Massive Psychic Trauma Research Articles

Variations on the Migratory Theme: Immigrants or Exiles, Refugees or Asylees.

When a country is engulfed in war, or overrun by a dictator who begins killing, its citizens are forced to flee. In such situations, the only compassionate response is to take people in. With the ongoing mass migration to Europe, these refugees pay smugglers to take them to safety, but there is no safe place to go since nobody wants them. They leave in a rush to save their lives and their families due to political and religious fear, death threats, rape of women, or forced labor. They do not have time to mourn the losses, there is no time for "ideal migration" where destination countries can choose whom they will take in. The initial hope and dream to escape to a safe "haven" is transformed into a nightmare of humiliation and fear. These asylum seekers will be or already are suffering from PTSD due to massive psychic trauma.

Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse: Trauma and Transformation in AMC’s The Walking Dead

ABSTRACTThe experience of massive psychic trauma has been all too common in human history, uprooting us from the safety of our homes and thrusting us into strange and dangerous environments. The combination of uncertainty and stress bears down on us emotionally, putting the integrity of self-experience at risk. The psychological disorders resulting from trauma (such as posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and moral injury) can be disruptive, painful, and refractory. Among the many ways in which modern culture has reflected on these experiences, narrative media—such as novels, film, and television—have frequently dramatized the experience and aftermath of trauma. In this article I discuss the AMC television series The Walking Dead, which depicts the ongoing struggle of a group of survivors of a zombie apocalypse. The psychological and interpersonal impact of coping with the demands of a postapocalyptic world is the primary focus of the narrative of The Walking Dead. I examine of the series’ sustained depiction of trauma. I stress the central role of uncertainty, the disruption of our assumptive worlds, and the loss of trust in the foundations of our lives.

Authoritative Witnessing and the Control of Memory: On Jorge Semprun's L'écriture ou la vie

Authoritative Witnessing and the Control of Memory:On Jorge Semprun's L'écriture ou la vie Sharon Marquart Ça n'effraie pas, l'autorité, ça rassure plutôt. Jorge Semprun The opening scene of Jorge Semprun's 1994 witnessing narrative L'écriture ou la vie describes in detail the first instance in which the text's main character, "Jorge," is faced with telling people who did not experience Buchenwald about the horrors of camp life.1 It is the day after the camp's liberation by Allied Forces, and the twenty-one year-old Spaniard and member of the French Resistance encounters three terrified officers in British uniforms while he is standing guard outside one of the camp's former SS barracks. Two of the men are British, one of them French, and they all stare wide-eyed at the young survivor, waiting to hear what he has to say. The passage's narrator carefully scrutinizes the French soldier before Jorge begins to speak. His demeanor is both joyful and fearful; a horrified look in the Frenchman's eyes contrasts starkly with the triumphant way in which he is wearing his French military badges. "Il doit avoir mon âge, quelques années de plus. Je pourrais sympathiser," Semprun narrates (15). Jorge's first words are directly addressed to the Frenchman. "Qu'y a-t-il," Jorge drily and irritatedly asks. "Le silence de la forêt qui vous étonne autant?" The soldier turns his head to look at the trees, and pricks his ears in response to the question. The British soldiers obediently follow his lead. "Non, ce n'est pas le silence," the narrator states. "Ils n'avaient rien remarqué, pas entendu le silence. C'est moi qui les épouvante, rien d'autre, visiblement." Though the [End Page 147] officers probably perceived the survivor's Russian boots and German rifle as "reassuring" signs of authority at the time, the narrator surmises, it must be the look in Jorge's eyes that they find so terrifying. "Plus d'oiseaux," Jorge continues. "La fumée du crématoire les a chassés, dit-on. Jamais d'oiseaux dans cette forêt." The three wide-eyed officers listen attentively, and, the narrator guesses, try to understand Jorge's message. When Jorge further explains that it was the smell of burnt flesh that drove the birds away from the forest—"[l]'odeur de chair brûlée, c'est ça!" he exclaims—, the three already terrified men jump in horror. Though the three soldiers remain in Jorge's presence, they are unable to look at him for the rest of the time he bears witness to his experience of Buchenwald. Witnessing narratives, whether oral or written, play crucial roles in transmitting the horrors of atrocity to those who are fortunate enough not to have experienced them. Much scholarship on survivor testimonies has focused on the challenging task with which readers and listeners are faced when they engage witnesses and their terrifying texts. In their landmark work on the genre, Testimony, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub suggest that those who listen to or read narratives about "extreme human pain" and "massive psychic trauma" embark on "a journey fraught with dangers" because, through the act of listening to or reading the words of survivors, people can come to experience trauma themselves (57, 72). Felman and Laub define witnessing as a performative speech act that involves an "intimate bond" between a speaker and a listener, and say that the role of the listener in this relation is to be a "blank screen on which a traumatic event comes to be inscribed" (57). But, because "[t]here is so much destruction recounted, so much death, so much loss, so much hopelessness" in survivor narratives (72), they suggest that readers and listeners frequently experience "a need, an urgency to pull back, to withdraw to a safer place," one in which they can protect themselves and "maintain a sense of safety in the face of trauma" (73). The opening passage of L'écriture ou la vie points to a different kind of relation between witnesses and their listeners that I consider to be a mise-en-abyme of the...

