TRAUMA Dr. Louise Braddock ISRF Director of Research
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his Bulletin bridges the themes of the last and next ISRF Annual Workshops: between the mutual importance of history and social scientific thought of ‘Connecting Pasts and Presents’ in 2018, and this year’s ‘The Question of Violence’. Freud too connects past and present and violence, when he writes in Remembering, Repeating and Working Through that in analysis the patient ‘brings out of the armoury of the past the weapons with which he defends himself’. In analysis and outside of it the patient acts out, symptomatically, a scenario from the past that, self-protectively, he cannot remember. Trauma is the link concept here; it means ‘wound’, and we may understand it most generally as damage or harm to living systems. What the patient cannot remember, and thus has instead to repeat, is a mental or psychological trauma which, Freud held, is inscribed into the mind. Societies also suffer trauma, as violence inscribed into their fabric and structure. They register and record it in the repositories of culture, in social memory and practices, and in the social imaginary. Whether we understand the harm as functional disruption or ethical destruction, both exogenous shock and endogenous disruption leave their traces; the effects, on the life of a society and on human subjective life both, are real and enduring. Psychological harm is itself a placeholder for the disturbances and disruptions of mental functioning; not only of cognition but also of motivation where the disturbances of affective subjectivity that accompany threat or actual harm make a human life hard to live. Precarity is not a mere theoretical construct. Social conditions themselves create psychological suffering: the pain of loss or anxiety, the experience of fear or of hopelessness, the desperation of seeking and failing to find reward, the abjection of dependence and deprivation. These are all states of mind which anyone with any agency will do anything to avoid being in, and which the mind, functioning as a self-regulating system, is geared to transforming defensively into less unendurable forms. For this the frequently discounted defence 7
