A Psychoanalytical Approach to Individual and Collective Trauma

Reflection on trauma is consubstantial with the birth of psychoanalysis. Freud’s first hysterical patients suffered from reminiscences, and the talking cure revealed early experiences of seduction. Although Sigmund Freud initially supported a traumatic aetiology for his patients’ disorders, on 21 September 1897, in his Equinox letter, he confided to his friend Fliess that he no longer believed in his Neurotica (Moussaieff Masson, Reference Freud1985). For the father of psychoanalysis, fantasy reality took precedence over material reality. In the new approach adopted by the founder of psychoanalysis, it was not the traumatic event itself but the way in which the subject experienced a situation that had overwhelmed his or her defences that was important. We will attempt to understand the way in which trauma, both individually and collectively, undermines the ability to process conflictual situations, by encouraging a regression to archaic anxieties and defences. To do this, we will first look at the way in which psychoanalysis thinks about trauma at individual and collective levels, based on the distinction between material reality, or the state of facts, and phantasmatic reality, or the subjective interpretation of factual reality. It will then be important to look at the notion of the repetition compulsion, which is very present in traumatic dreams, in the construction of the symptom and in the representation of the aftermath or second stage of the trauma, which gives full meaning to the initial experiences. Finally, we feel it is essential to examine the archaic anxieties associated with the traumatic experience.

For Freud, the psychic construction of the subject is thought out from the outset in relation to the hypothesis of the unconscious, the instance of the first topic, which constitutes an attempt to represent the different psychic spaces: unconscious, preconscious and conscious. The Freudian unconscious represents what escapes the subject’s consciousness. Its main mechanism is repression, which makes it possible to keep intolerable representations away from consciousness. This first topical approach was made more complex by the contributions of the second topical approach, which introduced the separation of id, ego and superego, while in the 1920s Freud introduced the notion of the death drive into psychoanalysis, defined as the tendency to return living beings to an inorganic state.

The death drive is particularly present in repetition compulsion. It drives the subject to reproduce traumatic experiences that are familiar to them, through symptoms or nightmares, no doubt because they are under their influence, in a passive position, or because they unconsciously identify with their tormentors, identification with the aggressor being a way of finding oneself in an active position. At the same time, repetition is a first attempt to elaborate or symbolise something of the trauma, to appropriate what has happened by linking fragments of one’s history, to change the actors in the traumatic scenario, leading to a first form of differentiation.

In Psaltis’s story (Chapter 5 in this volume), a frequent traumatic dream, linked to the arrival of Turkish soldiers who would seize his house, signals the presence of a fear of which the dream is both a symptom and an attempt at self-healing. It is to be understood as an initial effort to process the traumatic charge. After the age of 18, the traumatic dream that had accompanied him throughout his childhood disappeared; this signals a change in his relationship with the past and the ways in which he defended himself against it.

In the psychoanalytical approach, the perception, representation and interpretation of a situation are more important than the nature of the situation itself, and their meaning is always linked to a psychic work determined by the subjectivity of the actors. The subject’s history and psychic organisation, as well as exogenous factors linked to the context of the traumatic encounter, play a decisive role not only when confronted with a traumatic experience but also when it is recorded in the memory and later narrated. Within the same family, each person has his or her own representation of what happened, even if there are links between the narratives of different people (Bruner, Reference Bruner1990). The resulting memory traces are determined by the individual’s way of maintaining a psychological relationship with the experience, the essential thing being what each person does unconsciously with the traumatic encounter in relation to their internal resources. The clinical question of the forms of ‘reminiscence’ and ‘reviviscence’ (representation of the affect) thus refers back to a theory of memory, of its forms of inscription and conservation, but also of the forms of ‘return’ of previous traces of the subjective experience (Roussillon, Reference Roussillon2003). This return concerns what had been repressed and buried in the unconscious or cleaved, denied and preserved in encysted form (Abraham &Torok, Reference Abraham, Torok and Rand1994).

The encounter with trauma often takes place in two stages. A first experience, the meaning of which escapes the subject, and a second temporality, that of the aftermath, which gives meaning to the traumatic experience a posteriori.

It may be possible to see traumatic repetition as an unconscious search for an aftermath that would link the fragments of the past and present, in relation to the questions left unanswered in the subject’s history, to find out what lies behind them and try to make sense of them. Repetition obeys a logic of reconstituting the ‘scene of the crime’ with the unconscious aim of mastering its unfolding a little more, if not understanding its meaning.

