Background: The editors of the journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry asked me for a contribution to an issue they were preparing for 2010. They were asking a number of psychoanalysts to answer this question: If you were writing Civilization and Its Discontents today, what would you write? At first, I thought answering would require a book, or two –one about Freud’s 1930 text and one about what I think of “civilization” today, preceded by a long excursion on the many meanings of “civilization.” But finally I decided to go ahead, and just live with the fact that an essay –this essay—would leave so many things unsaid, so many domains unexplored, so many qualifications unspoken. Many of the roads not taken will be taken on this blog later.
CIVILIZATION AND ITS DREAM OF CONTENTMENT:
REFLECTIONS ON THE UNITY OF HUMANKIND
Introduction: The Dream of Contentment
Aristotle systematized or made a theoria out of a train of thought that was common among his contemporaries who composed tragedies, as it had been among his predecessors, the first Western philosophers, called the PreSocratics. The thought train had been especially clear in the teachings of Heraclitus, even though the Ephesian was known as “the Obscure” for representing it in cryptograms or aphorisms like “ethos anthropo daimon” ( in a human, character is destiny). These Greeks believed that human beings are microcosms and their societies macrocosms within the great macrocosm, which is all of physis, all of nature, so beautiful to contemplate.
Through the same phases and patterns, human beings and their societies are born, grow, develop a mature character, and decline, When they pass away, new ones are born to replace them, and these, in turn, grow, develop a mature character, and decline. The cycle is ceaseless. But there is incremental evolution in it, despite episodes of devolution or regression or missing the mark or the goal (such a miss being attributed to a harmartia, sometimes translated “a tragic flaw”). Slowly, the maturation of human beings and of societies comes closer to the goal that Aristotle named eudaimonia, harmoniousness, happiness, or, literally, wellness of the daimon, a word which invokes that growth principle in people and in nature which is the future of the whole and the destiny of each. Growing from little groups to bigger families to polities and eventually commonwealths, human societies are incrementally approaching unity and peace, as some magnanimous humans are approaching apprehension of the unity of mankind by swelling their minds up, as it were, to embrace the macrocosm.
Human beings, Aristotle observed, imagine eudaimonia or dream of contentment in different ways, because they have grown to have somewhat different characters (and thus destinies). Some think that eudaimonia consists in pleasure and some in the accumulation of material goods. Quite different from the hedonists and proprietors are the moralists for whom eudaimonia is exercise of their moral faculty (dianoia); and even more different are those rare, maximally evolved individuals for whom exercise of mind (nous) in contemplation is eudaimonia. It is the contemplatives who can envision the future unity of mankind, civilization’s contentment. Aristotle’s teacher Plato had discussed these character types in terms of the functions they would have in an ideal eudaimonic polity: they would be craftspeople and workers and merchants; warriors and guardians; and philosopher kings. Aristotle, however, wanted the contemplatives to have the leisure and safety to contemplate, not to rule –for in ruling they would run the risk of missing the mark and devolving into tyrants.
Down through the Western tradition, the microcosm/macrocosm analogy[1] offered basic guidance for understanding nature and the characters of human beings and their societies. But by the end of the 19th century, confidence that there was a slow progressive trend –an incremental evolution—toward the eudaimonic unity of mankind was challenged by great nay-sayers like Nietszche and then by less great but very forceful devolutionists like Spengler. Sigmund Freud declared himself an ambivalent heir of the tradition, a pessimistic optimist. When he wrote Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), which might have been Greekishly entitled Dysdaimonia in Culture, he announced with the grandeur of an Aeschylus that Eros is always at war with Thanatos, the sexual instinctual drive with “the death instinct.” But whether Eros could advance in the cycle of his era, or the unity of mankind come any closer, Freud declined to predict. It was as though he had produced only two parts of an Orestia-like trilogy: Would the ferociously punishing Erinyes, wanting vengeance on Orestes for his guilty aggression against his mother, give way to the Eumenides?
In the tradition within which Freud –ever so precariously—thought, the coming unity of mankind had always been envisioned as a triumph of the human spirit, which Hegel had invoked during the Napoleonic campaigns as a triumph of the Weltgeist. Freud was far less “Prussian” when he declared (1930, pp. 69): ”…civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind. Why this has to happen, we do not know; the work of Eros is precisely this. These collections of men are to be libidinally bound to one another. Necessity alone, the advantages of work in common, will not hold them together. But man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and all against each, opposes this programme of civilization.”
Not surprisingly, Freud’s conviction –a speculation which over the course of the decade from 1920 to 1930 became a conviction—that human beings have a natural aggressive instinct, a derivative of “the death instinct,” has been the crux of all controversy among psychoanalysts since his death in 1939. Gradually, the controversy diffused and came to encompass the whole of Freud’s theory of the instinctual drives, which had evolved over his career. To some psychoanalysts the theory of instinctual drives is a legacy that must be rejected; to others it must be retained –perhaps reformulated or refined– as a necessary foundation. And as this controversy has ramified and grown in scope, it is not surprising that no one who calls herself or himself a Freudian has been ready, willing or conceptually able to write about the microcosm/macrocosm analogy or the evolution of human beings and societies or the unity of mankind. “The death instinct” challenges the basic assumption about human beings that subtended the Western philosophical tradition which Freud himself inherited, and which Aristotle had summarized with his aphoristic definition of a human being as zoon politikon (a polis-dwelling animal); that is, a being by nature designed for bonding with others in a polity, for acting with others similarly moved by philia politike, political affection or friendship, respect. A being by nature seeking contentment in civilization.
