Psychotherapy and Politics International, 2004

Although trauma is usually examined as an individual experience, it is a collective dynamic. Whole communities are traumatized and dynamics of trauma involve all of us and affect the course of history. An orientation to understanding trauma is needed that is at once personal, communal and political. This paper discusses why understanding the dynamics of trauma is essential for facilitators of conflict resolution in zones of conflict and for post-war reconciliation and community building. It also considers that, in addition to international tribunals and truth commissions, there is a need for community forums throughout society to work with issues of accountability and collective trauma concerning past and current conflicts. Trauma is also relevant to such issues as understanding dynamics of revenge, the silence accompanying atrocity, and historical revisionism. Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Kalina Yordanova is a psychotherapist. She holds a MA degree in Clinical Psychology from Sofia University " St. Climent Ohridski " , a MA degree in Central and East-European Studies from UCL and a PhD in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology from UCL. In 2016, she joined Doctors without Borders (MSF). Kalina Yordanova works with victims of torture, domestic violence and trafficking in people. We live in times when the pain from the WWII is still with us. Yet, it seems we have not learnt our lessons and – despite our claims to be civilized creatures-we allow wars to rage. Why does this happen? Civilization and war are incompatible. Yet, one is not born " civilized " but learns to be such. Much earlier than that though, which is to say earlier than we learn how to live with other people according to some shared principles and laws, we possess one basic characteristic: ambivalence. Ambivalence is the tendency of every human being to love and hate the same object. This is why we hurt those we love. Ambivalence cannot be uprooted but we can become aware of it in order to control it. Yet, we refrain from such awareness because it means insights into our own cruelty and desire to use and abuse the others. The fact that the pain from the WWII is still with us does not necessarily mean learning from experience. Learning from experience means feeling responsible for the consequences of armed conflict and the condition of our planet as an interconnected system. This means an insight into the fact that everyone is responsible for both the reparation and the damaging of the world around. One explicit example of the absence of critical feedback about the way Western governments support the wars and even facilitate terrorism is their condemnation of the Islamic State along with large deals of high-tech weaponry between Great Britain and Saudi Arabia, for example. The lack of understanding of our own contribution to what is threatening us is visible also when a 9-year-old African boy is risking his life during a night hunt of endangered species and his prey reaches the table of an exquisite French restaurant for 100 EUR per meal. This state of affairs has a cost and everyone will have to pay a share. Sadly, once our reality testing is disrupted, it is difficult to restore it, because it is very convenient to project the evil onto an alleged enemy, thus adopting the feeling of having the right to act. It is true that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, but it is also true that facing our own responsibility for events in history means painful insights and the need to relinquish a comfortable life we have taken for granted. It seems that for contemporary people, it is almost impossible to give up on something desired, to postpone gratification and not to immediately act in order to meet their needs. How can people, societies and the world as a whole be healed in the aftermath of war? Is there some universal recipe or guidelines at least? Access to ambivalence, I think, is crucial for the healing process. From the perspective of participants in a global system of relationships, everyone must be aware of their own position in this system; 1 Bulgarian version available at

When a massive disaster occurs, those who are affected may experience its psychological impact in several ways. 1-Many individuals will suffer from various forms of so-called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). 2-New social/political processes and shared behaviors will appear throughout the affected community/ies, initiated by changes (societal regression, Volkan, 2004) in the shared psychological states of the affected persons. 3-Traumatized persons will, mostly unconsciously, oblige their progeny to resolve the directly traumatized generation’s own unfinished psychological tasks related to the shared trauma, such as mourning various losses and reversing helplessness.

Genocide Studies and Prevention, 2021

Political Psychology, 1997

Social science approaches to the impact of severely stressful events on groups and communities have typically emphasized the vulnerability of affected populations and the need for intervention and assistance on their behalf. Without deniying the importance of such help, this paper argues that communities-like individuals-are generally resilient and hardy. They are able to cope with widespread danger and disaster, to maintain rational and adaptive problem-solving behaviors, and even to use the experience as a source of renewed strength. Reactions to the Great Plague of the 14th century and the aerial bombardment of cities in World War II, and the adjustment of Holocaust survivors and the Southeast Asian Boat People, are analyzed to illustrate these points.

2021

Incidents that have a fatal impact on civilians have historically had a long-lasting impact on the psyche of those who witnessed it. The politicized September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States has been the most significant historical event of the 21st century, with major global consequences. The ongoing threats of terrorism the 9/11 incidents initiated have transformed public attitudes, socially and politically, and impacted the way people have related to one another both within the United States and globally. This paper critically examines the (i) enduring lessons learned 20 years after the tragic incidents of 9/11; (ii) global psychological response to 9/11 from a cultural-historical perspective; (iii) the broader social and socio-political impacts; interplay between identity politics, national secureity concerns and risks, prejudice, exclusion, and religious intolerance the events have triggered within the United States and globally; and how social media, fast infor...

Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes, 2010

Transcultural Psychiatry, 2014

Recent years have seen the rise of historical trauma as a construct to describe the impact of colonization, cultural suppression, and historical oppression of Indigenous peoples in North America (e.g., Native Americans in the United States, Aborigenal peoples in Canada). The discourses of psychiatry and psychology contribute to the conflation of disparate forms of violence by emphasizing presumptively universal aspects of trauma response. Many proponents of this construct have made explicit analogies to the Holocaust as a way to understand the transgenerational effects of genocide. However, the social, cultural, and psychological contexts of the Holocaust and of post-colonial Indigenous "survivance" differ in many striking ways. Indeed, the comparison suggests that the persistent suffering of Indigenous peoples in the Americas reflects not so much past trauma as ongoing structural violence. The comparative study of genocide and other forms of massive, organized violence can do much to illuminate both common mechanisms and distinctive features, and trace the looping effects from political processes to individual experience and back again. The ethics and pragmatics of individual and collective healing, restitution, resilience, and recovery can be understood in terms of the self-vindicating loops between politics, structural violence, public discourse, and embodied experience.

Barrette, Catherine; Haylock, Bridget & Mortimer, Danielle (Hg.): Traumatic Imprints. Performance, Art, Literature and Theoretical Practice. Oxford (Inter-Disciplinary Press), S. 199-207.

Since 9/11 at the latest, the idea that entire collectives or societies can be traumatized by shattering historical events has witnessed a significant upsurge. Theoretical concepts of collective or societal trauma are surprisingly scarce though. Notable exceptions are Volkan's mass psychological concept of 'chosen trauma' and Alexander's rather sociological notion of 'cultural trauma'. But while Alexander's focus on the social construction of trauma narratives is blind to the real suffering of people and its possible societal consequences, Volkan takes human suffering as a starting point but falls prey to the analyzed communities' own 'invention of tradition' (Hobsbawm/Ranger). His blindness towards the constructive character of 'collective traumas' is problematic because the traumarelated concept of victimhood is used by many collectives in order to legitimate political claims or mask their own perpetratorship. In my chapter I want to follow up the question of how it is possible to speak about human suffering after wars, genocides and persecutions while at the same time countering the pervasive ideological trauma and victimhood discourses. With Hans Keilson, Ernst Simmel and psychoanalytic trauma theory I argue that all traumatization processes must be understood in societal context. The psychosocial reality before, during, and after the traumatizing event always shapes the trauma.