Matrixial Traces in Performance: the anchor series

Matrixial Traces in Performance: the anchor series

Traumatic Shutdown of Narrative and Symbolization

Through a detailed clinical vignette and a review of the relevant literature this paper illustrates the failures in narrative formation, symbolization, and even in the process of psychoanalytic listening and comprehension, that occur in the wake of events of massive psychic trauma. Inexplicable gaps and absences occur in what should be all too evident and readily known, and the processes of exploratory curiosity come to a halt. The author attempts to explain this phenomenon through the cessation of the inner dialogue with the internalized good object, the “inner thou” that is annihilated in massive trauma. He tries to demonstrate the role the death instinct derivatives play in this presumed shut-down of processes of association, symbolization, and narrative formation. Such death instinct derivatives come unleashed once the binding libidinal forces of object cathexis are abolished and identification with the aggressor (the only object left in the internal world representation) takes place. Implications for psychoanalytic psychotherapy with severely traumatized patients are discussed and illustrated by another case vignette.

From Voyeur to Witness: Recapturing Symbolic Function After Massive Psychic Trauma.

From Voyeur to Witness: Recapturing Symbolic Function After Massive Psychic Trauma.

Thanatos and massive psychic trauma: the impact of the death instinct on knowing, remembering, and forgetting.

The connection between massive psychic trauma and the concept of the death instinct is explored using the basic assumptions that the death instinct is unleashed through and is in a sense characteristic of traumatic experience, and that the concept of the death instinct is indispensable to the understanding and treatment of trauma. Characteristics of traumatic experience, such as dissolution of the empathic bond, failure to assimilate experience into psychic representation and structure, a tendency to repeat traumatic experience, and a resistance to remembering and knowing, are considered as trauma-induced death instinct derivatives. An initial focus is on the individual, on how death instinct manifestations can be discerned in the survivors of trauma. Next the intergenerational force of trauma is examined; a clinical vignette illustrates how the death instinct acts on and is passed on to the children of survivors. Finally, the cultural or societal aspects of trauma are considered, with an eye to how death instinct derivatives permeate cultural responses (or failures to respond) to trauma. Because trauma causes a profound destructuring and decathexis, it is concluded that the concept of the death instinct is a clinical and theoretical necessity.

Testimonies in the Treatment of Genocidal Trauma

This article describes an approach to the treatment of genocide survivors that addresses both the personal and communal/historical dimensions of their experiences. I begin by outlining the characteristics of massive psychic trauma as background for using video testimonies in the treatment of Holocaust survivors. I then discuss videotaped interviews with perpetrators as an illustrative contrast to survivors' testimonies. The third section explains my position as a psychoanalyst encountering historical trauma and its relationship to my own experiences as a survivor. Following a brief history of videotaping as a medium for recording testimonies, I conclude by demonstrating the ways in which active listening can lead to the revelation of new dimensions of historical as well as personal truth.

Working with victims of persecution: lessons from Holocaust survivors.

It is estimated that 25 to 30 million people are forced to leave their homes because of human rights violations or threats to their lives. Such massive dislocations at the international level result in significant numbers of diverse, persecuted populations seeking asylum in the United States. It is estimated that as many as 400,000 victims of torture now reside in the United States, with many survivors suffering in silence. The challenge for social workers is to discover this often hidden, vulnerable population and to serve them. Among all the populations experiencing the trauma and stress of persecution, most is know about Holocaust survivors. Through examining the long-term effects of massive psychic trauma gleaned from research on Holocaust survivors and their children, this article addresses the skills, techniques, and insights about current refugee populations that can be incorporated into social work practice and training.

A Family Survives Genocide

This is a case study of a family that survived genocide and a discussion of families and massive psychic trauma. This family, like many others from Bosnia-Herzegovina, was driven from their home by Serb forces-"ethnically cleansed"-then eventually escaped to Croatia, and was later resettled in the United States. They were referred to us, a group of mental health professionals who established the Bosnian Refugee Trauma Program at the Yale Psychiatric Institute (YPI). We have done clinical, testimony, and research work with the refugee families from Bosnia who resettled in our region, described in part in prior reports (Weine, Becker et al. 1995a, 1995b; Weine and Laub 1995).