The Unity of Humankind after the Second World War
To my way of thinking, while this controversy over the instinctual drive theory was developing within psychoanalysis, and especially during recent decades when the controversy linked up with a post-War tendency—deeply indebted to Nietszche— to pour “post-modernist” deconstructive scorn on all “master narratives” that rest on the microcosm/macrocosm analogy (as all master narratives not involving a transcendent diety do), something has been happening in reality, unremarked, to mankind. It seems to me that humankind (as we ought now to say, acknowledging women, so absent from the prejudiced philosophical tradition) has really become, since the Second World War, united. The unity of humankind is not in the future, it is not a possibility (of libidinal purpose or any other). It is present, factual, and it has come about in an unenvisioned way: humankind has been united in and by common terror, shared traumatization.
There was a period of preparation for this phenomenon, so unprecedented in depth and scope. In the first three decades of the 20th century, many thinkers observed that modern technologies were “shrinking” the planet, even as imperialists were crisscrossing it, leaving their corseting tracks of ruthless exploitation and cultural suppression on every part of it. New modes of transportation on land, sea and –most astonishingly—air, brought regions of the world into proximity and peoples into contact as never before. New modes of communication shrank space and time. Peoples who were, in the old microcosm/macrocosm terms, living in the childhood of humankind, isolated in small families and tribes, were “discovered” by those (sometimes anthropologists, sometimes imperialists) who called themselves maturely “civilized,” so that the whole history (and common ancestry in prehistory) of humankind could be studied. Even though study of humankind was biased by moralistic and prejudiced versions of evolutionary assumptions and analogies to individual development, it was, nonetheless, universal in scope.
Crucially, new modes of warfare and weaponry erased the boundaries of battlefields, so that the First World War extended out around the globe but also no longer stopped at civilian areas or spared women and children. And in this context, after the First World War, ideas learned from Roman Stoics, heirs of the Greek tradition and its vision of the unity of humankind, were taken up –filtered through Kant’s oeuvre—to found the League of Nations, a grand adjunct to the peace treaty that concluded the terrifying First World War. The effort to make that horror and that flawed treaty into a step forward for humankind was doomed, however, by the ethnic nationalism it permitted –even promoted.[2]
Again, after the Second World War, when technological developments and group conflicts had gone even further toward shrinking the world, an organization for imagining the unity of humankind had been sought in the United Nations. But this postwar context was different—and remains different. The changes that had preceded the Second World War continued and cumulated to such an extent that a discontinuity in human history was registered in many domains with use of the word “unprecedented”—now so hackneyed, but then, itself, unprecedented, for human history and the human condition had not been thought to admit events and changes without precedent. Throughout the tradition, Natura non salut (nature makes no leaps) had been held to be a principle of both microcosm and macrocosm evolution.
The world-shrinking technological developments had turned out to have sinister consequences that were novel: they had made possible or supported grandiose bids for power and methods of war that were without precedent. A form of human governance had arisen in Germany and in the Soviet Union, to be given the new name “totalitarianism,” that did what no tyranny, monarchy, or oligarchy had ever done: in its bid for world conquest, it had attacked all political life, destroying all genuinely political institutions and ruthlessly suppressing and killing its own citizens like an omnivorous monster eating itself. Totalitarians invented methods for this killing–-concentration camps, crematoria for millions–that were the Industrial Revolution turned totally malignant. To fight the Nazis, and then the Soviets, the Americans had invented an atomic bomb, which they used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, incinerating those cities, turning them into crematoria. It became apparent that genocidal warfare could have ecocidal consequences, as it became (more slowly) apparent that the Industrial Revolution, unrestrained and carried everywhere by expansionary capitalism or communism, could have both genocidal and ecocidal consequences as it polluted and corrupted all of human nature and nature, the macrocosm.[3]
The Second World War –if we take that title to embrace the war itself, the apex of full-blown totalitarianism, the Holocaust, the use of the A-Bomb—was traumatic for all involved, which eventually meant for all humankind because images and stories of it reached those not directly involved (especially via the new media of television and news reels). In the years immediately after the War, the trauma linked to traumatizing events around the globe, especially as the surviving empires dissolved and new nations were created. Events like the 1948 War of Independence in Palestine, the partition of India, the institution of apartheid in South Africa, the Long March launching a Cultural Revolution in China –all shaped the histories of the peoples, countries and regions involved, and still reverberate in intra-group conflicts that threaten the world. Each of the nations that gathered at the United Nations was compromised by a trauma history as all engaged in new forms of treaty-making to try to heal from the cluster trauma of the Second World War. Debates over the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on Genocide were filled with echoes of the traumas the various national populations had endured, and also inflicted.[4]
The UN Declaration’s aspiration to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” reflected the realization that human beings had become capable of destroying human life in the mass, that is, the potentiality existed that all human life could end, become extinct. The species was capable of suicide; of producing what came to be called “nuclear winter,” and of creating political institutions that could eliminate politics. Or, more accurately, the Declaration’s framers realized that one people, even a single leader of one people, possessing nuclear weapons and infected with totalitarian elements, could bring about the death of all. Rightly, this realization was immediately dubbed “unthinkable” and it remained “unthinkable” right through the Cold War that kept the threat of nuclear war and totalitarianism continually in the minds of everyone. No matter which camp they aligned with politically or ideologically, everyone agreed that trying to “think the unthinkable” was necessary for survival (and the same phrase has now been extended to the ultimate environmental catastrophe or ecocide that was vaguely envisioned after the war).
