5 facts about the origins of collective traumas and how to deal with them
Ilya Kukulin, PhD in Philology, Associate Professor of the Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Philosophy, Higher School of Economics
The word “trauma” is extremely fashionable right now. It has already passed from the language of scientists to the language of newspapers. The question of what trauma actually is requires clarification, because this is not about occupational injuries, but about a socio-psychological and at the same time cultural phenomenon.
The very concept of psychological trauma, like many other scientific terms, originally emerged as a metaphor. This happened in the last third of the 19th century, although for several centuries before that, many people, especially doctors, had noticed that after terrible events, accidents, public defamation or shameful actions, a person could begin to experience pain, have strange dreams, and so on. Let us recall Lady Macbeth's behavior in Shakespeare's tragedy. But doctors began to study this phenomenon relatively late. For example, when there were cases of mental shock from train accidents. At the beginning of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet described the consequences of emotional shock in different ways: Freud focused more on blocking or making it very difficult to remember the accident, and Jean focused on regression, that is, moving to more archaic or infantile forms of behavior.
During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—1905, qualified psychiatrists worked in the Russian army to study how what experienced at the front affected soldiers and officers. Perhaps it was the discussion of this topic in the press that influenced Leonid Andreev's novel, written specifically about the Russo-Japanese War. In my opinion, this is one of the most powerful descriptions of psychological trauma in fiction. The story describes the nightmares experienced by an officer who witnesses numerous deaths of unarmed people — in the trenches or on an ambulance train.
“I recognized him, that red laugh. I've been looking for it and I've found it, that red laugh. Now I understand what was in all these mutilated, torn, weird bodies. It was a red laugh. It's in the sky, it's in the sun, and it'll soon spread all over the earth, that red laugh!”
Fedunina N.Y./Burmistrova E.V. Mental trauma. On the history of the issue//Journal of Practical Psychology and Psychoanalysis, 2014, No. 1
Andreev L.N. Red Laughter
After World War I, many psychiatrists, including Freud, studied patients who were shocked during the fighting or as a result of terrible news received from the fronts. It became clear that there is a large class of mental experiences and conditions that a person can hardly cope with.
In 1917, Freud wrote Grief and Melancholy, another translation of the title being “Sorrow and Melancholy”, which seems to be unrelated to the consequences of hostilities. However, researchers place it in the context of precisely those works that are due to Freud's shift in research, social, and clinical interests during the war.
In this work, Freud identifies two ways to respond to very difficult experiences. One is melancholy, the other is grief.
Melancholy is a person focusing on their loss, as they would say in programming terms now. A person is constantly returning to what he has been through and, in a sense, is unable to move on with his life. And this can be a very explainable behavior when you lose a very close person and live for many years thinking only about that loss.
Another case is when a person realizes that he has suffered a very heavy loss, but he must move on and that he has the opportunity to continue to change and develop, and at the same time not forget the misfortune that has befallen him, to make him a part of his life, not the center of his life. Freud writes:
“What is the work done by grief? I think that without any stretch, we can depict it as follows: a reality test has shown that the favorite object no longer exists, and now it is necessary to distract all libido from connections with this object. [...] In fact, after completing the work of grief, “I” again becomes free and unconstrained” (translated by V. Mazina, with change).
The contrast between these two reactions later proved to be extremely important, although Freud's study was only the beginning. Subsequently, psychologists discovered the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress, when a person seems to live on, understands what he should live, but his or her feelings as if frozen. True recovery may come much later.
The Second World War and the events preceding it, namely the creation of a concentration camp system in Germany, provided even more material for the analysis of grief and melancholy. In the same 1930s, the Gulag system in the USSR was already in full swing, but no one really explored the psychological state of the Gulag prisoners, as well as those people who remained at large but shuddered every night at the noise of cars under the windows. At that time, only a few people analyzed the psychological trauma of everyday life in the USSR who had the personal courage and at the same time methodological “equipment” for such work.
Tammy Clewell. Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud's Psychoanalysis Of Loss
As has been said many times, concentration camps were not first invented by the Nazis. They appeared at the beginning of the 20th century. Historians are debating when to count: from the “concentration camps” created for the Boers in 1899—1901 at the behest of Lord Kitchener during the Boer War, or from the German camps for the Herero and Nama tribes in South West Africa, organized in 1904. However, it was during the Nazi era that a huge number of people passed through concentration camps in Europe — so many were killed or died there. (In the early 1950s, two thinkers, Hannah Arendt and Aimé Sezer, simultaneously interpreted the Holocaust as a transfer to Europe of the methods of mass terror and genocide previously used in colonies; but, of course, it should be noted that before the Nazis, such methods, however brutal, were not aimed at the complete destruction of any ethnic group.)