While Freud often sees trauma as intrinsically linked to the human condition, with every human being experiencing experiences that psychically overwhelm them and attack their excitatory barrier, we find it interesting to note in his work the idea of Hilflosigkeit (Freud, Reference Freud1926). This is the infant’s ‘original distress’, which echoes in all our subsequent experiences of powerlessness. An infant’s powerlessness in the face of a world on which he or she is entirely dependent at the beginning of life can confine a being to an imaginary omnipotence that is all the more difficult to dialectise (i.e. to develop something through a process of oppositions) and overcoming these oppositions (thesis, antithesis, synthesis), because he or she has not been able to experience sufficiently satisfying and containing responses from his or her environment. As Winnicott would later show, it is the ability of those around the child to help them experience a good enough response to their needs that will gradually enable the child to emerge from this delusion of omnipotence and become progressively disillusioned. Intrapsychic and intersubjective bonds are built by internalising the other person’s good relational qualities. It is this introjection that enables the subject to psychically process the anxieties of early life and those of major traumatic experiences, which take us back to the quality of our first bonds and our narcissistic foundations.

The analogy between the primitive anxieties of the infant, exposed to a feeling of acute powerlessness in an environment that is not good enough, and the re-actualisation of this initial distress in the face of major collective disasters should not obscure the differences that exist between the two types of experience. This would be an epistemological pitfall to be avoided, as would the concept of cultural trauma, which confuses the experiences of victims, perpetrators and bystanders of traumatic events (Kansteiner, Reference Kansteiner2004). In one case, an under-resourced child must face up to a hostile world; in the other, a human community is plunged into the most extreme adversity. The two contexts are different, and to equate them would be to run the risk of denying the uniqueness of each situation, trivialising its seriousness and minimising its impact on those involved. Our aim, however, is to show that confrontation with collective trauma encourages massive regression and gives rise to anxieties and defences that can be found both in the mental world of the very young child and in the clinic of psychosis.

The question of archaic anxieties concerns the earliest stages of the subject’s psychological construction, in a quasi-archaeological approach in which the earliest strata are more or less well buried.Footnote ¹ These anxieties involve physicality, the infralanguage and early bonds. They concern the anxiety of collapse, of falling, of liquefaction, of fragmentation, of intrusion, of emptying.Footnote ² In the wake of the thinking of Donald Winiccott and René Roussillon, we could call them agonistic.Footnote ³ Later, the anxieties relate to separation and the loss of an object, to be understood as the disappearance of the loved one. When all goes well, the archaic anxieties are relatively calmed and other anxieties more related to the oedipal crisis, such as castration anxiety, linked to the prohibition of incest and parricide, take over. Early traumatic experiences hinder both the creation of a feeling of internal security, which guarantees the ability to relate to others, and the more general ability to perceive others and otherness not as a threat to one’s own integrity but as an intersubjective encounter, rich in emotional and intellectual exchanges.

If new layers are added to the oldest strata of the psyche, these remain accessible and determine subsequent constructions. To take this geological metaphor a step further, we would add that these layers can come to the surface during an earthquake, particularly in seismogenic terrain. Exposure to major trauma, such as an earthquake, puts to the test both the quality of the initial constructions and the solidity of the later buildings and soils involved. In the case of extreme trauma, primitive fears take over and are expressed by a disintegration of the drive to live and the drive to die. Confrontation with mortifying experiences encourages regression movements that sometimes lead to massive anguish and the mobilisation of defence mechanisms that are just as consequential, situated on the side of primary processes, namely the immediate and unbound discharge of psychic energy.

Some particularly hateful political discourse finds fertile ground in the emergence of these archaic anxieties and their defence mechanisms. To protect themselves, individuals or groups deny the violence on their own side, divide their relationship with the world into those who are all good and those who are all bad, and project everything that is bad onto the enemy group. The demonisation of the political enemy or an ethnically and culturally different group builds on these mechanisms of denial of our common humanity, of the Manichean dichotomy of the world and of the essentialisation of the other as the bearer of all evil.