One way to define a trauma is: an experience (or a series of experiences) that is, for those who suffer it, unthinkable. “Unthinkable” may mean that a person thinks compulsively about the trauma but cannot really confront it or put the fragments of memory into an integrated narrative or even an integrated neuronal memory. Often such compulsive thinking produces “worst possible case scenario” thinking that has little connection to present reality or realistic assessments of the future. On the other hand, “unthinkable” may mean that the traumatic experience is denied, dissociated, disavowed, and the traumatized person is left psychically split or disintegrated. Either way, traumatized people become “stupid,” in the sense that their ability to think is compromised by the anxiety-ridden compulsivity which grips them.[5] Specifically, they are “stupid” as judges of future possibilities, for all they experience is the traumatic past laid out in front of them. Judgment –including good political judgment–presupposes freedom of mind, freedom to range imaginatively and see matters from many points of view, imagine many outcomes of events, many causes of events.[6] Traumatized people, whether compulsive ruminators on their trauma or compulsive deniers of it, easily become “fundamentalists,” that is, they embrace a pre-existing thought system with a fundamental event in it that explains all of history, polarizing all humankind into all-good and all-bad. The thought-system also plots an endpoint at which ultimate judgment is delivered by a forgiving or punishing deity, ruler of the macrocosm, who is outside of the macrocosm, transcendent.
I am suggesting that traumatization, with these consequences for human thought and judgment, was a collective experience of humankind in the Second World War and its aftermath, so that this type of unification into a traumatized mass is the currently existing factual unity of humankind. We have the task before us of grasping this unification and thinking, therapeutically, how it can be turned into a unification that is not based on what traumatologists call “psychic numbing.” Can a negatively attained unity that interferes with thought grow into a thoughtfully chosen unity? If it is so that there has been one trauma, repeating itself in many forms and degrees, but many ways of responding, which ways of responding are most conducive to overcoming it? Can those help who are least trapped in this collective traumatization or most able to analyze it because they have struggled free of it?
It seems to me that it is not Freud’s contested theory of instinctual drives, or Freud’s speculation about Eros locked in battle with Thanatos, that we need in order to understand this development in the human condition and what it means for the future unity of mankind. Rather, we need the Freudian theory of trauma, propelled by Sandor Ferenczi’s interest in trauma (first among war neurotics and later among abused children) and elaborated by many post-War Freudians. For this theory brings out a dimension of human experience that had been obscured: it was first obscured by the emphasis on human evolution in the Western philosophical tradition, which so often degenerated into facile worship of automatic Progress; and then it was obscured again by Freud’s own hypothesis about a devolutionary counter-force to Eros, misidentified as innate aggression, not trauma. But, at the same time, I think we need to rescue from Freud’s late emphasis on the Eros and Thanatos battle his very important –and now neglected–continuation of the old philosophical tradition of character-oriented microcosm/macrocosm thinking. Minus its distortions,[7] this train of thought can be used to explore the idea that there are social traumas that operate analogously to individual traumas, and that we have been living inside such a shared trauma since the Second World War (more than half a century, the entire lifetime of my generation, that is, of people born around my birth year, 1946).
Theory of Social Trauma
A second way to define a trauma is: an event (the actions of a person or groups of persons) rends the psyche of an individual or the interpersonal fabric of a society in such a way that the ingredients of the event are compulsively repeated within the individual or the society, which come, then, to resemble the traumatizing event. This definition references a phenomenon known to psychoanalysts since the 1920s and elaborated by Anna Freud in her The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936). An individual who is traumatically aggressed can –and usually does—“identify with the aggressor” or the aggressive event and do unto others as has been done unto her or him. That is, the person will imitate the ingredients of the aggression suffered, including not just acts but the ingredient of motivation. (Later, after child abuse was more thoroughly studied, this phenomenon between children and adults was called “intergenerational transmission of trauma.”)
The elaboration of this definition for social traumas depended upon work done on trauma after the Second World War, and very crucially on a classic 1963 paper by Masud Khan, “The Concept of Cumulative Trauma.” This paper had as its purpose the delineation of a particular trauma type, “cumulative trauma,” and a comparison of it with other types of trauma– a first attempt at a typology of traumas. Clearing a path for this pioneering typology, Khan noted that the complex history of “trauma” in psychoanalytic theorizing began with Freud’s shift away from making sexual trauma central to his etiological theory of the psychoneuroses (particularly seduction trauma in hysteria) toward emphasizing fantasy (especially oedipal fantasy) and intrapsychic experience –a move Ferenczi protested. Later, as Freud reconsidered his instinctual drive theory and his theory of anxiety in the 1920’s, he attempted several different syntheses of his first concern for traumatizing events and his second with the intrapsychic experience of being traumatized. But this project remained incomplete (and it was quite derailed by the “death instinct hypothesis,” which minimized external trauma).
In the absence of a clear synthesis, subsequent theorizing pendulumed back and forth between emphasis on event and emphasis on intrapsychic experience. Having noted this pattern, Khan made a synthesizing proposal that the basic Freudian definition of traumatization as a process involving breaching a protective stimulus barrier and subsequent efforts to repair or remedy the breach be retained, but that the protective barrier be understood not as a “stimulus barrier” but as, basically and primarily, the relationship that a helpless baby has with its caretaker (usually the mother). Every individual’s trauma history –and every individual does have such a history– begins with a history of infant and childhood growth in the matrix of the protection provided (to some degree) by the caretaker. All subsequent traumas reference this beginning and are experienced as repeating it. This is the universal situation, the human condition, Khan argued, and in order for a description of the universal situation not to become a launch for over-generalizing, attention must turn to types of traumas, which will each have a relation to types of failures of the protective shield of the caretaker-infant relationship.
Khan first noted the two forms of traumatizing failure best known to Freud. The first form included traumas of separation, abandonment, or loss (including fantasized loss of the phallus, castration anxiety); the second, particularly explored by Ferenczi, included traumas of excessive intrusion into the infant’s mind of the caretaker’s psychopathology (or the psychopathology of another significant person, or, I would like to add, a society). For simplicity’s sake, I suggest that these be called rupture traumas and break-in or abuse traumas. A third type of protective shield failure noted by Khan occurs when some problem in the child –physical handicap, constitutional sensitivity. illness—is overwhelming to the caretakers, who then cannot provide a protective shield. A fourth type of failure is the one Khan designated “cumulative trauma” (and related to the “strain trauma” that Ernst Kris (1956) had earlier distinguished from “shock trauma”).
