The twentieth century saw two world wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Rwanda, to mention only some of the worst atrocities. As John Wilson notes, the litany of war, civil violence and nuclear attack produced more trauma, mass destruction and death in a limited time frame than any other period in human history.¹ Trauma has also become a feature of political discourse, most evident in recent history in the relation to the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon on 11 September 2001.