Both people who were to blame for nothing but their sexual orientation and people who were not to blame for anything but their origin: Jews, Gypsies and many others, and, for example, Soviet prisoners of war, ended up in concentration camps. Bruno Bettelheim, an Austro-American psychologist who went through these Nazi camps, was the first to describe the experience of hopelessness and complete dependence in a concentration camp in detail. He also noted that even these emotions, not to mention the everyday and almost ritualized brutality of guards and a number of prisoners, can help a person quickly turn into a “doer” if he does not resist psychologically.
Subsequently, the wonderful Italian writer Primo Levi, who went to a concentration camp as a Jew and was liberated by Soviet troops, in his book “Sunk and Saved” talked about the so-called “gray zone”, that is, about people who clung to life in camps at any cost (similar to the attitude of criminals known from Varlam Shalamov's stories: “You die today and I'll die tomorrow”) and committed many small and big betrayals were tried to adapt to life in camps. Such people had a huge stain on their conscience; some of them, for many years after their release, apparently tried to persuade themselves that otherwise they would not have survived. And their devotees were shocked that no one in the camp could be trusted.
Today, psychologists, anthropologists and cultural historians write that not only being in a concentration camp was traumatic, but also “ordinary” life in relative freedom in totalitarian societies: the reckless daily disappearance of people caused feelings of horror and meaninglessness that sublimated in different ways. In the USSR, in 1937, this sublimation ranged from a paranoid search for “enemy” signs, such as Trotsky's portrait, on notebooks and school textbooks, from which portraits of “enemies of the people” were already carved, to a morbid interest in the romance of the Civil War, when you could also die at any moment.
Vaguely similar, although, of course, morally difficult to measure, phenomena occurred during the Leningrad blockade, when people were free and in much less morally degrading conditions than in the camp. However, unbearable hunger and physical suffering also forced them to do things that they would never do in normal life. There was a man in Leningrad at that time who analyzed in great detail the transformations of the human psyche under these catastrophic conditions. It was Lydia Ginsburg, a wonderful writer and thinker who kept detailed analytical diaries.
Bruno Bettelheim. Enlightened heart
Ginsburg L. Passing characters. Wartime prose. Notes of a blockaded man
What we are discussing with you are injuries that become elements not only of individual memory, but also of collective memory.
Collective memory is a complex phenomenon. Not all psychologists and anthropologists agree with its reality. Indeed, in a strict sense, only an individual human being has memory. But there is a special phenomenon — personal shock experiences that are perceived not as unique, but as massive. Already in 1937, many people in the USSR understood that they were not alone in their fears, although they did not understand what was happening in the country. One way or another, the trauma you've experienced can be emotionally perceived as simultaneously unreportable — you can't say it out loud — and divided.
For decades, Soviet censorship prohibited discussing many of the problems related to captivity, the lives of Ostarbeiters, that is, people sent to Germany to work, the ethnic selectivity of Nazi terror (the genocide of Jews and Gypsies), the painful experiences during the Leningrad blockade, the deportation of the peoples of the North Caucasus, Volga Germans, Kalmyks, Crimean Tatars... This is also a silence about it sometimes pseudo-noble explanations that broke out (those who wanted to speak more about the Leningrad blockade were told that heroes and victory should be remembered first of all) in Together, people felt guilty and formed taboo topics in the public mind that people could not talk about even with themselves, not only with others. So far, this silence has a hidden effect on Russian culture and causes delayed “post-memory” effects, when neuroses are transmitted from parents to children for several generations.
One of the most important effects of collective trauma is that it is very difficult for people to tell others and to themselves how they behaved in a difficult situation, to realize that some behaved better and others behaved worse. This analysis is painful but very important. It was blocked in the Soviet Union. The tools for talking about trauma were developed mainly in informal culture. But even now, Russian culture is in dire need of such resources to enable people to cope with their feelings.
Timofeyeva M. The trauma of the past (Stalin's regime) in the clinical material of Russian patients
The modern American scientist Dominic LaCapra described two ways of working with trauma based on Freud's work Grief and Melancholy. You can act out trauma, that is, constantly showing that you were bad and focus on it, as Freud's melancholic people did, or work through it according to Freud's way of describing the work of grief. Lacapra calls the first Acting-out, the second Working-through.
We need to understand that we, I mean a certain community of people living in Russia, have had catastrophic events in the past, and we have no right to forget them. But if we talk about them, they won't bind us hand and foot, they won't make us their slaves and hostages to the guilt complex. You just need to understand how to speak and develop cultural tools to cope with post-traumatic stress and the severe consequences of remembering unspoken fears that is passed down through generations. On the contrary, the less we talk about this, the more we establish one concept of the historical past that does not embarrass anyone, the more we will develop melancholy and the associated guilt complex transferred to something else: to someone or someone who behaves differently, to those who are richer or those who are poorer.
Ilya Kukulin's publication “Historical trauma as a cultural phenomenon” http://postnauka.ru/video/24436
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