The traumatic experience unravels the work of linking the inside and outside of oneself, whereas a therapeutic approach to trauma enables us to re-establish links between the present and the past, between our emotional experiences and our thoughts, between ourselves and others. Although Freud (Reference Freud1933, p. 82) said that crystal only shatters according to the fracture lines in its structure, our experience with patients who have lived through situations of war, genocide or torture shows us that in the face of experiences of massive dehumanisation, depersonalisation and derealisation, phenomena specific to psychosis can emerge and even persist. Non-psychotic subjects may also experience decompensation in the face of extreme experiences, taking on the appearance of psychotic disorders, with delusions and hallucinations.

People confronted with war, deportation or genocidal violence are caught up in a regression to the most primitive strata of their psyche. Some of them, younger when they were confronted with the trauma, may remain attached to problems linked to a stage in their psychosexual development. This is particularly the case with certain children for whom reality collides with fantasies in a collapse between the two that can be more or less long-lasting (Janin, Reference Janin1996). Losing one’s father at a time when strong feelings of unconscious hostility are present can plunge the subject into significant guilt, hinder the mourning process and even take the form of melancholic identification. Being exposed to a mother’s depression in the first two years of life, when the children themselves are confronted with massive anxieties, theorised by Melanie Klein under the terms of schizo-paranoid anxieties and depressive anxieties, can make it much more difficult for them to cope, and can lead some children who have previously had a good enough environment to constantly try actively to ‘repair’ this distressed mother, or even to adopt sacrificial positions within the family and the community. Becoming a model pupil by trying to live up as closely as possible to parental ideals is also sometimes a way of remedying the parents’ distress.

The context in which the trauma is experienced is very important, and the collapse of a certain symbolic order in the world, as in the experience of war, can play a drastic role in undoing what may have been established as relatively acquired, what formed the psychic and group envelope for the subjects. Didier Anzieu has referred to the ‘group envelope’ (Anzieu, Reference Anzieu, Béjarano, Kaës, Missenard and Pontalis1972) as a way of thinking about the differentiation between the inside and the outside, following on from the notion of the ‘ego-skin’: ‘Through its internal face, the group envelope enables the establishment of a transindividual psychic state that I propose to call a group Self … It is the container within which a phantasmatic and identificatory circulation will be activated between individuals. It is the Self that brings the group to life’ (Anzieu, Reference Anzieu1981/1999, p. 2).

The advantage of this approach is that it allows us to think about the various psychological functions that the group performs for the subject in terms of containment. The ego-skin is used to evoke any boundary, any interface that separates, unites and connects. Transposed to the group, these concepts make it possible to think about what constitutes a link and containment within a group in relation to the subject’s psychic needs. They are particularly useful for thinking about all the attacks to which members of a group are subjected because they are members of that group. Anything that overflows the group’s excitation barrier, and is therefore on the side of trauma, attacks the main functions of this protective interface and exposes the members of the group to very archaic anxieties.

For a family, the loss of their home or the intrusion of soldiers into it can be experienced as an invasion of the envelope that protects the ‘good’ psychic objects within the group. For the members of the group, hoping to find the lost house can mean rediscovering a moment of ‘group illusion’, of fusional euphoria where all members of the group feel good together and are delighted to form a good group (Anzieu, Reference Anzieu1981). As time goes by, rediscovering the lost home, the way of life of yesteryear – an unattainable ideal, in short – becomes the emblem of all the aspirations, hopes and disappointments endured individually and collectively since the loss.

Confrontation with traumas that undo the symbolic order of the world, that legitimise unlimited violence, that attack the social meta-frameworks (René Kaës, Reference Kaës, Altounian and Altounian2009a, Reference Kaës2009b) as guarantors of the existence of protective laws, is capable of undoing what may have been achieved from the point of view of the psychic construction of the subject and the group. The trauma that attacks the subject’s links to the group and, more broadly, to society is thus interesting to question in so far as it undoes a sense of belonging to humanity. At the collective level, as at the individual level, confrontation with trauma leads to a disintegration of the drive, a regression to the most archaic strata of the psyche and a deconstruction of the group’s symbolising capacities through the mobilisation of massive defences of projection, cleavage and denial of otherness. The result is a weakening of the difference between inside and outside, accompanied by intense fears of persecution. The impact of this trauma is not limited to the generation directly confronted with it. It is passed on to subsequent generations through an interplay of identifications, projections and unconscious transmissions.

Between Identification, Projection and Unconscious Transmission of Trauma

How can we think about the mechanisms of identification and transmission within groups confronted with collective trauma? After a brief diversion into some Freudian reflections on the way institutionalised groups function, we will look at the processes of identification, projection and unconscious transmission of trauma within communities that are victims of mass violence.

