Trauma, Trust, and Memory

Social Trauma and Reconciliation in Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and Cultural Memory

Andreas Hamburger

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000157413
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psicologia
• Categoría: Disturbo Post-Traumatico da Stress (DPTS)

Trauma is one of the most important topics discussed throughout the clinical, social and cultural field. Social traumatization, as we meet it in the aftermath of genocide, war and persecution, is targeted at whole groups and thus affects the individual's immediate holding environment, cutting it off from an important resilience factor; further on, social trauma is implemented in a societal context, thus involving the surrounding society in the traumatic process. Both conditions entail major consequences for the impact and prognosis of the resulting individual posttraumatic disorders as well as for the social and cultural consequences. The volume connects clinical and epidemiological studies on the sequelae of social trauma to reflections from social psychology and the humanities. Post-war and post-dictatorial societies are in particular marked by the effects of massive, large group traumatization, and if these are not acknowledged, explored, and mourned, the unprocessed cumulative trauma that has become deeply embedded in the collective memory leads to periodical reactivations. To address social trauma, an interdisciplinary approach is required.

PART I

GENOCIDE AND PERSECUTION
ARE NOT EARTHQUAKES:
THE CONCEPT OF SOCIAL TRAUMA

Introduction to Part I

The initial section of this book deals with concepts of social trauma and related research. This is much less an academic approach than the section title might sound: in the field of social trauma, the term “concept” is anything but a neutral, technical term. It is at the core of the matter. Because what differs in social as compared to individual trauma—or more precisely, what characterises the social aspects of trauma, present in any traumatising event whatsoever—is its conceptual framing. When we understand that a concept is what people use in discourse to name a phenomenon, then social trauma is in itself something like a “concept”. It is conceptualised from the start, when groups turn against other groups, and when enacted, it is enacted as a specimen of a concept (like Auschwitz is a materialisation of the concept of annihilation)—and eventually, when we talk about it afterwards, it is a concept we have to develop and foster in social discourse as well, according to the theory of cultural trauma, which will be extensively dealt with in the next section of the book. However, understanding social trauma as a concept cannot mean separating its manifestations from non-social traumatisations, simply because there are no non-social events in the social world. If a girl is abused “in private” the abuse is still part of a society’s tolerance and denial, and thus has a social aspect. If a flood destroys a city, leaving thousands of people homeless and deprived of everything they need for survival, it is an important question whether their huts or houses were built on ground within the reach of a deluge, and whether public security and assistance are available to them. It is the (sometimes silent) decision of a society to leave some of its citizens unprotected. From this viewpoint, earthquakes can be manmade disasters, at least through a lack of prevention. Still, there are differences. Social acceptance of pauperisation of a large group is a social trauma, but it differs in quality from plotted persecution, mass killings, and extinction. We should be aware of these differences, and not prematurely unify the concept of trauma.

In the first chapter, Vamık Volkan, the world’s leading scholar in the field of political psychoanalysis, having been a consultant in socially traumatising national and international conflicts for decades, will describe the psycho-social scars and unconscious consequences of large-scale social traumatisations. Then, Andreas Hamburger takes up his previous approaches to distinguish between social and individual trauma and attempts to clarify some crucial bridge concepts between clinical and sociological trauma discourse. The section is concluded by Sabina Alispahić from Sarajevo University, an early member of the Trauma, Trust, and Memory network, who connects theories of trauma memories to clinical approaches.

