By reenacting the story time and time again and creating situations into which we are vulnerable to reenactment, we remain loyal to the story, to the master narrative of suffering. Historical trauma creates a unique constellation of behavioral and emotional issues that are rooted in this idea of loyalty. It becomes the source of identity as well as the fabric of our national culture, whether this idea of “national” is rooted broadly around a specific nation-state or in a more amorphous vision of cultural affiliation or identification as nationality. This idea of cultural nationalism is on display when I work with socioeconomically challenged addicts and their families. There is a perverse cultural pride in remaking a part of the community of addicts, enforced beyond a mere psychological reading by addicts who come from families in which their parents and even grandparents were addicts.
A word about what is said and what is unsaid in discussions around identity and cultural trauma versus identity and trauma (i.e., Judith Herman) might be useful here. In the more reductive version, there are social conditions that create dysfunctional behaviors resulting in attachment traumas—all of which are exacerbated by poverty, violence, sexual abuse, drug use, and incarceration. When an entire nation has been traumatized, there is something that stands out in the families of those who have specific trauma that transcends the historic communal narrative.
The world is split into idealized and persecutory aspects. It is persecutory because one must rid oneself of the bad experience, of the bad self-representation that accompanies the bad internal object representation of the bad mother—by projecting it out onto the world. It’s “out there,” it’s not “in here”–one’s bad internal self-states. This process works much like that of an animal who runs away when it is in pain, not understanding that the animal itself is where the pain is located.
Psychoanalytic object relations theory, depressive position, narcissistic grandiosity
In session, we find role reversals (dependent/devaluing). Those that occur in psychoanalytic experience also occur in political experience. We are working with identity diffusion to normalize identity (the diffusion is the projected all good and all bad). The dependent position (“don’t abandon me, I can’t survive without you”) is in conflict with the empowered position (“you’re here and as a result I feel strong and don’t need you”). The go-away/come-back relational rubber-banding impairs these client’s ability to make transitions easily. Any change becomes an arena in which these conflicts have to be played out, either by delaying, avoiding, entrenching, or, conversely, jumping in with no warning and no preparation, and other impulsive behaviors.
My environment led to two separate academic foci. First there is Holocaust history, with an emphasis on culture and identity. Second, there is psychoanalysis, with an emphasis on what is sometimes termed “psychosociology”—an interdisciplinary mode of applying psychoanalytic concepts to the larger social and historical field in which the self exists. My interdisciplinary background has provided me with a holistic view of individual development and insight into the kinds of disorders that develop when the context that has supported the trappings of the false self is ripped away.
I am particularly interested in the sociologically determined base of many of the identity errors clients and patients present with. I was fortunate in working with key political psychologists from the post-World War II era when I was young, and this has informed my theoretical groundings. I completed my doctorate under a protegé of the late Nevitt Sanford, a primary author of the first major study on authoritarianism (Adorno et al., 1951). The other work that has influenced my psychoanalytic thinking is from political science: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Both of these works investigate failures of individual accountability in terms of projection, splitting, and exteriorization, even though these terms are not spelled out.
