From trauma to brain fog? Bodily and psychic dispossession in times of violence

Abstract

What does the term ‘brain fog’ enable and what might it foreclose? In response to David Bissell's account of being ‘out of it’ through his analysis of the phenomenon and experience of brain fog, I consider how it opens questions of how body and mind might bear the ‘insults’ inflicted by both external and internal worlds. I speculate that accounts of brain fog might signal the supplanting of the logics of trauma (together with the compacted histories of psychoanalysis and psychiatry that trauma carries with it) and the installation of other ways of understanding embodiment, affect, and the wounds caused both by the external world and by illness/bodily change. In considering the ramifications of this potential shift, and through a reading of Palestinian poet Husam Maarouf's essay, ‘Hunger that defeats language’, I argue for not losing sight of the psyche in understanding inflictions that result in bodily – and psychic – dispossession.

Fog

What kind of a phenomenon, and what kind of a (social-)scientific object, is fog? David Bissell compellingly argues that ‘brain fog’ ought not to be regarded just as a biomedical symptom produced through infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus but as ‘a response to the wholescale socio-spatial reorganisation of life that the virus set off’ (Bissell, 2025: 2). My own experience of COVID in 2020 and of what, retrospectively, I would come to describe as brain fog – I had to put Post It notes in my home to help me navigate situations I had previously traversed effortlessly – appeared to me to wrap within it both the physiological damage caused by the virus and the traumatic assault that the pandemic inflicted on my mind as I attempted to find my bearings across days spent largely in a sick bed, isolated but for my partner who cared for me (Callard, 2020; Callard and Perego, 2021).

As I prepared to write this commentary, I read articles about atmospheric fog as well as brain fog, to think through how both phenomena might be approached socio-spatially. I read scientific research arguing that fog appears to be decreasing in parts of the world because of climate breakdown. I read scientific research arguing that brain fog might well be increasing because of climate breakdown. Rising temperature and humidity are associated with a rise in unpleasant neurological and psychological symptoms including fatigue and confusion. But both kinds of fog – one external, one internal – are complex objects with complex histories: determinative scientific predictions or conclusions are hard to make. Though, today, atmospheric fog is a much more stable scientific object than ‘brain fog’ (whose definition is not resolved in the scholarly literature), both atmospheric fog and brain fog are sites of ongoing scientific uncertainty – as regards both questions of classification, modelling, and forecasting (vis-à-vis atmospheric fog), and of aetiology and nosology (vis-à-vis brain fog).

This uncertainty, I suggest, is related to how both kinds of fog have the capacity to register what might be described as insults, whose causes are often hard to pin down, from the external or internal world. Ought the apparent lessening of atmospheric fog in some places be tied to changes in climate – or to reductions in pollution? Ought a doctor respond to a patient's reports of symptoms of brain fog by considering further biomedical investigations or pursue inquiries as to the patient's living situation, working conditions, or mental state? Additionally, the emergence of the term ‘brain fog’ (which, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, can be dated to the mid-19th century) is an instance of how internal states are often described through reference to phenomena or activities found in the external world. How the external world is used to model the internal world has implications for how the internal world is understood, if not actually experienced. In my research on historical-geographies of daydreaming and mind-wandering, I have been preoccupied by the epistemic and ontological consequences of describing mental activity through the language of wandering (‘mind-wandering’) versus the language of dream (‘daydream’) (Callard et al., 2013; Morrison et al., 2019). Similar questions need to be posed as regards the term ‘brain fog’: what does this term enable and what might it foreclose?

Supplanting psychoanalytic models of trauma

In the remainder of my commentary, then, I focus on Bissell's choice of brain fog as his exemplary case study through which to address the much broader phenomenological category of being ‘out of it’. That latter category, he shows us, extends across multiple phenomena, including symptoms of illness or of changing bodily states, states of intoxication, and heterogeneous instances of dissociation and fatigue that can result from enduring different kinds of political-economic and relational violence or wearing down.

