Why have trauma and 'lived experience' become the professional class's favourite currency? Cultural theorist Catherine Liu argues that trauma, once a clinical term for the aftermath of real violence, has been hijacked by liberal elites as a tool of self-branding and class distinction, eclipsing the harder political work of naming exploitation itself. From AOC's Instagram confessions to Prince Harry's memoirs, Liu traces how pain became content, and asks what the left loses when it trades solidarity for social media spectacles. 

See Catherine Liu live in-person when she takes part in the HowTheLightGetsIn festival at Kenwood House, London, 19–20 September 2026 diving into the trauma culture debate and discussing the biggest ideas of today alongside Bryan Johnson, Roger Penrose, Emily Wilson, Sabine Hossenfelder, and many many more. Book your place now.

Trauma was once a clinical term for the aftermath of real violence. Catherine Liu argues it has since become something else entirely: a currency of the professional class, a branding tool for celebrities and politicians, and a substitute for the harder political work of naming exploitation. From the gentrification of pain to the Instagram confession, Liu traces how suffering became content—and asks what the left loses when it trades solidarity for spectacle. Her new book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, follows Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.

Interviewer: You’re known for your work on class. And especially your attack on the professional-managerial class—academics, lawyers, doctors, NGO staff, media, and tech workers—who believe they possess a kind of neutral, technical expertise that makes them better equipped to run society than either capitalists or the working class. Your new book turns to trauma, why?

Catherine Liu: I was really fascinated, but I should say appalled, by the way in which trauma—as an affliction, and as a concept—has been instrumentalized by the liberal class of professionals, especially around the very basis of their politics. There was something about the rise of this kind of psychologization of suffering, as well as the gentrification of pain, that struck me as critical to the post-’68 professional-class elites. One of the things that allowed them to eclipse the suffering of the working class and the question of exploitation was that they promoted, at every single level—from psychology to feminism to medicine to politics itself—this idea that trauma was something cross-class as a phenomenon. The trauma industry only accelerated since COVID, and since the rise of neoliberal liberalism, where trauma becomes content. Publishers were starved for it.

I also came of age at a time when human rights in the Cold War were very much dominant in politics, and this whole idea of trauma was, hypothetically, a way of positioning the American hegemon as the most enlightened force in the world, one that was going to help the world recover from the trauma of communism. Especially from the end of the Cold War through the 1990s, there was an idea that the Holocaust was the greatest atrocity in the world, and that it was only the free world that was processing it—that the recently liberated countries of the East had not looked at the trauma of the Holocaust as such.

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So you’d call this an element of class war?