Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic research and on literary and archival sources, this paper explores the multiple discourses on psychiatric trauma that circulated in psychological, cultural, and political debates around self, affliction, and violence in Lebanon. I argue that psychiatry’s cultural authority and its intellectual impact on these debates merit an examination that takes seriously the role of psychiatric science in the making of political and social understandings on self, culture and the other. I take trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) not as allegoric concepts but as therapeutic objects that provoked debates on modernity and ethics, religion and postwar living, afflicted subjectivities and the nation in Lebanon. The paper traces these debates among psy practitioners, state and political actors, sociologists, humanitarian workers, literary scholars and cultural artists in the Lebanese civil war, Israel wars and present day.