Virtual Therapy and the Digital Future of Traumatic Past

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) presents a puzzling pathology of memory. An event, usually experienced with great fear and distress, is remembered not through typical recollections of past occurrences, upsetting as they may be, but instead as repeated and intrusive re-experiencing of the event as if happening once again. This is more or less the description of a disorder officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, but whose history can be traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century. As critical accounts by Ian Hacking, Ruth Leys, and Allan Young have shown, the very notion of traumatic memory is a distinctively modern development, which introduced new dimensions to the understanding of human memory more generally. In the spirit of modern progress, pathology of memory calls for therapy of memory, and the question of how to treat post-trauma inevitably involves the question of how to penetrate traumatic memory. That this memory is such that resists normal memorization renders any therapy a form of intermediating between past and present. In fact, it might be possible to run through the history of trauma therapies as a story of the challenge of accessing and retrieving traumatic memory. This chapter ventures no such enterprise. But its subject matter might be considered as a most recent episode in that story, in which access and retrieval of traumatic memory are performed by means of digital media technology. Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) is a clinical therapy project that employs digital virtual reality platform for treating war-related PTSD. Developed chiefly by psychologist Albert “Skip” Rizzo at the Institute for Creative Technology of the University of South California, the project draws on principles of exposure therapy, a cognitive-behavioral method whereby the patient is exposed to stimuli associated with the fearful event in order to achieve habituation. Its most recent configuration is Virtual Iraq- Afghanistan: an Xbox videogame- based platform currently in use at more than sixty locations, including hospitals, military bases, and university centers.