A Realist Account of Stress, PTSD, and Resilience Lessons from the United States Marine Corps

This book rejects traditional, dominant—typically reductive and anti-realist—explanations of stress, PTSD, and resilience. Frank Tortorello presents the United States Marine Corps’ doctrinal explanation of stress, PTSD, and resilience as a case in point using new realist theoretical resources from Rom Harré and Charles R. Varela. The author systematically exposes the scientific and ethical failures of traditional explanations in accounting for the actions of stressed and resilient Marines on and off the battlefield. The power of new realist explanations emerges in application to the same ethnographic data, thereby supporting the author’s call to replace traditional explanations with those grounded in new realism.

Introduction 1 A New Realist Account of How Physical Science Works 2 The Marine Corps’ COSC Doctrine: An Impossible Science of Human Nature.. 3 The Marine Corps’ COSC Doctrine: An Impossible Science of Perception 4 Applying the Traditional Approach and the USMC COSC Doctrine Part I: Ideology and Self-Defeat 5 Applying the Traditional Approach and the USMC COSC Doctrine Part II: Immorality and Self-Defeat 6 Replacing the Traditional Approach with New Realism: Framework for a Scientifically Defensible and Ethically Justifiable Human Science 7 Applying a New Realist Human Science to Stress, PTSD, and Resilience 8 Stress, PTSD, and Resilience as Ways of Being 9 PTSD as Existential Crisis Conclusion

Frank Tortorello is an independent scholar previously employed as a contracted social scientist by the United States Marine Corps. He received a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.