The cumulative trauma is a cluster of experiences and events, over the years of infancy and childhood, no one of which entirely destroys the protective shield of the infant-mother relationship, but each of which contributes to strains, distortions and attenuations of the protective relationship and of the character of the infant’s emerging ego (eventuating, he might have added, in character traits and a character clued to the cumulative trauma). A cumulative trauma is usually not even visible until its ingredient events have become so woven into experience that we say (for example) “he has a schizoid character,” marked by futile, repetitive preoccupation with his trauma. By contrast “he has a dissociative character” would more likely be said of someone whose trauma history included salient events of rupture or break-in that had been sealed off. Khan did not go on to use Freud’s own characterological scheme, which consisted of three types, hysterical, obsessional and narcissistic, and ask about the experiences of trauma typical of them. But he might well have, and I think we should take this cue.
It is important to note that the kind of review and clarification of types that Khan was undertaking in the 1960s was part of a wider shift within psychoanalysis to correct for Freud’s original pendulum shift away from traumatic events. This correction came particularly from child analysts, especially Winnicott, who was Khan’s analyst and mentor, and it represented a critique of the extreme emphasis on intrapsychic experience (especially of the death instinct in aggression) among the Kleinians. The correction coincided with a movement within child studies to use new techniques of observation (like film) and new observational situations (like parent-infant play groups, the “strange situation” set-up, and simultaneous analyses of mothers and infants) in order to focus on early (pre-oedipal) growth environments and the mother whom Winnicott had called “the environmental mother” (in contrast to “the object mother”). The Ferenczi-trained émigré analyst Rene Spitz made films of hospitalized children –children suffering traumas of separation, abandonment, loss—and then American colleagues of Spitz’s in Colorado, led by C. Henry Kempe, developed techniques for empirically studying children suffering from break-in traumas of physical abuse (“the battered child syndrome”). The phrase “child abuse” came into common use in the 1970’s, with both clinicians and policy commissions trying to define it for both clinical and legal purposes By the 1980’s there was a surge of pediatric procedure and of legislation to protect children from abuse: the development, as it were, of a social protective shield, with a therapeutic component, a social matrix in which children could be protected from the failures of their parental relationship shields.
A social protective shield could be defined as a relational network of people and institutions that grows up to enwrap basic social units –like families, but also states—in customs, programs and ideas of eudaimonia that prevent the units’ failure and remedy their ills medically and psychotherapeutically. Social shields of all sorts develop in societies as different needs and ‘social ills’ are discovered and addressed. Sometimes great effort has to be expended to construct them, as was the case with the child abuse initiatives in America, sometimes they generate more spontaneously, as in villages where it is taken for granted (to use an African proverb popularized in the 1990s) that “it takes a village to raise a child.” Or they may result from political movements that build “from the ground up,” maximizing citizen participation and emphasizing human rights.
In the same period during which “child abuse” emerged and was refined, the diagnostic category Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (later PTSD) was formulated, and much work was done by neuroscientists to examine forms of trauma memory. This work brought together two decades of child study with contemporaneous clinical observation of “war neuroses” in the specific forms encountered among Vietnam War veterans.
But, interestingly enough, the convergence of child study and adult PTSD study did not include the more widespread, and less acknowledged social trauma phenomenon that I am considering: all children born during or at the end of the Second World War were raised by adults who had been collectively traumatized, that is, by adults who were to one degree or another and in one way or another united as the terrorized survivors of the Second World War. “Intergenerational transmission of trauma” emerged as a category specifically applied to children who had been abused and neglected in the clinically and legally defined sense; but it did not refer to the transmission of a trauma experience from a group to a next generation.
In the 1980s, however, the concern with PTSD did bring into the burgeoning trauma literature another form of typological distinction relating to traumatic events –one according to degree or scale. The phrase “catastrophic trauma” appeared to indicate that traumas most immediately and physically devastating to the protective barrier of the infant-caretaker relationship could effect groups. “Catastrophic trauma” was used for individuals –in considering severe in degree, life-threatening physical abuse, for example—but the term more often referred to traumas on a large scale involving large groups: force of nature traumas like fires, earthquakes, and floods; technological traumas like airplane crashes, chemical spills, and nuclear reactor meltdowns; and traumas of war.[8] More and more frequently, study of catastrophic traumas of war focused on civilian populations in addition to veterans, for it had become widely acknowledged that the nature of war itself had continued to change since the unprecedented Second World War changes. The traditional barriers (topographical and legal) distinguishing battlefields and civilian areas continued to erode. War and genocide became blurred as civilian casualties mounted in both high technology and low technology war zones. Similarly, particularly in the 1990s, war and terrorism became blurred as the purpose of so many war efforts, which employed civilians, became to terrorize civilian populations and create waves of refugees, and this, in turn, inspired terrorists who were not soldiers. By the time Americans declared “war on terrorism” in the days after the 9/11 terrorist attack, many around the world, organizing massive protest demonstrations against a retaliatory invasion of Iraq, realized that “war on terrorism” was going to mean state terrorist attack on non-state terrorist attackers. Again, the phenomenon of a state identifying with its aggressor and aggressing back in its mode was apparent.
