(2011). Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 8:207-214
Acknowledgment of Collective Trauma in Light of Dissociation
and Dehumanization
Jessica Benjamin
My response to chana ullman's very thoughtful and poignant paper is
complex. It has special emotional valence for me, as she and I participated
together in a joint project involving witnessing and acknowledgment between
Jewish and Palestinian Israelis as well as Palestinians from Occupied
Territory. Given how vital this theme is, I can hardly begin to do justice to her
treatment of it, so I will do my best to explore how Ullman's perspective on
witnessing might link up to ideas about recognition and acknowledgment that I
have used throughout my work. Recognition is a wide roof sheltering many
different phenomena, including the two that Ullman emphasizes: witnessing
and acknowledging realities that are often denied. Our work, as Gerson
(2009) so powerfully articulated, lies between the poles of witnessing and
denial (see also Cohen, 2001).
Part of the conceptualization of recognition is that we are talking about
how we register and make meaning of others' impact on us as
—————————————
As always, I want to affirm my appreciation for the [guidance and
leadership] inspiration of Eyad el Sarraj, with whom I conceived the
Acknowledgment Project following his expression of the importance of
acknowledgment and apology in healing collective conflict. Sarraj, founder
of Gaza Community Mental Health Programme and advocate for
nonviolence, has continually emphasized—even in the midst of horrific
violence and trauma—our potential humanizing ability to hold different parts
of ourselves, the frightened, the wounded, the compassionate as well as the
aggressive, and recognize them in others.
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well as the impact we have on others. In this case what is relevant is the
profound impact we have when we acknowledge a heretofore denied reality
of suffering or even violence. The impact of receiving such recognition, but
also of giving it, may be transformational, allowing a person to move into
action to repair, rectify, or otherwise deal with something that has previously
paralyzed them with fear. An underlying meaning of being part of an exchange
of recognition—I use this term to emphasize recognition, or the specific
modality of witnessing, as being given and received, part of an intersubjective
connection—is that the individuals involved reconnect with what I call the
moral third (Benjamin, 2004). In such reciprocal affirmation of the other,
especially acknowledgment of suffering that has been denied, there is an
implicit affirmation that two or more humans are linked by a third. This third
contains or rests on certain principles: that the suffering of humans matters, no
matter what their different origins or status; hence, that the acknowledgment of
pain and suffering gives dignity even to wounds that cannot be repaired; that
the recognition of suffering connects or reconnects us to the magnetic chain of
humanity in which suffering is our common denominator.
In my view these affirmations of the third, in turn, validate the idea of a
lawful world—one in which even when the kind of lawful responsiveness or
care or respect that we envision is denied or ruptured, our acknowledgment of
this painful rupture can reaffirm the value we place on the law. In other
words, when the principle of right behavior is violated, the affirmation of the
violation reinstates the principle. What defines a lawful world—whether the
world of discourse, personal relationships, or social bonds—is not the full
realization of the third, which all too often is ruptured, but the effort to
recognize ruptures, to repair when possible, and to acknowledge failure and
harm when impossible. This effort to repair the lawful world may be seen as
an effort to bring the third back to life.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, all such activity involves a lifting of
dissociation, a concerted effort to overcome denial. This may, in cases of
collective or familial trauma, actually involve breaking certain bonds that are
not founded in the third. From this point of view I find Ullman's modification
of Margalit's (2002) position very insightful. Margalit speaks of the moral
witness as needing to take a risk, but the risk taken by the witness is not
necessarily that of being in the same danger
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as the victims one is witnessing; rather, just as often the risk lies in naming
uncomfortable “truths” that others wish to deny. This not only elicits scorn or
condemnation, but also makes the witness the one to bear the anxiety and
anger that lifting of dissociation may incur. Again, relational psychoanalysis
allows us to see just how difficult this action is. How so? Because without
confronting our own dissociation, we run the equally great risk of simply
turning the scorn and condemnation back on the other, vitiating our witnessing
self and replacing it with a self-justifying self in a blaming and blamed
complementarity. As relational psychoanalysts, we may see it as defining that
the witness needs to truly engage the denial in the surrounding community or
relationships and in doing so recognize our own proclivity for dissociation,
our own wish to deny what is unbearable and overwhelming, perhaps by
resorting to simple moral categories that appear to appeal to a third but
actually undermine it.
Ullman's essay, and in particular her case vignettes, gives us a sense of all
the complexity involved when one is confronted with massive trauma in the
form of “political differences” and not simply as naked acts of violence that
exist outside a context of social and psychological justifications. She shows
how those justifications may mask deeper psychological pressures and
conflicts—for example, issues around having been humiliated as “lambs to
the slaughter” during the Holocaust and not merely having been victimized by
overwhelming force. Thus, to engage with all those psychological vectors
involves us in multiple parts of ourselves, with any number of identifications,
as well as our common temptation to simplify and dissociate in terms of right
and wrong.
