Trauma and the stoic foundations of sympathy

Many of the contributions to this volume are concerned with the difficulty of communicating traumatic experience to a wider public. Richard Gehrmann’s essay and our interviews with emergency nursing specialist Therese Lee and foreign correspondent Michael Willacy give detailed accounts of some of the difficulties created by the immense gulf in awareness and understanding. Yet the impulse to bridge that gulf is very powerful. There are two things at issue here. One is the influence on public memory, so that it is accountable for the full spectrum of human reality. The other is the need for a more fundamental kind of influence, on the cognitive and emotional range from which public memories are drawn. The second of these is difficult territory. This essay offers an approach to it with some historical perspectives, and explores how certain influential figures were concerned with the formation of memory in circumstances that test the capacities of human sympathy in the modern era.