Collective traumas should be worked through. If this doesn’t happen, no one is helped. If individual obstacles are still in place, it is much more difficult to answer the question “Who am I?
Context 1: Second World War (or wars in general).
In my opinion, the topic of identity is treated too subordinately – scientifically or in general. Because, in my opinion, its role in shaping one’s own life is still underestimated. This underestimation has to do with missing reappraisal – and with it the cat bites itself unfortunately into the tail.
In detail: Identity is at the same time part of a larger theme of a certain kind of collective oppression: namely, the collectively experienced trauma of World War II. To my knowledge, psychoanalysts have been supporting the coming to terms with this very collectively suffered experience for many years.
But there is no such thing!
Wait a minute This is not about the historical reappraisal of the Second World War – but about the psychodynamic one!
Maybe you too have a grandfather (or even father) who comes home after work, doesn’t speak a word, sits down at the dining table, reads the newspaper and then retreats to his study, from which he doesn’t come out again before going to bed?
These are withdrawal tendencies that are well known to trauma research. They are also known to many former soldiers. But what they don’t know is how to deal with them in a good, appreciative way. n the U.S., it was not until the returnees from the Vietnam War that the extent of traumatic stress was recognized and then appropriate programs were initiated.
The past and psychodynamic clarification
So what does this have to do with identity? Well, those who don’t like to deal with their past and the neuroses/pain associated with it are no longer able to say for sure who they are. And that is precisely the question of identity: Who am I?
This, in turn, is also a bit more complex: the fact that this is about pain has to do with the theme of “war and trauma”. If we had not had two world wars in a short time, perhaps it could be said that we generally do not want to deal with ourselves (again, psychologically speaking). Only it is (unfortunately) not like that, but an objectively considered bad experience is written in the history books – of all European states, by the way.
So the whole thing is not an exclusively German issue, but although we can certainly be considered proficient in historical enlightenment, this very proficiency is suddenly lost to us in the psychological context. Why?
Because it hurts terribly to deal with such inner dynamics. Quite unpleasant feelings come up. Fear, shame, pain – all that perhaps at once! Many can’t stand it and prefer to look for compensation: work, sports, shopping, boozing. The list is endless, because it’s not the “what” that matters, but the “how.” Avoidance namely, can be compensated with everything possible. The important thing is that compensation makes the pain go away – unfortunately only for a short time.
Compensation as a gap filler
Because that is the tragic thing about compensation: it can only serve as a stopgap. For many, this may well go on for a lifetime and then this unfulfilled moment of one’s identity is taken to the grave. For others, the compensations do not help, they also take this gap to the grave, but then in the form of suicide, because life is simply no longer livable for them (I simplify, but I think my point becomes clear).
Surprisingly, such a suicide then does not lead – in the collective sense (because this is what I am concerned with, so please no statements on this in the style of “Yes, but my neighbor/husband/me…!” – thank you!) – nevertheless not to the fact that the environment would then deal with a further reflection. On the contrary!
At this very moment, it immediately reproduces repression as a principle and thus works to maintain the status quo: no inner confrontation!
Context 2: Stigma and taboo in COPMI
This is the framework from which I start and in which the plight of COPMI takes place:
So, on a flexible and imaginary scale, we are already in a culture that practices repression and non-engagement with the self. In this context, COPMI experience an even stronger negative effect when searching for themselves.
Because through the subject of psychosis in the broadest sense, they are prevented even more than they already are from dealing with themselves, from being allowed to deal with themselves and, moreover, from passively “being dealt with”: that is to say, no one deals with you sufficiently. This is mainly about important feedback on your doing and being as well as the recognition of this very doing and being.
Triple crap
And even if the environment – i.e. your parents – should be halfway familiar with this circumstance, they are probably not exactly the masters of empathy and rear-view mirroring because of this rather obstructive avoidance context. Why should they? After all, their parents were unable to teach them because they were far too busy avoiding the feelings of their own traumas.
Double, maybe even triple crap: My own parents can’t empathize and feedback properly; if they do, they’re also lousy at it; then the shame of psychosis prevents society from providing me with reasonably good offerings to protect my child development; and my own shame about my mentally ill mother, in turn, makes it hard for me to show myself at all anymore – which in turn results in a repression effort, so I have almost no chance to realize, “Who am I?”
“Who am I?” therefore has a lot to do with the indirect observation of myself also by third parties. If these third parties (here mainly parents) are then not good providers in this emotional sense, then the fruits of the important self-awareness fail to materialize.
Third degree traumas
COPMI are structurally getting the short end of the stick here, and for a long time to come. For anyone who believes that these traumas would “grow out of it”, as it were, or become harmless over the generations is seriously mistaken: trauma research has been talking about second- or third-degree traumas for some time now, which does not necessarily make them ineffective.
How all the fun continues? I do not know. However, much, much would be gained if the issue of “collective trauma” were to become more widely accepted. Then the subject of identity would also come much more into focus and, in my opinion, its importance for personality development would also be given the appropriate appreciation. In my opinion, both moments are inseparably connected with each other, even in such a way that they seem to be conditional on each other: Without inner reflection, no trauma processing is possible, but also no identity work.
But the way out is not easy, because when avoidance is lived, there is almost no interest in “going into pain,” as it were. Thus, the “strategy” of avoidance seems pre-programmed for a long time. At the same time, the majority of the collective makes it difficult to turn away from this line of march because it legitimizes it anew every day.
The whole thing would be, by the way, even another argument against war: We do not want a (world) society populated only by compensating individuals. …but that’s just by the way.
