Trauma resides in genes, too. It is easy to focus on the survivors of labor camps, but ordinary civilians enduring bombing and shelling quite easily get it too. Here, they say nearly 15% percent of Cambodians nationally seem to have it.
One good quote:
The children of the traumatized have always carried their parents’
suffering under their skin. “For years it lay in an iron box buried so
deep inside me that I was never sure just what it was,” is how Helen
Epstein, the American daughter of survivors of Auschwitz and
Theresienstadt, began her book Children of the Holocaust,
which launched something of a children-of-survivors movement when it
came out in 1979. “I knew I carried slippery, combustible things more
secret than sex and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost.”
More:
Traditionally, psychiatrists have cited
family dynamics to explain the vicarious traumatization of the second
generation. Children may absorb parents’ psychic burdens as much by
osmosis as from stories. They infer unspeakable abuse and losses from
parental anxiety or harshness of tone or clinginess—parents whose own
families have been destroyed may be unwilling to let their children grow
up and leave them. Parents may tell children that their problems amount
to nothing compared with what they went
through, which has a certain truth to it, but is crushing nonetheless.
“Transgenerational transmission is when an older person unconsciously
externalizes his traumatized self onto a developing child’s
personality,” in the words of psychiatrist and psychohistorian Vamik
Volkan. “A child then becomes a reservoir for the unwanted, troublesome
parts of an older generation.” This, for decades, was the classic
psychoanalytic formulation of the child-of-survivors syndrome.
But researchers are increasingly painting a picture of a psychopathology so fundamental, so, well, biological, that efforts to talk it away can seem like trying to shoot guns into a continent, in Joseph Conrad’s unforgettable image from Heart of Darkness.
By far the most remarkable recent finding about this transmogrification
of the body is that some proportion of it can be reproduced in the next
generation. The children of survivors—a surprising number of them,
anyway—may be born less able to metabolize stress. They may be born more
susceptible to PTSD, a vulnerability expressed in their molecules,
neurons, cells, and genes.
After a
century of brutalization and slaughter of millions, the corporeal
dimension of trauma gives a startling twist to the maxim that history
repeats itself.
I am well read, but I am not aware of any theorist dealing in depth with the idea of traumatized societies, and what effects may linger. That does not mean they don’t exist–the questions, for example, are obviously being raised here, without taking the to me now obvious step of looking back at our own history, extended beyond Holocaust survivors–but this seems like a very potentially productive avenue of inquiry.
And as I have noted before, the issue of Islamic child rearing, which does likely have at least some commonalities across cultures, might for many be an intrinsically traumatizing process. It may be that male children never bond properly with their mothers. It may be that the fathers beat their sons so much that they enter the world already disembodied in some ways. I don’t know.
I was reading about Bataclan. What was not reported at the time was that a number of people were taken to the second floor while the police were organizing a response, tortured, and presumably the tortures filmed and sent off on the internet, as recruiting propaganda. Eyes were gouged out, male testicles were cut off and placed in the victims mouths, females were stabbed repeatedly in the vagina.
The psychopathic dissociation necessary for this sort of thing, especially in people raised in Western civilization, in France, even if my Muslim parents, can in my view only come from trauma of some sort. Perhaps I am naive: perhaps indoctrination is sufficient to develop psycho killers.
Certainly, I think that when we spontaneously call such people “animals” that is quite accurate. Lions, in killing and eating raw zebras on the savannah, feel no moral compunction. They do not have internalized senses of the zebra other than that it is food for them. They are not human, and we do not expect them to be human. They worship no God, and make no vows before that God.
Likewise, those capable of such crimes worship no God, and make no claims before that God. They act from utterly inhuman, primitive, atavistic instincts far behind the capacities we have developed for moral reasoning, and basic empathy.