Trauma

Dr. Louise Braddock ISRF Director of Research

This 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 mechanism of projection is ubiquitously employed: my unthinkable state is parlayed into something ‘you’ have done to me, so that if (per impossibile) I could eliminate ‘you’, my state would once again improve. Acted out in the world, the individual with this state of mind replaces ‘weapons from the past’ with those of the present.

Once the psychological dimension is identified (along with the distortions arising from projection) we see how social science can offer different and varied access routes into trauma’s subjective dimension. Charles Stewart notes how sensibility produced by historical re-enactment opens an actor to sympathetic identification with the auctioned-off slave; we may recall here Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ‘By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them’. Cian O’Driscoll interrogates the meaning of victory for victors and directs us to look beyond, to its meaning for the vanquished. The violence produces, and characterises, a subjugated subjectivity which in the colonial setting Deana Heath calls an ‘unworlding’. Brendan Ciarán Browne and Casey Asprooth-Jackson describe the enduring effects of internal displacement in Northern Ireland, where adapting to forcible separation from one’s home and environment absorbs energy, longitudinally, and creates another form of bare life. Keir Martin, commissioned by us to provide what is by this stage a much-needed lighter note by putting the state, if not society itself, on the couch, nevertheless ends up pointing out the cumulation of harm that comes from insidious state coercion.

Writing this, I recalled Jimmy Ruffin’s popular song of the 1960’s, adopted by Alan Duff in the ’90s as the title of a book, then made into a film by Ian Mune. Song, book, and film are in the past but the title resonates. ‘What becomes of the broken-hearted?’ What, indeed?