Cornelia Berens, Hamburg
The parlance of collective trauma Report on the second international network conference of the Trauma Research Net
"Individual and collective trauma – reality, myth, metaphor?", June 28-30, 2002, Wiesbaden-Naurod
- From 28-30 June 2002 the Trauma Research Net (TRN), in collaboration with the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and the International Academy for Innovative Pedagogy, Psychology, and Economy at the Free University of Berlin (INA GmbH,) held its second international network conference.
Established in 1998, this informal international network aims to promote interdisciplinary discourse between the disciplines involved in trauma research by providing networking services for theoreticians, researchers, and practitioners from various institutions working in this field. The irregularly-released TRN-Newsletter (http://www.traumaresearch.net), which has been published by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research in an online version since summer 2000, serves as the site for exchanges of information. In addition, the coordination office works on detailed inquires and requests, brings together scholars from the most various fields, develops topics within contemporary discussions, and specifies desiderata for future trauma research.
The closed symposium from summer 2002 responded to the overflowing use of notions of trauma and the increasing metaphorical parlance associated with trauma and trauma research. Although its early range of uses is disputed, the term "trauma" originated from a narrowly defined, clinical concept; the inflationary speech that eventually began to re-articulate and re-inscribe trauma in the second half of the 90’s forfeited the precision of a distinctive, critical term, and was – particularly in the context of society and questions of political development – reduced to an obtuse tool. Everything bad was endorsed as "traumatizing"; the contours of the concept blurred. In addition, speculation appeared vis-à-vis the supposition that not only individuals but entire collectivities that had been exposed to extreme violence would suffer long-term from the consequences, and that exposure to suffering would also greatly affect their thinking and acting as a group, influencing their norms and values.
In consequence, the symposium engaged explicitly a central question, which from the beginning of the work of the Network was always already attended to implicitly: "Individual and collective trauma – reality, myth, metaphor?"
In six plenary lectures, each with two speakers from different fields, and six workshops, which ran parallel and which were constantly occupied with revising the entire conference, the following questions, among other things, were discussed:
- What makes possible, and what prevents, the epistemological "fuzziness" of the concept of "collective trauma" in contemporary historical discourse?
- On what level of abstraction are we working, and what do we aim for (with respect to political rhetoric and to historical analysis) if we speak – both descriptively and analytically – of "traumatized collectivities"?
- If we accept that collective traumatization does exist as a phenomenon, does it follow that we must re-formulate the functional concepts employed by sociology to describe society?
- Is it helpful to speak of "collective trauma" if substantial violations of human rights are to be analyzed?
- How can we arrive at a more systematic conception of "collective trauma"? Would this not be necessary in order to relate productively the results of empirical trauma research and trauma concepts developed in the fields of cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and elsewhere – for example, in connection with the concepts of "extreme traumatization" (ICD 10), "cumulative trauma" (Khan), and "sequential traumatization" (Keilson)?
The University of Konstanz sociologist Bernhard Giesen opened the symposium with his article, "The trauma of perpetrators. The Holocaust as the traumatic reference of German national identity", and thus supplied a controversial reference for discussion in the following days. Giesen devoted himself to the historical changes in commemorative rituals of triumph and trauma within the area of conflict, by means of differentiation and function regulation of various forms of collective remembrance of a nation.
His conceptual considerations were taken up in the second plenary session by the historian Jörn Rüsen and the anthropologist Allan Young in the theme "Trauma, memory, and history".
Rüsen dealt with the current historiographical strategies of so-called "de-traumatization", as specified under the title of historicization of a trauma – the metamorphosis also of a traumatic, that is, senseless, past in history – and engaged the complex question of how the historian could avoid these in the future. His answer: in the face of the horrible and catastrophic experiences of the 20th century new modes of historical thinking must grant mourning a crucial place and senselessness must be considered as an element in a conception of history.
Allan Young pled vehemently for an alternative history of the concept of "post-traumatic stress syndrome". In 1995 Young had published his award-winning book The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder; on the basis of his criticism of counter-transference in the therapeutic setting, his lecture radicalized some of its expressed theses. Simultaneously he submitted – with a necessary historicization within the framework of general concepts for the unconscious and for traumatic memory – that, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, American psychiatrists around 1980 "invented" the diagnosis of PTSD. In doing so he clarified how ambiguous the boundaries between physician and patient can be drawn in relation to the exposure of the entire US society to a traumatic past. His concept of the "self-traumatized perpetrator", a perpetrator traumatized by the atrocities he himself committed in the Vietnam War, supports, with the case accounts, that here a diagnosis was implemented which otherwise was reserved for the victims of extreme violence. The diagnosis of PTSD thus necessarily falls within the field of sociological findings and moral-philosophical considerations. Allan Young is presently pursuing his important work under the title "Traumatic memory as a style of reasoning in psychiatry and western culture" at McGill University in Montreal.
The third plenum dealt with the question of the extent to which trauma studies and genocide research can profit from each other. The sociologist Eric Markusen, director of research at the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies [since 2003: the Department for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Danish Institute for International Studies], and the political scientist Jacques Sémelin, director of research at the Parisian CADIS/CNRS, maintained that the idea of "collective trauma" is an adequately justified and relevant concept for the scholarly argument with the causes, continuous forms, and consequences of genocidal violence.