CHAPTER ONE


From earthquakes to ethnic cleansing: massive trauma and its individualised and societal consequences

Vamık Volkan

In 1977, the then Egyptian President Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem. During his speech at the Knesset, he stated that there is a psychological wall between Arabs and Israelis that was the cause of seventy per cent of the problems between these two peoples. In response, the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs, of which I was a member, brought influential Arabs and Israelis together for unofficial dialogues for six years to make this wall permeable. In 1988, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, I opened the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction (CSMHI), with a faculty of psychoanalysts, other mental health professionals, former diplomats, political scientists, historians, an environmentalist, and a linguist. This interdisciplinary team and I visited many areas of the world where international conflicts existed and brought together enemy representatives for years-long unofficial dialogues. After my retirement from the University of Virginia and after the closure of CSMHI in 2005, I established the International Dialogue Initiative (IDI) in 2008. The IDI is a private, multidisciplinary group comprised of psychoanalysts, academics, diplomats, and other professionals who meet biannually to examine large-group differences. The present IDI members come from Germany, Iran, Israel, Russia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the West Bank.

Prior to my involvement in the Israeli-Egyptian dialogues, I studied the Cypriot Turkish society that had been living for eleven years (1963–1974) in enclaves surrounded by their enemies and their responses thereafter to the Turkish army’s de facto dividing of the island into north Cypriot Turkish and south Cypriot Greek sections (Volkan, 1979). Working in the international arena I also observed refugee Palestinians who were settled in Tunisia after the 1982 war in Lebanon (Volkan, 2013, 2014a) and visited traumatised Georgian and South Ossetian societies many times for five years after the war between these two societies, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I observed Croats, Bosnians, and Serbians following the collapse of Yugoslavia and witnessed Kuwaitis’ response to the Iraqi invasion after the Iraqi forces withdrew. I also examined societies traumatised by dictators: Romanians and Albanians following the deaths of Nicolae Ceauşescu and Enver Hoxha (Volkan, 1997, 2004, 2013). I also spent four months in Israel in the period 2000–2001, interviewing Israelis and Arabs living there.

My observations of societal consequences of natural disasters, however, are very limited. I visited Mexico City ten days after the impact of an 8.1 magnitude earthquake that occurred on the morning of 19 September 1985, followed by a 7.5 magnitude earthquake thirty-six hours later. This natural disaster resulted in the collapse of more than 400 multi-storey buildings in the city. Official figures for the number of fatalities vary between 9,500 and more than 30,000. A magnitude 7.6 earthquake devastated Izmit, near Istanbul in Turkey, on 17 August 1999. Officials estimated that 17,000 people were killed, although other sources gave much higher figures, and more than 40,000 were injured. Two weeks later I went to Istanbul and consulted with dozens of psychiatrists and psychologists who were still working with survivors and injured individuals. The helpers themselves, stunned by what they had seen, needed psychological support as well.

News about shared massive catastrophes is continually brought to our attention. Some result from natural causes, such as earthquakes, floods, or volcanic eruptions; some are accidental catastrophes like the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Sometimes, the death of a leader, or of a person who functions as a “transference figure” for many in the society, creates individualised as well as societal responses. We witnessed this after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy in the United States (Wolfenstein & Kliman, 1965) and Yitzhak Rabin in Israel (Erlich, 1998; Moses-Hrushovski, 2000). Other shared experiences of disaster are due to the deliberate actions of an ethnic, national, religious, or ideological enemy group. Intentional catastrophes themselves range from wars to terrorist attacks, and from the traumatised group actively fighting its enemy to the traumatised group rendered passive and helpless. In this chapter I will not focus on the impact of massive trauma on individual psychology; I will instead examine psychological responses to a massive trauma shared by thousands or millions of people.

