Chosen Trauma, Chosen Glory, and Beyond

Vamik Volkan’s persuasive essay is a contribution to understanding the intersection between individual leader(ship) and large group process. In addition to illuminating the era of Milosovic’s leadership of Serbia and the atrocities committed during that time, it also explicates for the reader many of Volkan’s innovative psychopolitical/ psychohistorical concepts. In “chosen trauma” and “chosen glory,” Volkan has offered two terms that have considerable explanatory value cross-culturally and historically. In this brief comment, I wish to expand the scope of this discussion.

Much attention has been given to the role of the Holocaust (Shoah) in post-World War II Jewish self-representation, memory, and memorialization. To Volkan, although there is intergenerational transmission of trauma from the Holocaust, it is too early to know whether it will become a “chosen trauma.” It remains an emotionally “hot” issue in the present. Although many Jews build their core identity around the Holocaust, I personally know many other Jews who have long felt left out from public acknowledgment of their own suffering because of their own or their ancestral central cultural catastrophe. The brutal eastern European pogroms of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, has been overshadowed in the media, in literature, in scholarship, and in clinical work, by the Holocaust. There exists what the late John Mack called the “egoism of victimization,” and what I have termed the “narcissism

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of victimization,” not only between ethnic, national, and religious groups, but within them as well. Those who feel that their personal and collective hurt has been neglected, protest that their suffering is as great as those whose grievance has captured public attention.

The issue is even more complex. Over the centuries, many Jews have engaged in what Volkan calls a “time collapse,” not only with reference to specific cataclysmic events, but to the whole of perceived history-as-victimization. Many discrete events, separated by centuries and millennia, are all said to have occurred on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av, beginning with the destruction of the two Temples, in 586 BCE and 70 CE, respectively. Further, for many Jews, Jewish history is itself seen as a single, unending line of persecutions, exclusions, expulsions, and annihilations. According to this view of history, peaceful times during which Jews are included and welcomed in non-Jewish societies are seen as, at best, interregna between expected disasters. The hated Amalek, supposed descendants of the Amalekites who attacked the Hebrews during the exodus from Egypt, are fused into archetypal enemies of the Jews, and are said to have pursued and sought to destroy them throughout history. Avner Falk and Jay Gonen have written much to help us to understand this experience and memorialization of cataclysmic history. My point in this example is that a notion, such as traumatic history, may be necessary to supplement the very felicitous concept of “chosen trauma”—which by definition refers to a single calamity.

Finally, the experience of time collapse may be ritualized during relatively “normal” times for a group, as well as during those large group crises about which Volkan has written extensively. Here I think of the injunction during the Passover Seder for Jews to live as if they themselves had been redeemed by God from slavery in Egypt, and not some distant ancestral Others of their group. Likewise, in the Hebrew liturgy, there are daily reminders of the destruction of the two Temples and prayers as well as hope for its restoration. Admittedly, it has yet to become so emotionally valent that it leads to the actual psychopolitical attempt to restore the Temple to its former glory. Still, there are time collapses during calm as well as explosive times. The difference (or a difference), perhaps, lies in whether members of the group psychologically experience the event as personally real or as existing “out there” in culture or history, as the late George Devereux argued.

[Editor’s Note: Vamik Volkan wishes to thank his colleagues for their comments prompted by his Milošević’s death article. However, because of the shortness of time and the demands of his position of Sigmund Freud Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis in Vienna until June 30, 2006, he regrets being unable to respond. Regarding the issue of his Turkish background, he did point out to me that he has written three book on the psychology of the Turks. They are The Immortal Attaturk: A Psychobiography (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), Turks and Greeks: Neighbours in Conflict (Huntingdon, England: Eothen Press, 1994), and Cyprus: War and Adaptation (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1979). The first two were written with Professor Norman Itzkowitz.]

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