Despite the work of Masud Khan and others in delineating types of traumas, psychoanalytic theorists made little contribution to the study of catastrophic traumas experienced by groups because their concern remained so decidedly with individuals and the interplay of individuals’ subjective experience (their histories, their fantasies, their reactions to trauma) and traumatic events of different types.[9] But that lack of contribution has also stemmed from not filling in the conceptual or theoretical blank between individuals’ experiences of being traumatized and experiences that individuals have as members of groups with group trauma histories. The microcosm/macrocosm thinking frame has been left unused, as though it were obsolete, in the old Freudian closet.[10]
Taking as a cue Masud Khan’s adaptation of Winnicott’s notion that the protective shield breached by a trauma repeats or reactivates earlier breaches in the child-caretaker relationship, this conceptual blank could be filled with the analogous notion I suggested before : a society provides the individuals who constitute it with a protective shield or shields, and there are traumas that breach these shields of existential belonging and social care or service and political union. A social shield can be broken through in many ways and degrees that are analogous to traumas of rupture, of break-in, and –perhaps the most common—of cumulative social erosion and deterioration and failure over time. The profound –unprecedented–rupture and break-in trauma cluster of the Second World War became a cumulative trauma as the generation suffering it transmitted it to their children, and as the events it set in train continued to traumatize both the adults and their children and grandchildren—thereby setting off more traumatic events.
To this thread of reflection about social trauma and particularly cumulative social trauma, I want to add one more thread before returning to the question of how shared social trauma as a type of unification of people might be worked through (as we say in clinical work) and transformed into constructive unification. So let me add a third definition of trauma to the preceding two. A trauma is a social-relationship harm that is compounded in the person or society harmed (and in the harmers as well). It reactivates older childhood relationship traumas, and it sets off a process of accumulation in which its own consequences, mingling with the consequences of the older childhood traumas that were woven into it, become traumatic. The mix of traumas influences the ways in which subsequent traumatic experiences are experienced. All traumas are, in this way, cumulative traumas. People and societies develop characters out of their trauma histories, and those characters are their destinies.
Are there characterologically typical trauma experiences? I think there are, and want to make a suggestion in this direction by using the Freudian theory of defense mechanisms and character-structuration. When Freud began to think in terms of the analogy between individuals and societies, microcosms and macrocosms, repression was the defense he had his attention focused on. Hysteria and obsessional neurosis both seemed to him pathologies of repression –the first more common in women, the second in men; the first more connected with oral and genital (Oedipal) repression, the second with anal; the first involving more passivity, the second more activity, and so forth. Both seemed common in and typical of societies in which sexual repression was obvious enough to be held responsible for “modern nervous illness” generally (as Freud had argued in his 1908 paper “’Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” a premonition of things to come in Civilization and its Discontents). During the 1920s, as much of the overt Victorian sexual repression lifted, hysteria and hysterical characters of the type Freud had studied became much less common in the clinical population (although obesssional characters remained common). All of Freud’s followers observed this diminishment of fin de siecle hysteria, but only some –particularly Otto Fenichel, Wilhelm Reich (1970), and others of socialist formation—responded by making the microcosm/macrocosm analogy more dynamic: as societies change, so do illnesses and so does the preponderance of one kind of illness over others in a society, marking that society’s “social character.” Many analysts who survived the Second World War noted that the pre-war “Prussian” character of German society, even during the upheavals of the Weimar period, had meant that narcissistic obsessionality[11] was the “social character” of the period when Nazism was articulated as an ideology and a way of life and a way of warfare. It was, to use Reich’s phrase, “the mass psychology of fascism.”
Narcissism was the third kind of neurosis and character disorder Freud identified. “Narcissistic neurosis,” received much attention among the “Ego Psychologists” after the Second World War, for they, of course, were concerned as Freud had been in the 1930s, with pathologies of the ego. Eventually, when narcissism was intensely studied in America in the 1960s, and work by Heinz Kohut, Otto Kernberg and others built upon earlier work by Sandor Ferenczi, Franz Alexander, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, Harold Searles, Harry Stack Sullivan and others, the idea began to form that America was becoming more narcissistic and more promoting of narcissism in individuals. This idea was fully formed as far as American society was concerned by the time Christopher Lasch published The Culture of Narcissism in 1979.
To my mind, the development in America of a “culture of narcissism” was connected to the way the Second World War traumatization developed in America, which was characterologically different than the way it developed in other parts of the world, and particularly in European societies that had been the main wartime battlefields and had been physically devastated and depopulated. At a greater distance from the actual land campaigns and bombings, America became a “Never again!” society: being resolute about never being traumatized again was as close as the society came to acknowledging that it had been traumatized, even though it had been victorious in the war and had emerged “a superpower.” There were many facets of this rigidity: assertions of territorial and military invulnerability;[12] assertions of moral rectitude (most obvious in the nationwide pact not to question the rightness of Truman’s decision to use atomic bombs or of the earlier decision to “blitz” Germany’s cities as Germany had blitzed English cities); rejection of anything that could be called “appeasement” in foreign affairs, assertions of “exceptionalism”; celebrations of American individualism (often gendered as “rugged individualism” and thus indistinguishable from machismo); and triumphalism (particularly as the Cold War was “won”). These social defenses became so normal that individuals with these forms of narcissistic character armour could not recognize them as such. (Thus a central contribution of feminism was to recognize these defenses in men and to make an effort to analyze them in terms of the way American men were “socialized,” starting with their socialization in the protective matrix of child-parent relations.)
