Confucian PTSD: Reading Trauma in a Chinese Youngster's Memoir of 1653

Struve examines the psychological movement that Zhang Maozi's memoir Yusheng lu embodies from a state of debilitating numbness and terrifying, repetitive hallucinations to one of ritualistically conceived, hopeful anticipation of (funerary) closure, as conditioned by the creeds of Confucianism. Among other things, he urges that documents such as the Yusheng lu, from eras and areas remote from those that heretofore have been dominant in historical memory studies, be looked to seriously for perspective on assumptions about the recentness of certain phenomena, such as traumatic memory, and post traumatic stress disorder, in human history.