The fourth plenum was argued by David Becker and Brandon Hamber under the title "Trauma work in crisis regions: developing and assessing quality". Their survey and recommendations on the evaluation of psychosocial work in areas of conflict were based on many years of experience, on the one hand, in Bosnia and Herzegovina and, on the other hand, in South Africa and Northern Ireland. Their main findings: in an intercultural context much too little consideration is given to the normative and explanatory charging of actually descriptive concepts, as they, for example, underlie the most different notions of the causes and consequences of extreme traumatization. In an extensive review of David Rieff’s book A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York and London: 2002) David Becker revisits these findings in the TRN-Newsletter and explains his own approach to trauma work in areas of conflict (see URL http://www.TraumaResearch.net/review2/becker.htm).
The work groups, each with 15-30 participants, served as the recess in which the rudiments of the various plena were discussed. They dedicated themselves each to four papers which gave impetus to discussions of the following themes:
- "Transgenerational transmission of trauma"
- "Traumatic history: speaking the void in literature"
- "Cultural context and the difficulty of conceptualizing trauma"
- "The insecure (legal) status of refugees and the vicissitudes of therapeutical help"
- "Victimhood and empowerment"
- "From genocide to terrorism: the outcome of collective grandiose omnipotence"
On the last day of the conference the results of the work groups were presented at the beginning of the fifth plenum. And this was followed by the conclusion sequence of the symposium, where the psychoanalysts Ilany Kogan (Israel) and Dori Laub (USA), both initiators and co-founders of the Trauma Research Net, presented their latest work on transgenerational transmission of traumatic experience.
Under the title "The silence of trauma and its impact through the generations – an encounter with terrorism", Ilany Kogan explored the responses of the descendents of Holocaust survivors in Israel to the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. The collective trauma of the Holocaust that is passed down from generation to generation as a shared memory in mental representation was reactivated in the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors by the attacks.
Dori Laub concentrated on his article about the responses of Holocaust survivors in New York, who, in contrast to Kogan’s subjects, saw the terrorist attacks directly. Laub gave an overview of the strategies his patients used to evade a repeated traumatization; he interpreted a renewed falling into silence - as we are otherwise familiar with in victims of extreme violence who cannot imagine that others could relieve them of this experience – as direct consequence of the actualization of powerlessness and helplessness.
The possibilities of this two-day intensive exchange of highly diverse institutions, which practically and theoretically are concerned with the phenomenology of traumatic experiences, were amply utilized by the conference participants. The second network symposium has – in addition to the desired result of reaching a clearer conception or reasonable repudiation of the parlance of "collective trauma" – as a consequence that the Trauma Research Net with its connection to the Hamburg Institute for Social Research will be even more strongly noticed internationally. At the same time the problem has been taken up additionally in publications and also in conference projects of other organizations.
The TRN-Newsletter 2 has published an assortment of the conference contributions. The coordinator of the Trauma Research Net willingly forwards requests for the other contributions to the respective contributor (see the conference program under URL http://www.his-online.de/veranst/tagungen/2002_3006_p.htm and information about the conference under URL http://www.traumaresearch.net/remarks/con_2002.htm).
The Munich psychologist Angela Kühner had prepared the theme of collective trauma for the conference. The Berlin "Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management" published in 2003 her complete report under the title "Collective Traumata: Assumptions, Arguments, Concepts. A Survey after 11 September" [in German only]. The report can be downloaded free of charge either as a PDF-file from the website of the Center (URL http://www.berghof-center.org/publications/reports/complete/br9d.pdf) or it can be ordered as a hardcopy on the website (URL http://www.berghof-center.org/english.htm).
For the third network conference a symposium is scheduled for spring 2006 on the topic of "Trauma and Stigma". Interested parties please contact the coordination office.
Cornelia Berens, M.A.
Trauma Research Net
Hamburg Institute for Social Research
Mittelweg 36
20148 Hamburg
Email Cornelia.Berens@his-online.de
Translation from German: Ross Lerner
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Short biographical note Cornelia Berens, M.A., literary historian, 1994-2000 staff member of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, since then guest fellow at the Institute, co-founder and scientific co-ordinator of the International Network for Interdisciplinary Research about the Impact of Traumatic Experience on the Life of Individuals and Society [the so-called trauma research net], and editor of its TRN-Newsletter, Hamburg.
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Citation Cornelia Berens, Hamburg, The parlance of collective trauma. Report on the second international trauma research net conference "Individual and Collective Trauma - Reality, Myth, Metaphor?", Wiesbaden-Naurod, June 28-30, 2002. In: TRN-Newsletter 2, Hamburg Institute for Social Research, June 2004.
URL http://www.TraumaResearch.net/net2/confrep2/berens.htm
Copyright © 2004, Cornelia Berens and TRN-Newsletter, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the TRN-Newsletter. For other permission questions, please contact via email the editor Cornelia.Berens@his-online.de
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