In his work Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, Freud (1921) looks more specifically at the affective links between the individual and the collective, with a clear interest in both crowd movements and institutions that require the subject to identify strongly with the group and its leader, such as the church or the army. It is important here to emphasise the affective dimension of membership of these groups – in other words, the way in which they are psychically invested by the subjects. Their highly hierarchical mode of operation presupposes not only adherence to the dominant ideas and beliefs but also submission to the authority figures who determine their decisions, and implies strong conflicts of loyalty in the event of disagreement with some of their decisions. These are institutions responsible for perpetuating an established social order, which find their internal legitimacy in their ability to elicit a degree of identification with, or adherence to, the group’s ideals from their members, and which have little tolerance for internal dissent or disobedience. They are also institutions that seem to guarantee a certain relationship to national identity at different times and in different places.

In Greece and Cyprus, the image of the army and the church is strongly linked to a certain version of Greek Orthodox national identity, which is not very open to the internal plurality of each place. The various ethnic, religious and cultural minorities thus seem to be ignored in the dominant narratives, with a semblance of cohesion for some taking place at the expense of recognition for others. A narrative that homogenises the demographic composition, multiculturalism and religious diversity of each country constructs a fixed, ahistorical and essentialist image of its national identity (Alexopoulos de Girard, Reference Alexopoulos de Girard2017).

It is interesting to note that this ostracism of the other can relate to groups considered to be very different from one’s own (Christians vs Muslims) but also to groups that are relatively close (opposition between centre and periphery). The question of the narcissism of small differences, which seems to us fundamental to thinking about the rejection of groups that are culturally or geographically close but outside one’s own group, is largely explained by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930):

It seems to us that sometimes relations between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots are thought of in terms of this racism of small differences, which accentuates everything that is not identical, deliberately minimising similarities in the interests of maximum differentiation. It is as if the identity of one group is based on its differentiation from another group, sometimes even, and especially, when the two are similar.

Freud’s work on social psychology, while varying over time, highlights the psychological mechanisms at work in identification with the leader and in the adoption of an ideology in place of the ideal self. The libidinal bonds between peers, the love for the father figure of the leader and the idealisation of the leader constitute the very ‘flesh’ of political, military or religious commitment, in the sense that they literally embody the relationship between the different members of the group, giving it a libidinal basis. For Freud, identification with the figure of the leader or his co-disciples is seen less in terms of representations and more in terms of affects. It is very important to keep this idea of an embodied link to the ideological, religious or military fact in order to be able to think about the question of identification, as a psychic movement of appropriation of the traits of the beloved or hated figure, and projection as an attempt to get rid of everything that is thought to be intolerable for one’s conscience.

Identification is classically defined as a ‘psychological process by which a subject assimilates an aspect, a property, an attribute of the other and transforms himself, totally or partially, on the model of the latter. The personality is constituted and differentiated by a series of identifications’ (Laplanche & Pontalis, Reference Laplanche and Pontalis1967). Projection is defined as ‘the operation by which the subject expels from himself and locates in the other, person or thing, qualities, feelings, desires, or even objects that he does not recognise or reject in himself’ (Laplanche & Pontalis, Reference Laplanche and Pontalis1967). In conditions of war, the group under attack experiences movements of projections and identifications constructed in response to archaic anxieties linked to threats to the group’s survival. Achieving a dialectical vision of its relationship with the other presupposes introspective work on these movements of identification and projection. It means moving away from a compact, Manichean vision of oneself, one’s group and those outside it to nuance one’s view, admitting one’s own dark side in individual and collective terms, while recognising the humanity of every individual and every group.

In his testimony, Psaltis (Chapter 5 in this volume) refers to various father figures in the persons responsible for his education, whether university or military. It is interesting to note the way in which these encounters shaped, constructed and transformed his thinking, from an approach that was rather close to the official Hellenistic-centric historiography to a gradual ability to emancipate himself from it. Meeting his future wife also enabled him to embrace some of her ideas, socialising with some of his teachers seemed to authorise him to think about things differently, and the confrontation with his military instructor came to determine a breaking point on the side of a shared rejection. Thought of as a Greek from the periphery, abused by this man in accordance with the operating world of the military, confronted with the absurdity of the army, Psaltis nevertheless managed to resist the alienation mechanisms of this institution as described by Françoise Sironi (Reference Sironi1999, Reference Sironi2007).