Also characteristic of America during and after the War was the appropriation of Nazi and Soviet institutions –the creation of American identifications with the two aggressors’ institutions. America manufactured a bomb fit for “total war” –a Nazi military ambition—and then engaged in an arms race with the Soviet Union that made the two countries imitators of each other’s scientific and military institutions. They shared a belief in “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) and a commitment to “deterrence.” America also developed a secret police, or several secret polices, and secret intelligence agencies like the CIA and the NSA, all using techniques developed by the Gestapo and the KGB. Through the Cold War, a concept of “national security” evolved that rationalized these agencies, which were billed as protective but which became more and more aggressive. The American military even created a “School of the Americas” training program for the police and military forces of its client states in Latin America, most of which developed into dictatorships with American help. Within the US government, a slow but steady shift began, away from the basic Constitutional republican assumption that the legislative branch of the government should lead, representing the people. The new assumption developed that the executive branch, and the President as Commander-in-Chief particularly, was the leadership branch of government, sanctioned to appoint the judiciary branch along ideological lines. To the President was given authority to use the nuclear armory, as the nation learned so vividly during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The ultimate species-extinguishing trauma can be inflicted by one person –and this knowledge is itself traumatizing (as it has become assimilated through all kinds of Dr. Strangelove images and scenarios).
Another specificity of the American experience of the shared Second World War trauma was the society’s development of an acute vulnerability to any experience that could be viewed as or actually was a national defeat. The school experience of my generation was as profoundly shaped by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 –a great “defeat” for America—as it had been by the constant rituals of preparedness against Soviet nuclear attack that started in 1951. But the major defeat –or narcissistic wound–of the Cold War period was, of course, the Vietnam War, which was a rite of traumatic passage for my generation. After years of being threatened with a “domino effect” in all of Southeast Asia if the Vietnamese Communists were not defeated, Americans found their military defeated by a nation that had turned itself into a guerilla force and won the war by hiding its actual soldiers in the civilian population, which the American military attacked by sea, by land and by “saturation” aerial bombardment. Vietnam was bombed almost to the point of using nuclear weapons, polluted almost to the point of having its land and natural resources irreversibly devastated–all to no avail, and to the widespread moral corruption of the American air force, army, and navy. The sons of “the greatest generation” who had fought Nazism –and endured the terrorization of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki– were demoralized and disgraced and terrorized by an experience particular to them but part of a cumulating trauma. Most Americans, to this day, if asked whether America “lost” the Vietnam War would be unable to acknowledge that, in fact, yes, it did; the most that is admitted is that America got “stuck in a quagmire,” without “an exit strategy.”[13] So this anal-obsessional language has overshadowed every word said about the Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq, and now the war in Afghanistan. These wars are all talked about against the background of the ritualistically invoked but still not fully acknowledged trauma of Vietnam.
It was not until the Vietnam War that America fissured along the line marked by struggle between “Hawks” and “Doves,” which eventually morphed into a broader struggle touching on social and cultural issues between Red or Republican conservatives and Blue or Democratic liberals. Through the decades a split along generational lines recurred as some young people –over two generations—longed to exit the collective trauma condition. That is, within these groupings the two typical responses to a cumulative trauma played out: one, most common in the Second World War generation (quite obssessional as well as narcissistic, and ruminating on the trauma of the Second World War) emphasized being moralistically in control of bombs and being willing to use them; and the other, more common among the Vietnam War generation and its children, wanting to exit the trauma and struggling not to dissociate from it, emphasized disarmament, pursuit of peace by peaceful means, and reassertion of hedonistic and proprietary eudaimonia. The young called not just for –to use Freud’s terms—Eros over Thanatos, but for avoiding or diminishing the anxiety of war, the anxiety of terrorization.[14] In the social domain, many among the traumatized who were “Hawks” associated the loss in Vietnam to a change in American society that featured a Women’s Liberation Movement, a revived Civil Rights Movement, and a Gay Liberation Movement, all of which signaled loss of power, loss of privilege, loss of patriarchal authority—in short, narcissistic vulnerability.
Therapeutic Consciousness
The fact –it seems to me a fact—that societies develop different characters in their responses to trauma, which reflect their prior histories of trauma as well as the conditions under which they experienced the trauma and transmitted it, is crucial to acknowledge in thinking about what might be called social therapy. The unity of humankind in terrorization that I have been broadly describing seems to me to have three obvious dimensions, registered in each and every post-war society, although each society has been particularly marked by one or more of these dimensions.
The first form comes from the period of the Second World War, and it is terrorization in the face of the existence of totalitarian forms of government in Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union (and its Eastern Bloc colonies) and the mass deaths those regimes engineered, known later as the Holocaust and the Gulag. Terrorization in the face of the existence of atomic weapons and the threat of their use for “mutual assured destruction” followed as the Cold War heated up, invoking again and again as it did the bombings at the close of the War of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mushroom cloud. Terrorization in the face of global pollution and, eventually, global warming grew, as the threat of ecocide joined the threat of genocide. The theme of this dimension of terrorization is: mass death is coming or is growing all around us, we are besieged. The theme is narcissistic, all about preventing defeat and death.
The second dimension compasses all of the ways in which the world has become boundriless. To the “shrinking” planet phenomenon has been added the massive post-war movements of peoples: first, the European refugees and displaced persons, then stream after stream of political and economic refugees from all around the world to all around the world. These movements were unprecedented in comparison to any population upheavals that had preceded the War. Although the world is still a world of nation-states, every state (particularly in the developed world, the destination of immigrants) is now a complexly multi-national entity. All states have had to confront the problems of their diversity or multiculturalism, so civil wars of one form or another –sometimes “cultural war”—have dotted the globe, increasing as the Cold War came to an end or morphed into global cultural war of more or less progressive states and entities against anti-modernists and reactionaries of various sorts. None stop short of using torture and terrorism. Some historians have spoken of a “conflict of civilizations” with the implication that the Muslim world is regressive and the developed, Westernized world progressive and freedom-loving, when it seems obvious that there are progressive and regressive groups within every nation-state, as there are terrorists in every nation-state –often in uniform—as well as in non-state or transnational alliances. The most assiduous boundary protectors and creators are obsessional.