As I tried to suggest in my discussion of these matters at the IARPP
Conference in June 2009 in Tel Aviv, shortly after the “Cast Lead” attacks on
Gaza, I went through my own personal struggle in addressing those in Israel
who defended this action. I knew they might feel my condemnation of the
massive assault on civilians to imply a blaming condemnation of their effort at
self-protection. Indeed, the reaction to my talk showed me just how much of
what I said appeared to be blaming. I suspect one reason for this was my
presupposition of guilt (or I should say consciousness of guilt feelings, based
on the disparity in power and harm on the side of the IDF and the Occupation
as compared to the other side's rocket attacks on Sderot and nearby parts of
Israel).
Part of the witnessing, as Ullman says, involves acknowledging
unacknowledged
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trauma and includes attesting to wrongdoings as well as suffering. Or I might
rather say, attesting to the unacknowledged suffering that one's own
wrongdoing engenders—the fear of being cast out and cut off from bonds with
the world at large; of losing one's own goodness (expressed as fear of being
judged), the inability to bear guilt and access remorse, and hence to free
oneself of a feeling of badness; the way those anxieties lead to entanglement
in justification and argumentation, which serves to dissociate the sense of
losing one's own goodness. As a consequence of having this view of
suffering, I was led to talk about the problem of abandoning those who feel
guilty, and in this way cutting myself off from them, their pain and anxiety.
Indeed, what is so difficult is to see the victim and perpetrator sides of
ourselves, or others, as truly linked rather than separate, unrelated states.
Ullman's very skillful vignette shows how the blackout her soldier patient
experienced could not be associated by him to his vision of the bystander
Palestinians until he found himself in a situation in which, through historical
awareness and sensibility regarding the Holocaust, he blacked out as he
identified with the victimization of his own people.
Linking this more acceptable identification with self as victim to the
identification with other as victim—the other now being a fellow human being
rather than an other, who may justifiably (even deservedly) be hurt in our
effort to protect ourselves, who may be discarded as less-human or abused—
is the hardest part. Thus Ullman shows how the problem of witnessing
suffering caused while being an agent of violence as well as an object of it
involves bringing together different self parts that are normally dissociated
and split. The identification with others who are victimized may be very
strong except in the case where it is a threatening enemy other, and this causes
a particular kind of break in linking. As Ullman describes, members of
Psychoactive maintain a community that tries to support being simultaneously
aware of the violent dehumanization of the other in their own country's actions
as well as the fear that they, too, feel in response to the hatred directed at their
country.
For myself, I often find it difficult to maintain this simultaneity of
positions, and often at best can oscillate between them. However, even in
making an effort to identify with the pain of being in a position in which we
are led to put self-protection over other values, and thus become both hurtful
and defensive, I appeared to be focusing more on
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the effect than the motivation for injuring. In other words, focusing on the pain
of losing goodness, feeling outcast, and so forth, I was neglecting the
acknowledgment of the fear and vulnerability that motivated that selfprotective behavior to begin with. I am not sure whether it is possible to
simultaneously acknowledge trauma and confront someone with the way in
which their trauma has led them to hurt someone else.
However, this dilemma is different from the analysis that finds the
difficulty, as Donald Moss (2010) said and Ullman affirmed, to lie in
interpreting trauma. I believe our dilemma is not precisely that trauma is
inaccessible to interpretation and thus beyond the reach of meaning, but rather
that uncovering and acknowledging the meaning has specific challenges in the
situation Ullman is describing. To acknowledge the reality of what these
soldiers are doing to others, and in a sense to themselves, would bring
together self parts that the social order, the prevailing norms and ideology, the
demands of culturally defined manhood prohibit (see Layton 2010). To be
sure, Ullman could not explicate this through simple interpretation to her
patients. There is certainly a struggle involved not to distance ourselves from
both the sadism of the perpetrator and the abjection of the victim. Ullman's
physician patient poses this challenge, the problem not only being that he
presents his actions as admiring of toughness and brutality, scornful of
weakness, but that these attitudes make him feel connected, part of the gang, a
man. I believe in working to link our victim and perpetrator identifications (to
put this overly schematically), we are countering the attacks on linking
between the individual and the collective order that Layton writes about and
thus creating new meaning where denial and evacuation of meaning held
sway.
To sketch the problem in very broad strokes, the anxiety we are always in
danger of dissociating, the evacuation of meaning and denial that we too
easily succumb to, have to do with dehumanization. As Ullman (2006)
proposed in her earlier paper on witnessing, the effect of witnessing
acknowledgment is to appropriate the experience of all sides and thus to
counter dehumanization. To deem one side less human, less worthy of being
saved, leaving people to be discarded and unrescued, is perhaps the
fundamental dehumanizing principle. When those dehumanized people end up
feeling that their trauma has been unrecognized, all too often they no longer
believe in a lawful world. The third has died for them, as Gerson proposes.