This emancipation from monolithic and exclusive nationalist authority figures enabled him to construct a way of thinking oriented towards otherness. Integrating the point of view of the other, external to the group, also means breaking out of a relationship of control that refuses all forms of exteriority, to gain access to a dialectical vision of the historical role of each party. It is very important to be able to move away from a projective mode of operation, based on the exclusion of a demonised otherness, towards a capacity to recognise otherness in ourselves and identity in the other, without minimising the place of the affects of fear, hatred or despair that may have been present.

Projecting outside the group what is intolerable for oneself, or recognising one’s own violence, is a very archaic mechanism that we find whenever there is a feeling of threat in real, symbolic or imaginary terms. While this mechanism initially helps us to form a kind of ‘sacred union’ with the group, it does not allow us to recognise the violence on our own side and freezes everyone in Manichean roles. Trauma can convey an overly compact vision of oneself, of others and of the past, silencing the internal polyphony of each human group.

The question of identification and projection is central to thinking about the relationship with trauma in terms of the memory issues at stake in our communities of belonging or reference, and more generally in the construction of imaginary communities (Anderson, Reference Anderson1983). It is important here to emphasise the unconscious transmission of trauma at work in the processes of identification and projection. The violence suffered is transmitted not only through verbal expression but also through a whole series of signs that consciously, but more often than not unconsciously, give shape to the trauma endured by previous generations. The younger generations thus identify with the distress of their parents, continue to project onto the enemy groups of yesteryear the image of a threatening and fundamentally ‘evil’ otherness, and receive from their families a transgenerational mandate to honour that commits them to a series of acts of loyalty.

When Psaltis’s son tells him that the Turks are bad because they took their house, this phrase interprets the paternal grandmother’s factual description of the spoliation. It brings back repressed representations, obeying a logic of identification with the discourse of his elders and of explicitation of its latent content. The child’s projection of all that is ‘bad’ onto the enemy group allows him to give meaning to his family’s painful experience by naming the negative experiences that have been kept silent, pointing the finger of blame and attributing responsibility for this painful experience to an ‘evil’ other.

At the same time, it speaks of a process of transmission in which Psaltis’s self-censorship, carried out in the name of the ideal of preserving his child from any discourse of rejection of the other, is thwarted by the unconscious need of the son and grandparents to come and signify something of an unresolved original prejudice. If the grandparents’ generation is imbued with a deep sense of prejudice, and the children’s generation tries to rationalise this approach through scientific reflection on the causes and consequences of intercommunity violence, by advocating solutions that bring people together, it is fairly predictable that the third generation will recall the negative representations of the enemies of yesteryear that the parental discourse had tried to sweep under the rug. Overcoming this feeling of prejudice presupposes the explicit recognition and uncensored recounting of one’s own suffering in the same way as that of the other side. If Psaltis’s son felt the need to tell him that the Turks are bad, it was undoubtedly because Psaltis was following a logic of intercommunity rapprochement, trying to defend himself against the suffering and powerlessness he had once felt and to cut through his own mother’s ‘infant distress’ and possible depression in the early years after the war. Psaltis failed to tell his son how psychically painful the loss of his home had been for him, how the fear of the return of the Turks had instilled itself in his heart, expressed through his many traumatic dreams, and how for his displaced parents this experience had been a nameless trauma and an endless sadness, having turned their lives upside down forever. Family trauma needs to be recognised as such, to be recounted and elaborated, so that it can then be considered in a more general context of condemnation of the violence committed by both sides and adherence to ideals of justice, peace and dialogue. Any rational discourse about overcoming conflict that fails to take account of the pain experienced by those involved blocks out a great deal of psychological work and can be found in encrypted form in the next generation.

The transgenerational transmission of trauma builds victim identifications at the same time as massive projections, which are very difficult to get rid of because they constitute a vital link with beloved figures whose narcissistic foundations and object relationships have been attacked. In a way, the unconscious transmission of trauma obeys a logic of force of attraction, where everything that is unrepresentable or unspeakable comes back as an unconscious problem for the subject and the group, sometimes leading to acting out. It is important, then, to think of the traumatic burden as a psychological and social fact that can prevent a bonding process based on the elaboration of the past, blocking the expression of negative affects and representations and hindering the effective recognition of the double trauma within memory communities. Emerging from victim identification and its transmission to the next generation in the form of encysted trauma (Abraham &Torok, Reference Abraham, Torok and Rand1994), which forms the basis of a ‘narcissistic pact’ – in other words, an internal image of the group that leaves no room for otherness – presupposes work on one’s own violence and suffering. Telling the story of the past should enable us to work on the emergence of painful affects and repressed representations.