In the boundriless world, only the Americans, relatively bordered by two oceans and with a relatively sedentary ruling group, the WASPS, could continue to debate whether isolationism and/or anti-immigration policies could sustain a foreign policy. No other people had the luxury of being isolated in any way or the luxury of continuing or developing notions of individualism for individuals or absolute sovereignty for nations. The European nations, invaded, bombed, occupied, devastated, emerged from the War more community-minded and more dependent on government programs in the areas of social development and family support, more “social democratic,” more convinced that they had to work toward multi-state unity –as they eventually did in forming the European Union, the first post-War multi-state regional political entity to have emerged out of a collective sense of danger. America has also been more and more hostile toward the United Nations, although immediately after the War it was committed to the United Nations and to the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights.
The third form of terrorization has resulted in various kinds of panics and moral panics—what Gustave Le Bon had named mass hysterias. This form could be described as terrorization in the face of unpredictability. Or terrorization in the face of constant anxiety. Freud concentrated his attention on the ways in which repression had produced a certain predictability or continuity in human affairs by keeping sexual energy and aggressive energy bound, for examples in monogamous families or authoritarian institutions like churches and armies. Similarly, he had studied the ways in which the task of repression had been unsuccessful or had needed all kinds of consolations to work at all (consolations of substance abuse, of worldviews promising postponed gratification, etc.). He noted that as religions, with their traditions of repression, were losing power, insecurity was rising, and he suggested that only for a return of security in some form would people repress their instinctual needs. He did not forsee (and nor did anyone else, even after the War) a religious revival of the sort that has swept the world since the end of the Cold War, promising security and return to a (quite mythical) tradition-bound time of security. Nor did he forsee the apocalyptic nature of some of the current fundamentalisms, which promise that security in the next world is imminent. This religious revival points, I think, to the changed nature of the unpredictability fear: it is no longer fear that instinctual drive energy will break out of bounds, but fear that there are no bounds –so fundamentalisms are desperate efforts to reinstate lost bonds, lost traditions.
The phenomenon I am describing (and analyzing as having three key dimensions) is not a collective post-traumatic stress disorder, but a collective cumulative-traumatic stress disorder or retraumatization stress disorder. There were mid-century traumas which we now refer to as “past,” but each of these has continued in its original form or in a variant form; there has been a continuous and cumulative collective retraumatizing. So any therapeutic approach has to take into account this continuous condition, and its various forms, which are linked to the predominance of a particular dimension of the trauma in a given individual or traumatized society.
Trauma therapy in the clinic begins with identification and description of the trauma: in the context of a safe, secure, protective relationship matrix, the story can be told and explored in all its dimensions. Why it has been unthinkable –what is unthinkable about it—can be slowly thought. The emotions involved in it –the fear, the anger, the guilt, sometimes the survivor guilt—can be recovered, and the trauma’s relation to early breaches of the protective shield explored. These processes have their analogies in the social world, where stories can be told in the course of political campaigns, deliberations, policy discussions, and, most importantly, treaty-making and convention drafting, which are the key acts of reconciliation and unification.
In my estimation, the clearest and most encompassing collective articulation of the shared trauma of the Second World War and what is needed to master it took place in the decade after the International Year of the Child in 1979, when the UN Convention on the Rights of The Child was being drafted. This has been the most progressive and sweeping of the UN’s post-war conventions, and the one that has garnered the most signatories. All the UN members have signed except Somalia, which has had no legitimate government for decades, and the United States of America, which is stubbornly committed to its absolute sovereignty and which has had successive governments that have judged children’s rights to be threatening to traditional parental rights. And this Convention has been the one that really addresses the post-war world in which children –the children of the wartime generation and their children—have grown up and needed (in the Convention’s terms) provision, protection and participation (to the extent of their “evolving capacities” in decisions effecting their lives). [15]
The framers of the Convention, many of them psychologists of the Vietnam War generation that so desired exit from the collective accumulating human trauma, understood that the crucial developmental period of zero to three must be a period of relational matrix, protective shield, capable of sustaining a child through its maturation so that the child can become an active participant in its community and the world community, as a world citizen. Families, societies, and world organizations that are able to give children’s rights priority, that is, to make them, as the Convention says, “paramount,” do not live in the past, identifying with their aggressors, repeating their traumatization, handing it –rather than good mothering–on to their children. They have been able to grasp the nature and dimensions of the traumatizing past and “master the past” rather than identifying with the traumatizing elements and repeating them.[16] The future unity of humankind depends upon how widely and deeply the peoples of the world can see the significance of this exemplary kind of unifying action. The old dream of contentment in civilization, similarly, depends upon adding to the post-Civil War insight “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world”[17] something more contemporary: the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that heals the world.
[1] The Greeks would not have spoken of an analogy in the rhetorical sense: the sameness of microcosmic and macrocosmic processes and patterns was a fact to be represented in a theory, a kind of language picture (in the sense that a Chinese character or ideogram is a language picture).
[2] The European who most clearly grasped the implications for the unity of humankind of the pre-WWII preparatory period was Karl Jaspers, trained as a psychiatric neurologist, in his post-WWII The Origin and Goal of History (1949). But Jaspers had also been courageously prescient in his 1931 book The Spiritual Situation of Our Time, which won him the enmity of the Nazis, who later scheduled Jaspers and his Jewish wife for deportation to Auschwitz on the day the American Army entered Heidelberg.
[3] Naturalists had warned of the destructive effects of human technologies since the 18th century, but Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962, was epoch-making for taking the warning into the realm of genetics and for considering how nature can be not just cultivated or shaped by humans, but genetically altered.