So why should they be ethical? Instead,
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in their insecurity they are going to turn to the use of force. This is where we
encounter the problem of the Failed Witness. We might say that the world
community, the potential witnesses, have continually failed. From this
perspective, for example, the salient experience of the Holocaust is not only
the horrific murder of six million but the devastating abandonment of the Jews
as the British and Americans chose not to help. This abandonment doubtless
contributed to the conviction that being tough and violent is a way to defend
yourself and can guarantee safety. (Indeed, a kind of madness can be created
in people when they feel that the truth of what is being done to them is being
denied and blacked out by the world, and much violence can be attributed to
this—but that is a larger topic.) I suspect that underpinning this failed
witnessing position is a persisting impulse to dehumanize whoever is under
attack—the Jews or the Gazans, the Congolese women, whoever is the victim
of human violence. Likewise, the experience of the indifferent bystander
observing but refusing to act is that of being seen as not worth saving. As
indifferent bystanders, we discard them. They will be the disposable ones, the
“ungrievable” lives (Butler, 2004). We will live and they will die. In the
face of shocking violence, it may be that only through dis-identification can
our own worthiness to live and survive be affirmed. Hence the toughness, the
scorn of weakness, are as much a part of the survivalist mentality underlying
the failure to witness (witness ourselves, witness others) as the actual doing
of harm.
To generalize, I think certain historical traumas are precisely in need of
being linked up with their origins and meaning: the meaning of
dehumanization. This holds true more obviously when one has been a
perpetrator but is equally true where one has been a victim and the failure of
witness has led to the demise of a lawful world, a living third. Thus while it
appeared that the Holocaust was foundational in Israeli thinking, actual
Holocaust survivors in Israel did not, as Ullman points out, receive the kind
of recognition that allowed them to find a way to socially express and mark
their suffering in a way that reestablished their dignity and so ameliorated
being merely “soap” (see Kane, 2005). We may contrast this with the
psychologically reorganizing (not to say healing) effects of recent treatment in
Chile of those who survived torture under Pinochet, described by Mailer
(Mailer et al., 2010). This process included collective recall of pain and
resistance, dramatization of protest against remembering as well as
remembering. All of this took place in
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the incalculably important context of state acknowledgment of the
wrongdoing. The essential argument put forth by Pumla Goboda-Madikizela
about her experience with perpetrators as well as victims of apartheid is that
there is a process of rehumanization that occurs when the social order
announces that this horror and suffering really matters. People who try to
recognize the horror of it by taking responsibility and expressing or accepting
remorse do create a world of meaning, including understanding of the fears
and anxieties that drive people to commit crimes.
In my thinking, the function of the witness is not only to break through
denial but to provide a form of recognition—where possible social
recognition (a point emphasized by the therapists who work with Chilean
survivors, ILAS)—that allows those who have committed or supported those
traumatic actions to reconnect to the meaning of their acts, their own remorse,
their need to make reparation, their sense that there is a way back to a lawful
world. The witness must not abandon—that is, deny the humanity of and
connection to—those who commit harmful acts. But if blaming or
condemnation taints that recognition of harmful actions, it can be difficult for
the witness to fulfill that reaction, as I myself found out. Ullman's insightful
elucidation of the dilemmas of witnessing, both in social and psychoanalytic
contexts, reminds us of the challenges relational psychoanalysis can and
should take on. Part of this challenge, as we have seen so often in regard to
individual trauma of a less portentous kind, is to allow ourselves to realize
how each person brings multiple self parts to the engagement with suffering.
And the risk involved to ourselves, at the very least, is that we must
necessarily struggle to recognize these painful and frightening parts in
ourselves if we are to be witnesses.
References
Benjamin, J. (2004). Beyond doer and done-to: An intersubjective view of
thirdness. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 73: 5-46. [→]
Benjamin, J. (2009). Acknowledgment, surrender, limits, transgression, and
hope. Paper presented at IARPP, June 2009, Tel Aviv.
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence.
London and New York: Verso.
Cohen, S. (2001). States of denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering.
London: Polity Press.
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Gerson, S. (2009). When the third is dead: Memory mourning and witnessing
in the aftermath of the Holocaust. International Journal of
Psychoanalysis, 90(6): 1341-57. [→]
Goboda-Madikizela, P. (2004). A human being died that night. New York:
Houghton Mifflin.
Kane, B. S. (2005). Transforming trauma into tragedy: Oedipus/Israel and the
psychoanalyst as messenger. Psychoanalytic Review, 92: 929-956. [→]
Layton, L. (2006). Attacks on linking: The unconscious pull to dissociate
individuals from their social context. In L. Layton, N.C. Hollander, and S.
Gutwill (Eds.), Psychoanalysis, class, and politics (107-117). New York:
Routledge.
Layton, L. (2010). In the valley of Elah. In Harris, A. & Botticelli, S. (Eds.),
First do no harm. … Routledge: London.
Mailer, S. (2010). The social reproduction of trauma: The case of Chile.
IARPP Panel on Collective Witnessing and Trauma, San Francisco,
February 2010.
Margalit, A. (2002). The ethics of memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Moss, D. (2010). Psychoanalysis and the trauma(s) of history. IARPP
colloquium series, No. 17, December.
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Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
Benjamin, J. (2011). Acknowledgment of Collective Trauma in Light of
Dissociation and Dehumanization. Psychoanal. Persp., 8:207-214
Copyright © 2016, Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing. All Rights Reserved. This download is only for the personal use of PadsIndividual.