Reconstructing Memories and Passing on Trauma through Testimony

Recalling and recounting the past, as attempts to make sense of what has happened to oneself and by oneself, can help to avoid reproducing the trauma in favour of elaborating it. On the other hand, this can also obey a logic of reiterating patterns of thought that leave no room for otherness and that re-actualise the original feeling of injury. Lastly, this can oscillate between the two functions, at times becoming a form of expression as much as a way of concealing different memory issues. We will see how, by forming part of a polyphonic testimonial network, the telling of one’s story and the recognition of its emotional charge open the way to a possible differentiation from the models with which we are familiar, heirs to a past of suffering and impasses.

The work of reconstructing our memories, which is partly unconscious, consists of trying to tell ourselves and others a certain version of what may have happened to ourselves and our loved ones. As Paul Ricœur (1984–Reference Ricoeur1988) shows us, all narratives are selective. It is therefore important to be aware of the work of selection that sometimes takes place, even without our knowledge, when a testimonial is given. Depending on the framework in which it is expressed, this talk about the past may borrow from community matrices, by repeating a dominant discourse within the group, take the form of an interface that is both an opaque screen and a support for subjective speech, or take on a cathartic function by enabling the subject to be as close as possible to his or her internal reality. Very often, after a conflict ends, the discourse that relates to it embodies a heroic version of the facts and an idealisation of one’s own camp, while gradually the axis of conflict shifts from the opposition between us and them to a capacity for self-criticism within one’s own community or even within one’s own history, between oneself and the other.

Recalling the past in a suitable therapeutic or research context is a way of revisiting what is still active in us, of becoming aware of it and sometimes of proposing a meta-analysis. Psaltis’s nuanced account, which includes a significant reflexive approach to his journey and its links to the narratives of his group, shows that a narrative can have psychic and mental developmental values, and even give rise to an epistemophilic investment in the field of knowledge involved.

The way in which we remember as members of a group and as a society as a whole sheds light on our individual and collective relationship with authority figures, the ways in which we identify with discourse or ideas and the various forms of conscious or unconscious transmission to which we have been subjected. The memory of trauma is often transmitted by what is said, but also by unconscious attitudes. The formation of the image of the self and the other and the construction of a political and social memory of the past are the result of a twofold movement. There is a move from the factual to the interpretative, and vice versa, in such a way that every historical reality becomes the object of social and individual reconstructions endowed with an imaginary of their own (Wagoner, Reference Wagoner2017). All the fantasies of an event consciously or unconsciously condition the perception and transmission of various facets of its reality.

Memory representations are social constructs with a group phantasmatic resonance and an individual unconscious anchoring. They evolve over time and maintain a causal and consecutive relationship with the discursive realities that frame them, since they are conditioned by them while in turn being likely to determine their contours. Discourses on the memory of the 1974 war, the intercommunity tensions of the 1960s and the experience of forced displacement within Cyprus are transformed into social objects that grapple with the endo-psychic and interpsychic issues of the subjects. They address themselves and the other at the same time, mobilising an enunciative act anchored in the here-and-now of the narrative while referring to a spatiotemporal elsewhere, and reflecting the internal polyphony of a plurality of memories divided inside and outside each community.

The transgenerational issues involved in the transmission of testimonies concern both the descendants and symbolic heirs of the witness and the researchers who take their testimonies and who find themselves confronted with the traumatic scare ‘not experienced by the subject, expelled from the fray, which then crosses the generations of the descendants by creating a gap, an inhibition of the contact that would constitute speech likely to address the objects loved’ (Altounian, Reference Altounian and Chiantaretto2004, p. 48). Working on one’s own subjectivity as a researcher is necessary to understand the way in which our history determines our relationship with our objects of study. Becoming aware of it means identifying its strengths and limitations, based on what constitutes our desire: the assertion of loyalty to parental figures or those hierarchically assimilated to them, the expression of conflict in the face of what seems to us to be hindering the fulfilment of our desire (for peace, for a return to the land, for a national claim) or, on the contrary, the expression of conflict in the face of what seems to us to be hindering the fulfilment of our desire (for peace, for a national claim) or, on the contrary, the search for a solution that silences or partially conceals an intrapsychic or intersubjective conflict that puts us at odds with the dominant discourse of our group and/or our own ideals of the solution to be achieved – the search for possible ways of compromising between our aspirations and the principle of reality.