Adolescent Survivors of “Ethnic Cleansing”: Observations on the First Year in America

To describe the psychiatric assessments and trauma testimonies of 12 Bosnian adolescents newly resettled in America. Twelve Bosnian adolescents who experienced the massive psychic trauma of "ethnic cleansing" were assessed during the first year after their resettlement in the United States. Assessments consisted of systematic, trauma-focused, clinical interviews that included standard assessment scales of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, as well as the opportunity to give testimony about their experiences. PTSD was diagnosed in 25% of subjects and depressive disorders in 17%. Reexperiencing cluster symptoms were present in 50%, avoidance cluster symptoms in 31%, and hyperarousal cluster symptoms in 29%. The relatively low rate of PTSD in this sample (in comparison with adult survivors of "ethnic cleansing" and with Cambodian adolescent survivors) may be attributable to normal prior development, time-limited adversity, lack of physical or sexual traumas, rejoining nuclear families, or insufficient time for the development of delayed-onset PTSD. It may also be a reflection of the resiliency of adolescence.

Psychiatric consequences of "ethnic cleansing": clinical assessments and trauma testimonies of newly resettled Bosnian refugees.

The authors describe the psychiatric assessments and trauma testimonies of 20 Bosnian refugees of "ethnic cleansing" who have recently resettled in the United States. Refugees referred from agencies managing refugee resettlement underwent systematic, trauma-focused, clinical interviews that included standardized assessment scales. The traumatic experiences of ethnic cleansing in these Bosnian refugees were genocidal in nature. The number of types of traumatic experiences correlated positively with age. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was diagnosed in 65% of the refugees, and depressive disorders in 35%. PTSD severity scores were correlated with the number of types of traumatic events experienced. Ethnic cleansing has caused high rates of PTSD and depression, as well as other forms of psychological morbidity, in this group of resettled Bosnian refugees. The longitudinal sequelae of ethnic cleansing as a form of massive psychic trauma remain to be studied.

Holocaust Survivors and the Crisis of Aging

The author discusses aging as an especially traumatic crisis for survivors of the Nazi Holocaust. Survivor guilt, unresolved mourning, and strained relations with the next generation are prominent among this group. Treatment difficulties are examined. Although this article focuses on Holocaust survivors, some of the suggestions offered are relevant to other groups that have survived massive psychic trauma.

Inescapable shock, neurotransmitters, and addiction to trauma: Toward a psychobiology of post traumatic stress

Chronic post traumatic stress has been described as a “physioneurosis” (Kardiner 1941), that is, a mental disorder with both psychological and physiological components. The behavioral sequelae of inescapable shock in animals and of massive psychic trauma in people show a striking parallel. Inescapable shock in animals leads to both transient catecholamine depletion and subsequent stress-induced analgesia. We postulate that the numbing and catatenoid reactions following trauma in humans correspond to the central nervous system (CNS) catecholamine depletion that follows inescapable shock in animals. We further explore the evidence for a human equivalent of “stress-induced analgesia” in animals, which is known to be mediated by endogenous opioids. Although reexposure to trauma may produce a paradoxical sense of calm and control due to endogenous opioid release, a cessation of traumtic stimulation will be followed by symptoms of opioid withdrawal and physiological hyperreactivity mediated by CNS noradrenergic hypersensitivity. This hyperreactivity can, in turn, be temporarily modified by reexposure to trauma. This factor could account for voluntary reexposure to trauma in many traumatized individuals and would provide a complementary formulation to the conventional psychodynamic concept of attempted mastery of the psychosocial meaning of the trauma.

The Clinical Effects of Massive Psychic Trauma in Families of Holocaust Survivors*

For years we have been treating numerous concentration camp survivors in the psychiatric clinics and hospitals of Israel. In recent years we have been seeing increasing numbers of the second generation suffering from a wide spectrum of emotional disorders, personality disturbances, borderline and psychotic states which are clearly related to the long‐term effects of massive traumatization in the survivor parents. These effects are manifest in four inter‐related areas of disturbance within the family—the parents' mental state, the family atmosphere, inter‐personal functioning in the family and specific distortions in the parent‐child interaction. Excessive talking about holocaust experiences to children, or the opposite —lack of communication, avoidance and denial of these experiences—are patterns frequently found in the children of survivors who seem to be most affected by the massive traumatization of the parents. It is postulated that therapy of the survivor parents can modify the transmissions of affects to the children. Family therapy is indicated whenever possible.

Massive Psychic Trauma

Massive Psychic Trauma

Review of Massive psychic trauma.

Review of Massive psychic trauma.

Massive Psychic Trauma

Massive Psychic Trauma

Massive Psychic Trauma.

This book is a report, excellently edited, on the proceedings of the Wayne University workshops on the late sequelae of massive psychic trauma essentially focused on psychiatric manifestations in German concentration camp survivors. The proposition for this reviewer is the ability to retain objectivity in the face of having experience of almost ten years and over 300 cases vs having been a very active participant in that conference on record in this volume. Narcissistic investment vs critical judgment is the oldest conflict of interest. Indeed a great deal of attention is given in the volume to the conflicts and defenses of the evaluating psychiatrists on both sides of the ocean. The problem of traumatic neuroses in the wake of major social disasters had been systematically explored after World Wars I and II with progressively greater insights and some value to the evolution of