There is something about the growing salience of the fuzzy category of ‘brain fog’, I want to suggest, that indexes specific sites of concern (including but extending well beyond the effects of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic) within our current conjuncture. I am interested just as much in Bissell's choice, as a scholar, to settle on and analyse brain fog, as I am in thinking through particular manifestations of brain fog. Let's look at Bissell's conjecture that, ‘if brain fog is induced by crisis events’ (he has just mentioned the punitive infliction of cognitive confusion by the state, or in cases of domestic violence), that ‘kind of subjectivity’ (the person with brain fog) might increase in prevalence as climate-change induced crises continue to intensify (Bissell, 2025: 14–15). The kind of subjectivity precipitated by crisis events that include state and relational violence has not always been one construed through the category of brain fog. Turn to the end of the twentieth century, for example, and the term used in many locations would likely have been trauma.

A vast body of writing has analysed how ‘trauma’ is intimately entangled with modernity and with the psychic damage that racial capitalism and fascism inflicted. Indeed, coiled within the term trauma are compacted histories of psychoanalytic and psychiatric attempts to map the complex temporality of wounded minds (Leys, 2000; Young, 2001). As Paul Lerner and Mark Micale argued, the expansion of the trauma concept across the 20th century ‘was simultaneously responsive to and constitutive of “modernity”’ (Lerner and Micale, 2001: 10).

Might the rise of ‘brain fog’ tell us something about the potential supersession of the problematics and terms regarded as constitutive of modernity? I speculate that ‘brain fog’ for Bissell – and perhaps, more broadly – works to supplant ‘trauma’ as a category that brings to visibility, and offers an analytic framework for explaining bodies and minds that are disjunct from how normative models construe people's internal and external worlds. Let me sketch out how I see this taking place.

A certain model of affect takes, for Bissell, centre stage. He argues that we need to reframe ‘displacement, disengagement, and dispossession’ as ‘affective concerns’; that brain fog allows us to understand specifically ‘cognitive affective’ concerns; that ‘being out of it points to a kind of bodily affectivity’ that demands reconfiguring geographical assumptions about how people are able to ‘make sense of situations’; and that the ‘incoming forces’ that impress upon or take over the subject are to be understood as ‘passive affects’ (Bissell, 2025: 1, 3, 11).

What is noticeable, here, is how the psyche – contra all psychoanalytic formulations of trauma and many psychiatric formulations of trauma – tends to disappear. The terms in play alongside affect are, instead, cognition and consciousness: there is no indication of an unconscious. Bissell invokes Berlant, whom he describes as an ‘affect theorist’, in the context of showing ‘how we are resolutely not in possession of ourselves, constituted as we are by all manner of attachments to and fantasies involving broader social structures’ (Bissell, 2025: 8). But Berlant's persistent investment in the psyche and the unconscious is nowhere in view. For Berlant, we should be clear, it is the psychic work of fantasy that anchors their claims about not being in possession of ourselves. Bissell also takes up the arguments of Catherine Malabou in The New Wounded (Malabou, 2012) at a point where he wishes to emphasise how experiences such as brain injury can ‘annihilat[e]’ the former self (Bissell, 2025: 12). Malabou in that book challenges a Freudian account of the psyche (and of the death drive) in proposing her regime of ‘cerebrality’ as a counter to Freud's foregrounding of sexuality. Malabou's account of the ‘new wounded’ has been critiqued for constituting a group made up of very different kinds of people (including those with Alzheimer's Disease, those living under the diagnosis of schizophrenia, autistic people, those damaged by extreme ‘relational’ and/or political violence, and those with post-traumatic stress disorder) and for emptying all those construed as the ‘new wounded’ of memory, subjectivity, interiority – and, indeed, feeling (Leys, 2016). There are, I believe, significant politico-ethical risks in taking up Malabou in the service of advancing the argument that Bissell wants to pursue – that an injury such as head trauma can effect ‘a rupture where a new subject emerges that is somehow severed from their psychic history’ (Bissell, 2025: 12).

