Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Reading and writing poems can provide a cathartic relief to pent-up emotions. The reader who hasn't known any traumatic experience is not going to grasp the agony of the sufferer. Many readers who avoid reading bereavement and war poetry and novels because they either don't feel anything or feel too much if they themselves have been hurt. Those who have undergone a trauma would like to forget their bitter experiences and yet what is the reason they still feel compelled to write poems about them? War has a strange fascination for human beings. Even those who cannot muster up the courage to be at the battlefront for a few minutes, love to watch war movies, novels but rarely war poetry. The reason is that in war poetry, there is the pain of some individual while war movies excite interest for the story line, adventure, characters and suspense. It is a paradoxical reality of human life that while no one wants to be a victim of war himself, (s)he derives vicarious pleasure from watching or reading scenes of actual or fictitious war and violence. Post Traumatic Disorder syndrome made Freud change his theory of repression of unpleasant experiences.