My Silent Story: Conflicted Memories, Silences and Intergenerational Traumas

This article aims to present the interdisciplinary project "My Story from Silence", conceived in 2022. The project represents a pioneering effort in assembling individuals from diverse communities, characterized by varying ethnic, national, and migratory backgrounds, along a historically dynamic border. Its primary objective was to provide a platform for these participants to articulate and share narratives previously shrouded in silence, offering insights into their historical pasts. Emphasizing reciprocal dialogue for the first time, the initiative fostered an environment where participants engaged in the dual act of narrating their own experiences and attentively listening to the narratives of others. These memories were explored in group workshops on both sides of the border. By combining elements of cultural anthropology fieldwork and analytical psychology, the workshops attempted to address hitherto unaddressed traumas and silent personal memories linked to major traumatic historical events such as fascism and Istrian exodus through the narratives of individuals. Three vignettes will illustrate the workshop dynamic and our Jungian understanding of it.

Trauma: open concept

This paper presents and discusses two sets of theories concerning trauma. The first involves a contemporary social theory of "cultural trauma" and the second refers to psychoanalytic theories on psychic trauma. We argue that these two groups of theories have some relevant elements in common, despite social theorists' critique of psychoanalytic understanding on the matter. In our view, the most important meeting points between these groups of theories concern (a) the possibility to think that trauma is not welded to events but has a formation process, one of attribution of meaning, (b) that this process has a temporality of its own, and (c) that the environment (the objects, actors, and agents that compose it) has a fundamental and determinant role in trauma formation. Further, we suggest that trauma is still an open concept in psychoanalysis.

Institutional trauma across the Americas: Covid-19 as slow crisis

Building on theories of cultural trauma, this research examines institutional trauma engendered by the pandemic in relation to journalism and public health in the US and Brazil. The trauma stemming from Covid-19 marks a transformational crisis not only in terms of global public health but also collective confidence in institutions writ large. To probe these issues, this article takes advantage of a vibrant digital discussion among Americans and Brazilians hosted by three flagship newspapers in the two countries: The New York Times, Folha de S. Paulo, and O Estado de S. Paulo. The analysis reveals that both groups experience Covid-accelerated trauma that undermines Brazilians’ and Americans’ faith in foundational institutions’ ability to adequately respond to the pandemic. Comparing these interpretations of the Covid-19 crisis in the US and Brazil allows us to see how the acute health crisis triggered by the virus morphs into a form of institutional trauma, with deep implications for collective confidence in public health, journalism, and democracy.

Indigenous Hawaiian Psychoactive Drug Use: Before European Contact, and after 1778

This article builds on an existing body of scholarship on historical and intergenerational cultural trauma to elucidate deliberate attempts to eliminate Native Hawaiian cultural practices related to psychoactive drug use and replace them with the foreign (Western) tradition of alcohol use. This action, to instill alcohol as a component of colonial domination, was one example of the resulting assault on cultural identity that has often been overlooked, particularly in relation to transgenerational trauma in the history of Hawai'i and the Hawaiian context. In this article, we argue for the use of the term historical trauma, introduced by Brave Heart, which allows for a more inclusive consideration of the many aspects of trauma. Drawing on literature related both to alcohol use in indigenous Hawaiian society and to the wider historical context of Hawai'i since the late eighteenth century, we endeavor to demonstrate the correlation between the historical trauma experienced by the population and the incidence of alcohol consumption and alcohol use disorder. The article is intended to augment the existing paradigm on cultural trauma as it specifically relates to Hawaiians, and potentially to widen the explanatory power of this paradigm with regard to present-day psychoactive drug use among Hawaiians as well as the implications for treatments.

Displacement trauma: complex states of personal, collective and intergenerational fragmentation and their intergenerational transmission

Originally presented at the Journal's one day conference entitled 'Displacement: Contemporary Traumatic Experience' held in London in November 2019, this paper expands on the author's theory of the implicit psychological organizing gestalt, an associated pattern of psychic functions which operate in an integrated way to simultaneously structure and organize our experience of self-cohesion and self-continuity. The gestalt, which implicitly links the formation of psychic skin, body image, cultural skin and both personal and cultural identity with place, functions as an emergent non-conscious permanent presence or background 'constant'. It develops over time and emerges out of embodied emotional experiencing with the total environment - both human and non-human. The author argues that it is the rupture of this gestalt and the disorganizing consequences of its loss which underlies the experience of displacement trauma. If disruptions in the formation of the gestalt and/or its later rupture remain unrecognized and unrepresented then the absence creates a void which can be intergenerationally transmitted. Case material is presented which describes this and which highlights the ways in which the gestalt can contribute to our understanding of collective displacement anxiety, cultural trauma and cultural complexes.

Time, history and mythology in the cultural construction of the "nature of pain": positioning Jewish settlements' evacuation within the religious timeline

The concept of cultural trauma serves as a useful analytical framework for analyzing social processes of the creation of trauma narratives. Following the conceptualization of "cultural trauma" by Jeffrey Alexander, this article focuses on representations of the "nature of pain" produced by mental health professionals who identified with Religious Zionism working Jewish settlers involved in the 2005 evacuation of from Gaza and the West Bank. Based on ethnographic and written materials collected during fieldwork at a mental health center that offered professional interventions to settlers, I argue that the "nature of pain" associated with the evacuation was represented by religious practitioners through reference to otherwise distinct contemporary and biblical events and characters. This specific narrative organization exposes the normalizing function of time in narrating trauma. The article demonstrates how, by framing the evacuation story within a religious timeline, the settlement evacuation was transformed from a painful episode of ideological and messianic failure to a crucial step in a long journey toward national redemption. I argue that the transformation of a narrative of failure into a narrative of redemption is not only a matter of homologation between contemporary and ancient Jewish history and mythology, but also an act of revitalization of collective identity.

When culture fails: coping with cultural trauma

The research into the phenomenon of cultural trauma is growing as the effects of historical transformations are recognized and analysed. The concept of cultural trauma and the analytic concept of the cultural complex is a suitable theoretical approach for this research. The Lithuanian experience of cultural trauma after the historical shifts indicates the importance of the interplay between societal and individual factors in coping with trauma. Academic psychotraumatological studies carried out at Vilnius University indicate a stronger traumatic experience by people who are survivors of direct political repression and even intergenerational transmission of trauma, but this group also seems to demonstrate an intergenerational transmission of resilience. Paradoxically, from a long-term perspective, the victims of direct repression seem to have suffered less than the people who accommodated to the regime, and this applies also to their offspring. Analysis in terms of overcoming cultural trauma indicates that society is gradually integrating historic traumatic experiences, although a healthy cultural identity has not yet been restored.