Substituting reflex or reflexive ethics for imperative ethics, where imperative ethics presumes to prescribe habitus and or action: Do not eat of the tree of knowledge, Love thy God, Obey Ten Commandments, Love thy neighbor as thyself, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, Obey the General Laws of Massachusetts, Obey the U.S. Code, Obey the Code of Federal Regulations, etc., while reflexive ethics considers what one does to be an expression, a reflection of what one is, ones essence at the moment of action, where that essence is the resultant of many forces, of genetic disposition, e.g. intelligence, physical and mental strength, intelligence, education, reward and punishment, paideia, experience, trauma, and fortune good and bad.

In this context, PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, post traumatische Belastungsstörung PTBS, is a diagnosis of much utility, not only because of its inherent validity, but also because of its plasticity and elasticity.  For us humans, trauma is an elastic concept which should comprise not only physical injury but also emotonal distress such as fear, disappointment, loneliness, grief, sorrow, even boredom. Stress, die Belastung, may manifest itself in any of the many obvious potential distortions of behavior.

Of special interest to me are the disorders which oppression and war as sources of trauma introduce into the delicate social balance of organized society. Historically this trauma has been construed as the expression of evil, als Ausdruck des Bösen, as work of the Devil. It is a negative cosmology which has not worked out, eine negative Kosmologie, die sich nicht bewährt hat. Dante's Inferno did not make the world a better place. Neither did Leibniz' pre-established Harmony with its pollyannaish assertion that evil in the world was required to satisfy a postulate of completeness and perfection. Goethes Faust makes Mephistopheles a mockery of suffering with its charades: the fatuous humanization of God: Mein Pathos brächte dich gewiss zum Lachen, hättst du dir nicht das Lachen abgewöhnt; with its denial of reality and its exaltation of unreality: Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, das Unzulängliche hier wird's Ereignis, das Unbeschreibliche, hier ist's getan, and the ultimate ambiguity: Das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan.  All of this is a panoply of obscenity in the shadows of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

The concept of a PTSD gives at least a hint why an entire nation became complicit in the modeling of Hell: The guards in the concentration camps inflicted unspeakable suffering on the inmates for fear that if they failed to inflict such suffering, they would become its victims. That fear was the post traumatic stress disorder which explains the Holocaust. 

Post traumatic stress disorder, Post Traumatisches Belastungsstoerung also explains the Crucifixion, surely on the part of its perpetrators and perhaps also on the part of its victim. So far as the perpetrators are concerned, the sacrifice serves to shift the otherwise unavoidable suffering to which the perpetrator has been exposed, thus far only as spectator, and which unavoidably threatens him as a potential victim, from the perpetrator to the victim. The hunting of animals "for sport" has the same function.

So far as the crucifixion is concerned, crucifixion was a public spectacle of cruelty and the exercise of power. Some of the highways of the Roman Empire were lined with crosses laden with their victims, dead or still dying, a terrifying and traumatizing spectacle for passers-by who were powerless to help, even if they had wanted to. By sending others, those who were different, who were unconventional, who did not blend into the social fabric, they demonstrated to themselves that their conventionality made them secure from such destruction.

John 19:
7 The Jews answered him, We have a law, and by our law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.

8 When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he was the more afraid;

12 And from thenceforth Pilate sought to release him: but the Jews cried out, saying, If thou let this man go, thou art not Caesar's friend: whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar.

So far as the victim is concerned, the trauma which he suffered, is that he was fatherless.  He deemed God to be his father, because he lacked a human father.  It was a natural reaction that he should try to heal the trauma of fatherlessness with a fantasy, that God was his father.  He let himself be persuaded, or he had convinced himself that he was the Son of God, and that God his Father would not forsake him.  In a fundamental sense, we, each of us considers himself a Son of God.  Sonship, having a father, and the relationship to that father, is the most fundamental of human relationships.  Given the fact that being an illegitimate child, his need for a father was so intense that he needed to invent that relationship, and God was the only father he could find.  But the fiction did not work.  In his time of greatest need, his Father abandoned hims, and he cried,.  My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 

Weil mein Vater mich nicht beschützte, musste ich zum Schützer meines Vaters werden.