The recording of the testimonial accounts of those involved on both sides, the research carried out on issues of inter- and intracommunity conflict, the work of reflection and the writing of a meta-analysis of the data collected must contribute to a process of collective recollection that allows for the recognition of traumatic experiences on both sides. Recognition of the status of victims for all those involved in a conflict is essential if people are to rebuild their psyches by breaking away from the state of emergency or war into which the trauma plunges them. Stepping out of the victim’s position to recognise the trauma suffered by others, particularly when they belong to the opposite group, presupposes that you feel that your own status as a former victim has been recognised. It is therefore a question of double recognition within communities of memory. However, it is difficult to escape from one’s victimised position when the dominant narratives within one’s group crystallise around victimisation, making it the basis of a narcissistic contract that also acts as a ‘denial pact’ (Kaës, Reference Kaës2014).

In the case of individual or collective trauma, it is interesting to consider the process of fetishisation in which the trauma is invested with the image of a partial, sacralised and fixed object. While this process can be found in both individual and collective trauma, it can be accompanied within a group by an attempt to instrumentalise the memory by public authorities constructing policies of remembrance based on the evocation of sacrificial and victim figures. This is the well-known martyrological nature of narratives of memory and official history in nationalist representational schemes, discourses and practices.

Finally, the recognition of double trauma, to be understood as the ability to acknowledge one’s own share of responsibility and suffering, as well as those of the other within each community of memory, is a way of providing a point of exteriority to the narratives conducted within each group. It thus enables one to escape a compact vision of identity and leaves room for the internal polyphony of each community. By making room for the other, outside the group, we also allow ourselves to rehabilitate the voices within our own group, and vice versa.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored how psychoanalysis perceives trauma in its individual and collective aspects, with reference to the traumatic encounter, to the unconscious reproduction of what has broken into the subject’s psyche and to the way in which each aftermath, sometimes unconsciously sought, remembers painful experiences that have been lived through without always being experienced. Repetition serves both to attach us to the past, possibly melancholising the link, and to replay the traumatic scenario, in an attempt to bring about some kind of transformation, however small. Changing our position and moving from a passive to an active role, by becoming the author of this play, thus represent the first attempt at subjective appropriation of a legacy that is heavy to bear.

In the history of the subject, the confrontation with early traumas, both in terms of too much excitement and emotional deficiencies, the absence of a sufficiently good and protective family environment, and repeated attacks on the envelope at individual and group levels hinder the passage through crucial stages of psychosexual and cognitive development by encouraging movements of fixation or regression. While archaic anxieties and the defence mechanisms deployed to deal with them are common to everyone, confrontation with major traumatic experiences can undo symbolisation capacities that had previously been successfully put in place. Trauma thus has a force of attraction that hinders separation from a painful past and can plunge the subject into very archaic modes of functioning.

In a group situation, confrontation with major collective trauma encourages the return of the archaic, the retreat of mental processing capacities and recourse to the reproduction of traumatogenic situations. It is as if very archaic mechanisms are summoned up, allowing a form of dehumanisation of the other: projection of the bad object outside the group, division between a very good self-image and a very bad image of the other, denial of the suffering and humanity of the enemy group. This mortifying, binary and projective logic encourages all kinds of violent acts, in a cycle of repeated violence from which it is important to find a way out.

To do this, it is vital to work on the dual recognition of trauma, specifically the ability to pass on to future generations a narrative of the past that leaves room for the internal and external polyphony of narratives without obscuring the emotional charge of what has been experienced. Integrating the point of view of the other, whether outside or within one’s own group, also opens the way to expressing conflict within oneself and one’s group by rejecting a compact, homogenous or monolithic vision of the identity and history of each group. Acknowledging the suffering of the other as well as one’s own enables the individual and the group to emerge from a position of victimhood or screen discourse, to integrate the traumatic experience into a more dialectic and authentic vision of their history, and to project themselves into a less Manichean and more constructive vision of the future, opening the way to a process of co-creation.