Trauma

A Social Theory

Jeffrey C. Alexander

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745661353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie sociale

In this book Jeffrey C. Alexander develops an original social theory of trauma and uses it to carry out a series of empirical investigations into social suffering around the globe.

Alexander argues that traumas are not merely psychological but collective experiences, and that trauma work plays a key role in defining the origins and outcomes of critical social conflicts. He outlines a model of trauma work that relates interests of carrier groups, competing narrative identifications of victim and perpetrator, utopian and dystopian proposals for trauma resolution, the performative power of constructed events, and the distribution of organizational resources.

Alexander explores these processes in richly textured case studies of cultural-trauma origins and effects, from the universalism of the Holocaust to the particularism of the Israeli right, from postcolonial battles over the Partition of India and Pakistan to the invisibility of the Rape of Nanjing in Maoist China. In a particularly controversial chapter, Alexander describes the idealizing discourse of globalization as a trauma-response to the Cold War.

Contemporary societies have often been described as more concerned with the past than the future, more with tragedy than progress. In Trauma: A Social Theory, Alexander explains why.

CULTURAL TRAUMA: A SOCIAL THEORY

Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.

As I develop it here, cultural trauma is first of all an empirical, scientific concept, suggesting new meaningful and causal relationships between previously unrelated events, structures, perceptions, and actions. But this new scientific concept also illuminates an emerging domain of social responsibility and political action. It is by constructing cultural traumas that social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations not only cognitively identify the existence and source of human suffering but may also take on board some significant responsibility for it. Insofar as they identify the cause of trauma in a manner that assumes such moral responsibility, members of collectivities define their solidary relationships in ways that, in principle, allow them to share the suffering of others. Is the suffering of others also our own? In thinking that it might in fact be, societies expand the circle of the “we.” By the same token, social groups can, and often do, refuse to recognize the existence of others’ trauma, or place the responsibility for it on people other than themselves. Because of their failure they cannot achieve a moral stance. Refusing to participate in the process of trauma creation, social groups restrict solidarity, leaving others to suffer alone.

Ordinary Language and Reflexivity

One of the great advantages of this new theoretical concept is that it partakes so deeply of everyday life. In the last century, first in Western societies and then, soon after, throughout the rest of the world, people spoke continually about being traumatized by an experience, by an event, by an act of violence or harassment, or even, simply, by an abrupt and unexpected, and sometimes not even particularly malevolent, experience of social transformation and change.¹ People also have continually employed the language of trauma to explain what happens, not only to themselves, but to the collectivities to which they belong as well. We often speak of an organization being traumatized when a leader departs or dies, when a governing regime falls, when an organization suffers an unexpected reversal of fortune. Actors describe themselves as traumatized when the environment of an individual or a collectivity suddenly shifts in an unforeseen and unwelcome manner.

We know from ordinary language, in other words, that with the idea of trauma we are on to something widely experienced and intuitively understood. Such rootedness in the life-world is the soil that nourishes every social scientific concept. The trick is to gain reflexivity, to move from the sense of something commonly experienced to the sense of strangeness that allows us to think sociologically. For trauma is not something naturally existing; it is something constructed by society.

In this task of making trauma strange, its embeddedness in everyday life and language, so important for providing an initial intuitive understanding, now presents itself as a challenge to be overcome. The scholarly approaches to trauma developed thus far have actually been distorted by the powerful, commonsense understandings of trauma that have emerged in everyday life. Indeed, it might be said that these commonsense understandings constitute a kind of “lay trauma theory” in contrast to which a more theoretically reflexive approach to trauma must be erected.

Lay Trauma Theory

According to lay theory, traumas are naturally occurring events that shatter an individual or collective actor’s sense of well-being. In other words, the power to shatter – the “trauma” – is thought to emerge from events themselves. The reaction to such shattering events – “being traumatized” – is experienced as an immediate and unreflexive response. According to the lay perspective, the trauma experience occurs when the traumatizing event interacts with human nature. Human beings need security, order, love, and connection. If something happens that sharply undermines these needs, it hardly seems surprising, according to the lay theory, that people will be traumatized as a result.²

Enlightenment Thinking

There are “Enlightenment” and “psychoanalytic” versions of this lay trauma theory. The Enlightenment understanding suggests that trauma is a kind of rational response to abrupt change, whether at the individual or social level. The objects or events that trigger trauma are perceived clearly by actors, their responses are lucid, and the effects of these responses are problem solving and progressive. When bad things happen to good people, they become shocked, outraged, indignant. From an Enlightenment perspective, it seems obvious, perhaps even unremarkable, that political scandals are cause for indignation; that economic depressions are cause for despair; that lost wars create a sense of anger and aimlessness; that disasters in the physical environment lead to panic; that assaults on the human body lead to intense anxiety; that technological disasters create concerns, even phobias, about risk. The responses to such traumas will be efforts to alter the circumstances that caused them. Memories about the past guide this thinking about the future. Programs for action will be developed, individual and collective environments will be reconstructed, and eventually the feelings of trauma will subside.