Sharing jokes

Sharing jokes is one of the first societal responses to a massive trauma. A psychoanalyst picked me up at the airport and drove me to Mexico City at the start of my visit ten days after the earthquake. While we were driving she asked me: “What is the similarity between a doughnut (a round pastry with a hole in the middle) and Mexico City?” The answer was that the middles of both were missing. I was surprised that the psychoanalyst was joking about a major tragedy within her own country, but later I would notice similar responses elsewhere. After the 28 January 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the United States experienced a shared trauma. Classrooms all over the country had tuned in to the event on television so the children could witness and celebrate teacher Christa McAuliffe going into space. Instead, they witnessed a terrible tragedy and, starting with children, the whole country was traumatised. Soon tasteless jokes were heard countrywide. One described how the shampoo, “Head and Shoulders,” could be found on Miami Beach, symbolically referring to body parts of the dead crew members. Tasteless jokes also circulated in the United States following the events of 11 September 2001. Sigmund Freud (1905c) identified unconscious elements within a person by examining dreams and slips of the tongue (parapraxis), as well as jokes, and illustrated some similar psychodynamic elements in jokes and dreams (see reviews of Freud’s ideas on humour by Altman, 2006; Newirth, 2006). Still, circulating jokes within a society after a massive trauma has not been studied in depth within the psychoanalytic literature. On the surface, sharing jokes during and after a massive trauma, even while expecting such a trauma, sounds like an unreasonable thing to do. A closer look, however, illustrates that circulating certain jokes is part of the shared grieving and mourning processes, and also utilises defences against the impact of a shared trauma. By sharing jokes, traumatised members of a large group—such as a national, ethnic, religious, or ideological group—discharge their emotions after defensively reversing their affect and laughing instead of crying. They celebrate staying alive while hiding their “survival guilt” (Niederland, 1968).

Some jokes reflect discharging a shared sense of helplessness and humiliation. During dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime in Romania from 1965 to 1989, there were many jokes about a fictitious character named Bula (in Romanian, “bula” is a vulgar term for penis). A typical buffoon, he was an impotent, humiliated coward. In one story, Bula goes to a meeting, opens his briefcase, pulls out a revolver, and aims it at Ceauşescu. He shoots and shoots, but in their enthusiasm, the encouraging crowd push Bula to and fro, causing him to constantly miss his target in a pathetically comic manner.

Under authoritarian governments, other shared jokes are used with an opposite aim: to minimise the danger or humiliate a “bad” leader. I have no information about jokes shared by the Jewish population during the Nazi period, but today both types of jokes about Nazi Germany can be heard. The following joke, for example, illustrates an attempt to minimise danger: a German child happens to pass through a ghetto and notices another child with the yellow star. The German child asks the second child: “Are you Jewish?” The Jewish child answers: “No, I am the sheriff!”

Dictators, authoritarian political leaders, and people in their close circle do their best to suppress jokes about such traumatizing leaders. During the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels forbade jokes about Adolf Hitler (Reimann, 1976). After the death of Joseph Stalin, I interviewed his two private interpreters, Valentin Berezhkov (Volkan, 1991a) and Zoya Zarubina. I learned that Stalin was unable to tolerate any jokes about himself. During the last decade, as the leadership in Turkey has become authoritarian, liberal-minded citizens have begun to experience, using Leonard Shengold’s (1991) term, “soul murder”. Shengold originally used this term to refer to the abuse or neglect of children that deprives them of their identities and ability to experience joy in life. In Turkey, many academicians circulate jokes about the present Turkish political leadership, while experiencing fear of going to jail.

I know of only one occasion in which the psychological meanings of jokes after a major trauma were not only understood, but were used therapeutically. Damir Arsenijević (see Chapter Nine), founder of the Psychoanalytic Seminar Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and his colleagues collected jokes after horrible events following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia. They were successful in opening what can be called “public classrooms” where they presented their findings on jokes. During these occasions laughter was lost, but Arsenijević and his colleagues were able to open up difficult topics of war, genocide, loss, and mourning.

Shared jokes that are circulated soon after a massive trauma takes place can indicate to an investigator whether a massive trauma is going to break the tissue of the affected society or not.

Breaking or not breaking the tissue of a society

Williams and Parkes (1975, p. 304) referred to a process after a shared trauma that they named “biosocial regeneration”. They informed us that for five years following the deaths of 116 children and 28 adults in an avalanche of coal slurry in the Welsh village of Aberfan in 1966, there was a significant increase in the birth rate among women who had not themselves lost a child. Thirty-three years af...