Bessel Van der Kolk on Trauma, America’s Favorite Diagnosis

Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives.

Bessel van der Kolk at his home in Massachusetts. Photo: Frankie Alduino This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. It’s bad news when your university creates a committee to ensure that you don’t publish any research papers without its approval. It’s worse news if the only other person facing similar scrutiny is a man investigating alien abductions. This was the situation facing the trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk in the mid-’90s when Harvard Medical School informed him that all of his future publications

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