This Enlightenment version of lay trauma theory informs Arthur Neal in his National Trauma and Collective Memory. In explaining whether or not a collectivity is traumatized, Neal points to the quality of the event itself. National traumas have been created, he argues, by “individual and collective reactions to a volcano-like event that shook the foundations of the social world” (Neal 1998: ix). An event traumatizes a collectivity because it is “an extraordinary event,” an event that has such “an explosive quality” that it creates “disruption” and “radical change . . . within a short period of time” (Neal 1998: 3, 9–10). These objective empirical qualities “command the attention of all major subgroups of the population,” triggering emotional response and public attention because rational people simply cannot react in any other way (Neal 1998: 9–10). “Dismissing or ignoring the traumatic experience is not a reasonable option,” Neal asserts; neither is “holding an attitude of benign neglect” or “cynical indifference” (Neal 1998: 4, 9–10). It is precisely because actors are reasonable that traumatic events typically lead to progress: “The very fact that a disruptive event has occurred” means that “new opportunities emerge for innovation and change” (Neal 1998: 18). It is hardly surprising, in other words, that “permanent changes were introduced into the [American] nation as a result of the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the trauma of World War II” (Neal 1998: 5).

Despite what I will later call the naturalistic limitations of such an Enlightenment understanding of trauma, what remains singularly important about Neal’s approach is its emphasis on the collectivity rather than the individual, an emphasis that sets it apart from the more individually oriented psychoanalytically informed approaches discussed below. In focusing on events that create trauma for national, not individual, identity, Neal follows the sociological model developed by Kai Erikson in Everything in its Path. This heart-wrenching account of the effects on a small Appalachian community of a devastating flood was constrained by a naturalistic perspective, yet it laid the groundwork for a distinctively sociological approach by thematizing the difference between collective and individual trauma. Both the attention to collectively emergent properties and the naturalism with which such collective traumas are conceived are evident in the following passage.

By individual trauma I mean a blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defenses so suddenly and with such brutal force that one cannot react to it effectively . . . By collective trauma, on the other hand, I mean a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality. The collective trauma works its way slowly and even insidiously into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of suddenness normally associated with “trauma.” But it is a form of shock all the same, a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared: . . . “We” no longer exist as a connected pair or as linked cells in a larger communal body. (Erikson 1976: 153–4)

As Smelser suggests (2004), following, lay trauma theory began to enter ordinary language and scholarly discussions alike in the efforts to understand the kind of “shell shock” that affected so many soldiers during the First World War, and it became expanded and elaborated in relation to other wars that followed in the course of the twentieth century. When Glen Elder (1974) created life-course analysis to trace the cohort effects on individual identity of these and other cataclysmic social events in the twentieth century, he and his students adopted a similar Enlightenment mode of trauma. Similar understandings have long informed approaches in other disciplines, for example, the vast historiography devoted to the far-reaching effects on nineteenth-century Europe and the United States of the “trauma” of the French Revolution. Elements of the lay Enlightenment perspective have also informed contemporary thinking about the Holocaust and responses to other episodes of mass murder in modern times.

Psychoanalytic Thinking

Such realist thinking continues to permeate everyday life and scholarly thought alike. Increasingly, however, it has come to be filtered through a psychoanalytic perspective that has become central to both commonsense and academic thinking. This approach places a model of unconscious emotional fears and cognitively distorting mechanisms of psychic defense between the external shattering event and the actor’s internal traumatic response. When bad things happen to good people, according to this version of lay theory, they can become so frightened that they can actually repress the experience of trauma itself. Rather than activating direct cognition and rational understanding, the traumatizing event becomes distorted in the actor’s imagination and memory. The effort to accurately attribute responsibility for the event and the progressive effort to develop an ameliorating response are undermined by displacement. This psychoanalytically mediated perspective continues to maintain a naturalistic approach to traumatic events, but it suggests a more complex understanding about the human ability to perceive them consciously. The truth about the experience is perceived, but only unconsciously. In effect, truth goes underground, and accurate memory and responsible action are its victims. Traumatic feelings and perceptions, then, come not only from the originating event but also from the anxiety of keeping it repressed. Trauma will be resolved not only by setting things right in the world, but also by setting things right in the self.³ According to this perspective, the truth can be recovered, and psychological equanimity restored, only, as the Holocaust historian Saul Friedlander (1979) once put it, “when memory comes.”

