and distress are essentially the result of brain functions. Even in the literature that focuses on the social implications of combat, stress and distress are most often conceived as traumatic damage to the psychology and mind of soldiers, and not as personal and socio-cultural constructions of a way of being. In a strong departure from the conventional discourse, Tortorello argues that such a reductive, neuroscientific approach to understanding SDR in the US Marine Corps fails both scientifically and ethically. Incorporating data from his ethnographic study of culture in the US Marine Corps, Tortorello proposes an agentic, socio-cultural approach that reconceptualises SDR as a way of being, wherein persons generate their own SDR through social and cultural mechanisms, rather than SDR presenting as the results of malfunctioning cognitive processes. This book will be of interest to scholars of medical and psychological anthropology, military studies, and American studies.

Spis treści

Introduction; 1 A New Realist Account of How Physical Science Works; 2 The Marine Corps’ COSC Doctrine: An Impossible Science of Human Nature; 3 The Marine Corps’ COSC Doctrine: An Impossible Science of Perception; 4 Applying the Traditional Approach and the USMC COSC Doctrine Part I: Ideology and Self-Defeat; 5 Applying the Traditional Approach and the USMC COSC Doctrine Part II: Immorality and Self-Defeat; 6 Replacing the Traditional Approach with New Realism: Framework for a Scientifically Defensible and Ethically Justifiable Human Science; 7 Applying a New Realist Human Science to Stress, PTSD, and Resilience; 8 Stress, PTSD, and Resilience as Ways of Being; 9 PTSD as Existential Crisis; Conclusion

O autorze

Frank Tortorello is an independent scholar previously employed as a contracted social scientist by the United States Marine Corps. He received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.