Is there evidence beyond Bissell's article to ground my speculation that ‘brain fog’ might come to serve, at our current moment, a similar role to that of (psychoanalytic and psychiatric models of) ‘trauma’ in the late 20th century? I think there is. I have come across many accounts of ‘brain fog’ that work to distance this phenomenon from formulations that rely on an intimacy between the psy-sciences and the subjectivities they are assumed to produce. Robert Chapman and Micha Frazer-Carroll, for example, read the pandemic, and its production of Long COVID, as a mass disabling and ‘neurodivergifying’ event, and situate their argument outside of the ‘remit of psychiatry’ (Chapman and Frazer-Carroll, 2025: 122, 128). It is worth thinking further about how Bissell's and others’ accounts of brain fog act to shift bodily and psychic experiences of dispossession and disablement away from knowledge practices (such as psychoanalysis) that focus on the vicissitudes of the psyche, and towards other means of modelling embodiment and affect (cf. Callard and Papoulias, 2010).

Dismantling the self

I had nearly finished my first (now erased) draft when Palestine again confronted me with the inadequacy of my thinking. This time it was the words of poet Husam Maarouf (2025). ¹ Maarouf, writing from Gaza, describes how Israel, in deciding to starve him, is dismantling his self and mind as well as his body. He writes of the hunger that he is enduring as bringing:

a numbness that spreads from the gut to the brain. It blurs memories, weakens vision, and turns every thought into a deep excavation that the mind can’t bear. Hunger steals the simplest human abilities: concentration, patience, sensation, the desire to say something. Thinking becomes a luxury. Words become weights that cannot be lifted.

In some, horrific sense, Maarouf's essay addresses an extreme form of being ‘out of it’ – though this phrase in no way does justice to what Maarouf is being forced to undergo. Maarouf describes the hunger inflicted as a tool of genocide as effecting his ‘coming apart’. He writes of inhabiting a self in which, ‘There's no idea, no drive, no inner voice pulling [him] forward’. This hunger ‘dismantl[es] … the self’ because it brings about the ‘alienat[ion]’ of ‘you from yourself’.

Maarouf's unbearable account of what he is forced to bear – deliberately inflicted numbness, one that swallows both his gut and his brain – confronted me, unyieldingly, as I attempted to reflect on what attending to states of being ‘out of it’ might do to our thinking, and our actions, within the discipline of geography. It confronts me with the urgency of acknowledging so as to act, to work relentlessly to stop what the imperial core is doing to Palestine – to combat the annihilatory drive that all too frequently forces others to experience bodily and psychic dispossession.

I have deliberately set psychic alongside bodily in that sentence. Maarouf is clear that those who have caused the blurring of his memory and the theft of his concentration have inflicted psychic as well as physiological wounds. The dismantling of the self is one in which ‘every thought’ is turned ‘into a deep excavation that the mind can’t bear’. The word excavation cannot but bring to my mind an image of the grotesque bombs with which the imperial core continues to bludgeon Gaza. There is rubble in both the external and internal world, and Maarouf's mind attempts, in the face of the violence that produces that rubble, to turn part of itself away from itself. His essay demands that we attend to how this violence carries deadly psychic as well as physiological and affective-cognitive consequences.

Trauma has long been a dominant term through which to construe the subject exposed to violence, disruption, and pain that comes from both inside and out. Bissell's article, in positioning a particular construal of brain fog as an exemplary instance of being ‘out of it’, is perhaps one instance of the calling forth of a different dispositif – one that does not work through the temporal and affective dislocations of the unconscious and which develops different accounts of affect, body, and cognition. I have diverged from some of the conceptual turns and emphases Bissell makes because I want to argue for the importance of holding on to the psyche and the unconscious as we continue to stay with the pain of events and processes that fall under the phrase being ‘out of it’. Maarouf's essay ends with his telling us that he ‘fears hunger more than death’. Any reckoning with states of being ‘out of it’ demands never losing sight of how and by whom so many of those states come to be inflicted – whether directly, or through less immediately visible, more circuitous forms of violence. States of incapacitation that lie at the juncture between the cognitive, somatic, and environmental also bear the tears of the psyche.