This phrase actually provides the title of Friedlander’s memoir about his childhood during the Holocaust years in Germany and France. Recounting, in evocative literary language, his earlier experiences of persecution and displacement, Friedlander suggests that conscious perception of highly traumatic events can emerge only after psychological introspection and “working through” allows actors to recover their full capacities for agency (Friedlander 1979, 1992). Emblematic of the intellectual framework that has emerged over the last three decades in response to the Holocaust experience, this psychoanalytically informed theorizing particularly illuminated the role of collective memory, insisting on the importance of working backward through the symbolic residues that the originating event has left upon contemporary recollection.⁴

Much as these memory residues surface through free association in psychoanalytic treatment, they appear in public life through the creation of literature. It should not be surprising, then, that literary interpretation, with its hermeneutic approach to symbolic patterns, has been offered as a kind of academic counterpart to the psychoanalytic intervention. In fact, the major theoretical and empirical statements of the psychoanalytic version of lay trauma theory have been produced by scholars in the various disciplines of the humanities. Because within the psychoanalytic tradition it has been Lacan who has emphasized the importance of language in emotional formation, it has been Lacanian theory, often in combination with Derridean deconstruction, that has informed these humanities-based studies of trauma.

Perhaps the most influential scholar in shaping this approach has been Cathy Caruth, in her own collection of essays, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History and in her edited collection, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Caruth 1995, 1996). Caruth focuses on the complex permutations that unconscious emotions impose on traumatic reactions, yet, at the same time, she roots her analysis in the power and objectivity of the originating traumatic event. “Freud’s intuition of, and his passionate fascination with, traumatic experiences,” she asserts, related traumatic reactions to “the unwitting reenactment of an event that one cannot simply leave behind” (Caruth 1995: 2). The event cannot be left behind because “the breach in the mind’s experience,” according to Caruth, “is experienced too soon.” This abruptness prevents the mind from fully cognizing the event. It is experienced “too unexpectedly . . . to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness.” Buried in the unconscious, the event is experienced irrationally, “in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor.” The psychoanalytic version of lay trauma theory goes beyond the Enlightenment one: “Trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on.” When Caruth describes these traumatic symptoms, however, she returns to the theme of objectivity, suggesting that they “tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (Caruth 1995: 3–4, italics added).

The enormous influence of this psychoanalytic version of lay trauma theory can be seen in the manner in which it has informed the efforts by Latin American scholars to come to terms with the traumatic brutalities of their late-twentieth century dictatorships. Many of these discussions, of course, are purely empirical investigations of the extent of repression or normative arguments that assign responsibilities and demand reparations. Yet, there is an increasing body of literature that addresses the effects of the repression in terms of the traumas it caused.

The aim is to restore collective psychological health by lifting societal repression and restoring memory. To achieve this, social scientists stress the importance of finding – through public acts of commemoration, cultural representation, and public political struggle – some collective means for undoing repression and allowing the pent-up emotions of loss and mourning to be expressed. While thoroughly laudable in moral terms, and without doubt also very helpful in terms of promoting public discourse and enhancing self-esteem, this advocacy literature typically is limited by the constraints of lay commonsense. Both the traumatized feelings of the victims and the actions that should be taken in response are treated as unmediated, commonsense reactions to the repression itself. Elizabeth Jelin and Susana Kaufman, for example, directed a large-scale project on “Memory and Narrativity” sponsored by the Ford Foundation, involving a team of investigators from different South American countries. In a powerful report on their initial findings, “Layers of Memories: Twenty Years After in Argentina,”⁷ they contrast the victims’ insistence on recognizing the reality of traumatizing events and experiences with the denials of the perpetrators and their conservative supporters, denials that insist on looking to the future and forgetting the past: “The confrontation is between the voices of those who call for commemoration, for remembrance of the disappearances and the torment, for denunciation of the repressors, and those who make it their business to act as if nothing has happened here.” Jelin and Kaufman call these conservative forces the “bystanders of horror” who claim they “did not know” and “did not see.” But because the event which triggered the traumatizing repression was real, they argue, such denials will not work: “The personalized memory of people cannot be erased ...