On Wednesday, September 21, 2022, IDI President Gerard Fromm offered remarks on psychological interventions at the Vilnius Conference on Overcoming Collective Trauma. An excerpt of those remarks follows:
Preparing the Ground: Psychological Intervention in Societal Conflict
Vilnius Conference on Overcoming Collective Trauma
September 21, 2022
M. Gerard Fromm, Ph.D.
Esteemed ministers, colleagues, guests and conference organizers, it is an honor to speak with you today and to discuss the lessons that collective trauma has taught us over time. It is an honor too to speak with you on the sixth anniversary of the death of Leonidas Donskis, whose energy for, and devotion to, this kind of conversation was, as I understand it, legendary. And it is an honor to represent my colleague, Dr. Vamik Volkan, whose groundbreaking work on the psychology of societal conflict has galvanized practitioners and students all over the world.
Several years ago, three IDI colleagues – two from Israel and one from Palestine – met informally with a senior diplomat working with the Israel-Palestine negotiating team. At some point in the conversation, one colleague asked the official what happened when people on either side talked about their fears. This experienced diplomat seemed surprised. “We don’t speak of fear,” he said, later adding that he could see the potential usefulness of trying to address fear during negotiations, but that the team did not know how to do this. Not long after this, an experienced negotiator working in the Donbas contacted us to say that something was missing from his training, and he thought it was “clinical.” He asked if we could help him with that.
Both of these conversations bear on our topic today. Powerful emotions, like fear, rage, humiliation and grief, and powerful defenses against these emotions, are at the heart of intractable group conflict. These emotions derive from past societal trauma and become interwoven into large group identity. “You did this to us” becomes hardened conviction, stripped of historical context and complexity. Large group anxiety amplifies these emotions and polarizes members into a good ‘we’ and a bad ‘they.’ Thinking is replaced by fantasies, grievances crowd out grief, leaders mobilize hatred for their own purposes, and people long to change what Dr. Volkan calls “chosen trauma” into “chosen glory.”
And so a cycle of violence continues, illustrating Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. This may be why our mediator colleague thought something clinical was missing from his training. Embattled groups could indeed be said to be “ill” with intense feelings and irrational reactions, even though the individual participants, of course, are not. Perhaps, it’s this “illness” that needs “clinical” understanding, without which negotiations and other interventions can go terribly awry or simply lead to exhaustion and futility. Something before negotiations may be needed, something that “prepares the ground”, as our colleague Gabrielle Rifkind puts it, and maximizes the chances for more realistic discussion of current differences.
In his early clinical work, Sigmund Freud made a critical discovery, which involved a complete reversal in his thinking. At first, he felt stymied by the fact that his patients super-imposed their past relationship histories onto him as their current doctor. Their more or less unconscious images of, and feelings toward, a man in authority mixed up current reality with the past reality of child and parent, and created problems. Thus, Freud’s idea that the “transfer” from past to present was a resistance to treatment. Then the reversal and creative leap. He realized that this wall was actually a window, that it was this relationship dynamic, learned powerfully in childhood, that needed analysis, and that the patient’s transference was bringing it to life in the present. In a sense, it was now right there in the room, to be understood together.
This kind of “time collapse” can be an enormous problem in real life. Large groups under the sway of collective anxiety, confused leaders and the conviction that past trauma is happening again can be mobilized toward great destruction. Some of Donald Trump’s followers felt that January 6 was 1776, the American Revolution all over again. But perhaps time collapse is also the way forward, because it offers the possibility of here-and-now experiential learning, which, like Freud’s transference work, is deeper, more alive and more persuasive than ordinary conceptual learning. People in conflict inevitably and largely unconsciously bring their group’s past pain with them – a large group “transference” so to speak. And, no matter how intense the feelings might be, the fact that they come to a dialogue means they have some degree of hope that their troubles – and the traumatic histories behind them – will be acknowledged, contained and understood. Managing this microcosm of both conflict and potential learning requires good-enough facilitation – one might say clinical handling – by neutral third parties.
Broadly speaking, this is what the IDI tries to do. In one way or another, it tries to restore a reflective space that has collapsed under the weight of unbearable pain. The idea of “reflective space” may seem like a luxury in the face of such intensity, but it is as essential as breathing, as urgent as the question: What is happening to me now? Trauma requires people to cut themselves off from pain, and, in doing so, from their capacity to feel and think. Healing from trauma – whether as an individual or a group – means restoring these capacities. Otherwise, functioning in the world is crippled and trauma is transmitted to the next generation, often through unconscious enactments within the family. This enacted fallout of trauma is not only a destructive form of catharsis; it is also a communication – sometimes even a task assignment – to the next generation. “Something horrible happened to my parent, and it’s my job to do something about it,” says the troubled young man in the midst of identity crisis. This is a common dynamic in the radicalization process.
In recent years, trauma studies have added a third experience as a potential cause of trauma. Besides sudden threat to life and sudden overwhelming loss, trauma may also be caused by moral injury, which has to do with a person’s witnessing or participating in actions – in high-stakes situations like combat – that violate one’s deepest sense of what’s right. Because those in authority tend to be implicated in these actions, a profound sense of betrayal by leadership is also part of moral injury. And so to the list of traumatic feelings to be coped with is now added overwhelming, self-esteem devastating guilt and shame, the feeling of having done something unforgivable. In 2016, Barack Obama became the first sitting US President to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. “Why do we come to this place?” he said. “To force ourselves to imagine the moment when the bomb fell…to feel the dread of children…(to) listen to a silent cry….Their souls speak to us.” This is the work of mourning – and of recovery from moral injury – that leaders can help societies achieve. Crucially, it includes the leader’s being willing to bear guilt and shame, associated with his own society’s aggression – Obama’s country dropped that bomb – no matter how justified or understandable that aggression might have been.
As the psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Dori Laub put it – and as Obama’s comments illustrate – recovery from trauma requires “testimony” – the story of what happened – and an empathic “witness,” who can be there emotionally for that testimony. The restoration of reflective space – the space in which the story can be told, felt and understood – happens simultaneously between the traumatized person and the witness and within the traumatized person, who heretofore could not bear to tell themselves, and fully feel, their own story. And one thing that happens in this process is that parts of the story that can’t be told in words make their entrance in other ways: through dreams, drawings, everyday objects linked to the trauma, or enactments: for example, the traumatized person’s reacting as though the listener is the persecutor. These moments of “immediacy”, as the WWI psychiatrist, Thomas Salmon, describes them, are important to keep in mind in the work with traumatized refugees.
Because societal trauma powerfully affects the groups that make up that society, overcoming it tends to involve group work. The rest of this paper describes various kinds of group work done by members of the IDI, some of which could be described as top-down, because it addresses the leadership level of a society, and some as bottom-up, because it works with the communities in immediate crisis.
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