Social trauma as the reviviscence of something personal

Most, if not all, of the migrants suffered repeated social traumas in their country of origin,
and faced enormous demands for adaptation to the new social enviroment. It is a special kind of
social trauma in question, developed mostly as a result of civil wars around their countries.
Conventional symbolic system has been destroyed, group has been divided and fallen into
madness, with appearance of the psychotic content of our psyche and predominance of primitive
mechanisms of defence.

As Freud rightly noted, group cohesion rests upon systems of narcisstic identifications:
identifications of the member with other members and of every member with the leader. So
narcissism is the register in which the organizing principle is functionig and malignant changes in
that system can bring to the decomposition analog to one which can be seen on the individual
level.

But can the group be affected on the level more basic than symbolic or narcistic on the
level of pure corporeality? Potentialy fruitful way in searching of response to this question can be
in following the train of thought which is given to us in Laplance's Essays on Otherness, which
situates the origins of the human psyche in the implantation of the message of the other.

We need to rethink once more the Freud's seduction theory, and meaning of temporal
structure of seduction trauma. Trauma, in order to be psychic trauma, never comes simply from
the outside. It must be internalized and revivified, in order to become an internal trauma. So it
consists of two moments: implantation of something coming from outside, and then reinvesting
memory of it. What is in fact traumatic is the internal reviviscence of this memory. Notion of
afterwardness demands precise exploration.

What exists at the begining is the other. In fact, the problem in psychoanalysis is not the
problem of the outside world, but of that reality of the other, and of his message. Young human
being has to find its way to cope with this strangeness, with this invasion of the unconscious of
the other. The question of adult social trauma can be considered as the rivaval of something
personal and sexual. Something untranslatable from the message coming from the concrete other
from the past.

If so, that would have many implications on the possibilities of working with traumatized
people, with the accent on containing and waiting to find a point of entry for analytical work as
long as it is needed.

This paper, theoretical by its nature, tends to look at the possible practical implications of
Jean Laplance's reinterpretation of Freud's seduction theory. Basic idea is that what the analyst
will perceive in the analytic situation, from the overall contents which analysand shares with him,
is determined by the conceptual framework with which he operates. So implementation of the
analytic tehnics in the new fields (such as crisis intervention) needs to be followed by adequate
development of theoretical thought.