Personal Trauma or Traumatic Reliving

As in much of Rudy Binion’s scholarship, I found his essay “de Gaulle as Pétain” suggestive, well written, and controversial. I assume that he will be elaborating his theory of traumatic reliving in his forthcoming book, Past Impersonal: Group Process in Human History. I would have liked to see more of that elaboration in this article. On page 19, Binion argues that group trauma does not have to be relived; it can be remembered, denied, or defended against. Earlier in the piece, he speaks of psychic numbing (is he borrowing from Lifton here?), again on the group level. What the reader wants to know, especially one who is receptive to the psychohistorical perspective as I am, is what are the mechanisms that propel these reactions? Is Binion postulating a group unconscious? Or, among political elites, a political unconscious, where the past can be relived in situations of real or fantasized crisis, as in the unforeseen loss of a war, or in the prospect of a bloody civil war?

I would have liked Binion to differentiate more sharply individual from group process. Are the anxieties the same? Are they multiplied in the collective setting, given the absence of a secure and safe framework to contain these anxieties? Given the propensity of individuals in groups to be susceptible to contagion, to an intensification of massive fears, does Binion think that collective trauma is distinctly different from individual trauma? Is he talking of anticipatory anxiety, or of real fears generated from the actual, lived experience of crisis? Through the historical/psychological study of groups at war, in situations of revolution or counter-revolution, severe economic dislocation, such as high inflation or depression, in the face of civil war or dislocation from one’s homeland, do groups react differently than individuals? Are there mediations psychodynamically between the individual and the collectivity? If so, how does the historian document these differences or similarities? What are his critical sources and documents? How does the historian evaluate for typicality? What are the norms and average expectable responses in groups at moments of enormous anxiety, bordering on panic? I remain curious about these issues and I wish that Binion would have addressed them more directly.

In working psychodynamically with severely traumatized patients, some of whom were sexually molested (including same sex molestation

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by a parent), others who were abused with violence, including repeated episodes of verbal assault, and still others who were severely neglected (another form of abuse in my view), I have discovered many of the same defenses that Binion outlines, including psychic splitting into good and bad, massive projecting, denial and avoidance, disavowal of affect, dissociation, psychic deadness, and the compulsion to repeat. These powerful psychological mechanisms can be seen as ways of attempting to master or adapt to the massive pain of the original trauma. I have found that these traumatized individuals are highly inhibited in certain instances, that they often have difficulty in accessing and expressing anger and aggression (even though they are suffering from profound sources of rage). I have observed that traumatized individuals suffer from shame, that guilt dynamics often hide the shame, that they protect themselves against the enormous anxiety about being exposed and humiliated. They are often secretive about their deepest sources of vulnerability. That fragility pivots on the fear of being retraumatized, a fear that they experience as potentially shattering to their sense of self. I wish that Binion would address the dynamics of shame that may be at work in his understanding of group process. Furthermore, in my traumatized patients, I have encountered severe self-loathing, self-doubts, passivity, and sado-masochistic dynamics (with masochism prevailing on the more manifest level). Most anticipate the inevitability of future humiliation, which structures their depression, their pessimism about life, their sense that life has no meaning, or very limited meaning

Traumatized individuals also fear they themselves will inflict another trauma, not necessarily the same, on others, usually weaker or more vulnerable than themselves. Many of those who experienced sexual molestation find themselves confused and disoriented about their own sexual orientation; many fear that they are gay, or that they brought on the abuse by their own seductiveness. Those victimized by violence wonder if they, themselves, somehow provoked the violence, that they are to blame for these episodes. In terms of the countertransference dynamics (not at all addressed by Binion: a significant omission, I believe), I find that working with traumatized individuals highly challenging (and highly rewarding if one can establish and re-establish trust, safety, and a secure working alliance). What is challenging is working with the prevalence of dissociation, the persistent deadness and emotional unavailability of these patients during the hour. They literally do not know what they are feeling; affects are foreign to them. They often are unable to read the affective signals and cues from others, making their relationships often stormy and problematic, often resulting in inappropriate behavior and expectations, in addition to self-destructive choices. They usually have enormous terror around separations and panic around the prospect of abandonment.

As a therapist, then, I find myself having to be patient, caring, affirming, and sensitive to their ability to express emotions. I have to be unusually empathic and careful about their propensity to experience shame. That can often inhibit my own spontaneity and my own desires to engage my patients. Once the intimacy begins to emerge, if it does evolve, the work and relationship can be quite rewarding, mutually rewarding and life transforming. But it is often a marathon—never a sprint. It would be welcome, but perhaps it runs against his style as an historian, for Binion to have revealed to his audience his own ambivalences and difficulties in working with the history of traumatic reliving. What, if anything, is he reliving traumatically? Can an historian who has been traumatized heal himself in working toward a psychohistorical understanding of earlier collective trauma? My preference, and this may be a matter of taste, is for the historian to lay bare more of his or her own subjectivity. I also wish that Binion would reveal more explicitly what clinical and/or psychological theories inform his historical thinking, rather than assume that his favorite theory of trauma is fully integrated in his narrative and analytic structure.

Binion, to summarize, needs to specify how group trauma recapitulates individual forms of trauma, or whether mass trauma has significantly other pathways and meanings. He needs to alert his fellow historians about how to detect latencies in the group process.          What clues are there to deciphering collective unconscious process? Clearly, charismatic leaders like De Gaulle and Pétain, both with heroic pasts or military stature, can capitalize on these dynamics when the country is experiencing crisis. But do these leaders operate uncon-

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sciously, or are they just being expedient and/or opportunistic? What is the relationship between the traumatized collectivity and their particular longings for a master, or a leader who will calm their anxieties? History can repeat itself but never in exactly the same ways, because trauma is never identical. De Gaulle may have been able to use the mystique of Liberation and his own ideological form of cultural nationalism, linked with his sense of himself representing the grandeur of France, as a way to secure power, but also to make his countrymen feel (probably in an illusory way) safe, secure, and immune from further disaster. In this instance he may have been functioning more as an omnipotent and omniscient mother than as a reassuring father (which may have been Pétain’s role and symbolic position at the moment of the Fall of France). Traumatized groups may gravitate more to mother figures than father figures, or fathers who are mothers on a more latent level.

On the group level, ideology may also be operative; after all, ideas and propaganda also have an important psychological component. Pétain’s appeal to religion, work, family, and country may have been soothing to a majority of the French after their shameful defeat. De Gaulle’s invoking of the mythical greatness of France may have also had a powerful unconscious impact on the population of France facing massive, civic unrest, particularly at a moment when France appeared to be losing its Empire in Algeria, i.e., losing its former greatness, displaying its national fragility. Binion might want to expand upon how ideology mixes in with group trauma and enters into his concept of how history repeats itself. Lastly, Binion, an excellent reader of Nietzsche who has written a fine study of Lou Andreas-Salomé, might have discussed the strengths and weaknesses of Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal return.” Was Nietzsche actually addressing precisely the same issue of historical trauma? Is Binion’s idea of traumatic reliving different from Nietzsche’s sense of the inevitability of history endlessly repeating its essential cycles and patterns?

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