[4] The Cold War was incipient when the Soviets rejected the Declaration for its refusal to support absolute state sovereignty and to guarantee not just political but social, economic and cultural rights. The first argument was a regressive, nationalistic one designed to prevent interference with Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe; the second a progressive, universalistic one. Ironically, over time it was American governments that refused regressively to sign declarations and conventions and accords that they viewed as infringements on state sovereignty. Thus did American governments imitate the worst in Soviet opposition to the unity of humankind, which is what assertion of absolute sovereignty implies.
[7] The worst distortion of the analogy appeared in the 19th century when it was used to identify white Europeans as the most evolved and mature of people and societies, in contrast to the dark-skinned primitives –that is, it served race-thinking and imperialism. One of the most powerful counters to this distortion appeared right after WWII in the anthropological studies of Claude Levi-Strauss, who was so respectful of la pensee sauvage and so sensitive to the corruptions of colonialism.
[8] A fascinating entry into this literature has been made this year by Rebecca Solnit, whose A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Diaster, describes communities built up or reconstituted after natural disasters like the San Francisco earthquake and Hurricane Katrina, by ordinary people acting together and helping each other in extraordinary ways. In effect, this is a study of the immediate reassertion of human “polis-dweller” nature, the triumph of sociability; but it is not a study of what happens over time to such resilient communities, when the traumatization settles in and the traumatized must sustain their communities or their socially created protective shields. Veterans with PTSD will often describe how they functioned superhumanly during and immediately after a traumatizing event and then “crashed” when they had to return home and live a “normal” life. Making a revolution “sustainable” similarly involves translating it and its initial violence into a phase of consolidation and constitution making.
[9] This generalization should be qualified with acknowledgement of the psychoanalytic literature on the Holocaust as a social trauma for the Jewish people, which includes some contributions on the children of Holocaust survivors, although it does not include much on the painful topic of identification with the aggressor in the survivor generation or among its children, or on the ways in which the Jews in the diaspora and in Israel were united with humankind in their trauma, as opposed to being distinguished by it, exceptional in it.
[10] The major exception to this generalization is the “Culture and Personality” school of psychoanalysis, led in the immediate post-war period by analysts and anthropologists at Columbia University (Abram Kardiner, Ralph Linton, Franz Boas, Ruth Benedickt, Margaret Mead, etc.), although the emphasis in this school was on how culture (chiefly child-rearing practices) shapes individuals, not on how individuals and cultures might be shaped by traumas. At the same time, the culture critic Richard Hofstader (1955) used “culture and personality” ideas to frame his extremely astute study of the “paranoid style in American politics,” a delineation of individual paranoids and the paranoid groups they dominated during the rise to prominence of the Right in the anti-Communist 1950s and during Barry Goldwater’s leadership of the Republican Party.
[11] In his 1931 essay “Libidinal Types,” Freud sketched his three character types –hysteircal, obsessional, and narcissistic—and noted defense mechanisms characteristic of each. He also noted that they seldom appear in pure form. Most people are mixtures, for example, narcissistic-obsessional –a combination in which grandiosity and moralistic rule-boundedness are the salient character traits.
[12] America’s postwar destiny has been deeply influenced by the fact that the Second
War (in the broad cluster-trauma meaning I suggested above) was not fought on American soil –with the extremely consequential exception of the off-shore Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 that precipitated America’s entry into the War. How crucial our territorial inviolability has been to our defense against trauma was immediately obvious when Pearl Harbor was invoked after 9/11, across the political spectrum but especially by those who wanted to use he terrorist attack as a causus belli for making war on Iraq, a nation that was said –falsely—to have nuclear weapons ready to use, and to be totalitarian and to be led by a Hitler.
[13] Both President Johnson and President Nixon and their advisors were committed to preserving the image of invincible America even after they realized that the war could not be won: American “credibility” was said to be at stake. They assumed (in their worst possible case thinking) that a defeat in one location, Vietnam, would necessarily pave the way to other defeats in other spheres of interest around the world
[14] The Freudian text that most influenced the anti-Vietnam War student movement was Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955).
[15] The Convention is organized to present the child’s rights as “the 3 Ps”: rights to provision, to protection, and to participation –the last the most radical for it denies that children are owned by their parents and under unqualified parental authority and it affirms that children have “evolving capacities” (Article 5) that eventually fit them to actively engage in decision-making in matters effecting them (an empowerment, in effect, for citizenship). UNICEF has developed a detailed analysis of programs that promote these 3 Ps, and all the signatories to the Convention submit to UNICEF biannual reports on their progress in the agreed upon directions. That the United States does not hold itself to these standards and measurements is one of the key policy reasons why the condition of American children has deteriorated so drastically since the early 1970s, when a Comprehensive Child Development Act was vetoed by Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War.
[16] I think that the fact that the so-called Golden Rule has been formulated within every known religious tradition is a universal acknowledgment of the power of identification with the aggressor (or, as I prefer to say, the traumatizer) and acknowledgment of the healing power of confronting and defusing trauma (which may, but need not, entail foregiveness). But the Golden Rule has appeared in two different forms –one more therapeutic than the other. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you” is typical of the Abrahamic monotheistic religions where an elite of believers (or non-sinners) is said to be able to do rewarding deeds, and thus be rewarded by being distinguished from the rest of humankind by God’s ultimate Judgment. They are “the chosen.” By contrast, consider the restraining rule offered by Confucius: “Do not do unto others what you would not have done unto yourself,” which presumes that humankind’s peaceful unity will come if humans restrain themselves. In the Confucian form, which is quite psychoanalytic, you must think what would harm you if it were done to you –you must imagine yourself being traumatized or remember your traumatization and on the basis of your empathic insight not become a traumatizer, identified with your traumatizer.
[17] The popular poet William Ross Wallace published the famous poem entitled with this line in 1865, as America began its healing –still in course—from the Civil War.
