Disturbances of Historical Trauma

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An artist's depiction of the effects of trauma. 

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"There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit."-Napoleon

 
 
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"If there was no suffering, man would not know his limits, would not know himself."-Leo Tolstoy

Humans have a mania for trauma. With trauma comes an upheaval of unsettling emotions that forces one to adapt with a sense of added urgency in order to reclaim homeostasis, to return to normal. Without trauma, life can seem tedious and monotonous, lacking in drama and motivation. Consequently, the current state of the news, social media, and political rhetoric are all dependent on the effects of trauma to implement a human reaction into their message. This somatic theory of trauma was developed by Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, in the late 19th century. He believed that an important aspect of trauma is the impulse of the human mind to repeat the events even though it caused pain and suffering (Nas) . When it came to traumatic events, Freud believed that humans have a “repetition compulsion” because of a fleshly effort to come to reality with and to accept the fact of death (Nas).

            One of the fundamental beliefs of history is that it tends to repeat itself. Hayden White, in “The Practical Past” juxtaposes the Freudian concept of repetition compulsion from an individual perspective to the entirety of mankind. He states, “This physicalist conception of trauma (developed by Breur and Freud in the 1890s) does not differ in any special way from its historiological counterpart in which the historical event is viewed as a significant disturbance of a historical (social) system which throws its institutions, practices, and beliefs into disarray and results in group behaviors similar to those manifested in the conditions of hysteria, paranoia, fetishism, and the like.” Simply, the history of mankind is not far removed from the history of the individual. Furthermore, defining and conceptualizing history and its many catastrophes is also similar to how one man attempts to creating order in the aftermath of a traumatic event. The pathology of trauma can not be defined by the event itself but rather through the experiences and the reactions to it that consistently repeat in the mind of the affected. To be traumatized is to be obsessed by an image and Leo Tolstoy knew this and accomplished this when he wrote his recount of the devastation of the battle of Borodino.

            On the twenty-sixth of August in 1812, the battle of Borodino was fought between the two great military nations, the French and the Russians. For the French, the battle only brought them closer to the complete consequence of utter destruction from the results of war. Even Napoleon himself did not desire to continue on after Smolensk because he knew the danger of his extended situation. The Freudian concept of repetition compulsion in reaction to traumatic events was exemplified in Napoleon’s situation since the French army had now decreased in size from 400,000 to a mere 125,000 and still Napoleon’s commands were to continue. For the Russians, the battle represented a final stand before the demolition of Moscow. The total causalities were approximately 30,000 for the French and 40,000 for the Russians but to summarize a battle by mere numbers is deficient when attempting to understand the repercussions. Tolstoy understood this deficiency and describes the battle through a sensible viewpoint by giving the reader a description of the battle. “As soon as these men left that space through which the cannonballs and bullets flew, their commanders, who stood in the rear, formed them up, established discipline, and, under the effect of that discipline, again led them into the zone of fire, in which (under the effect of the fear of death) they again lost discipline and rushed about according to the chance mood of the crowd.” The chaos of the scene and the reactions of the men is what Tolstoy chooses to insert into history. He describes the outcome, “Exhausted men on both sides, without food and rest, began alike to doubt whether they had to go on exterminating each other, hesitation was seen on all faces, and in every soul alike the question arose: ‘Why, for whom, should I kill and be killed? You kill whomever you like, do whatever you like, but I don’t want any more of it!’ Towards evening this thought ripened alike in each man’s soul.” Trauma is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, only in its repeated possession inside the minds of the impacted does it do its worse. Then trauma becomes a part of the survivor’s identity by being compulsively replayed and changing the consciousness of the humans involved, then trauma exhibits its full force. White supplements this effect of trauma by stating, “the terms ‘trauma’ and ‘traumatic’ are used to indicate a shock to the organism that has the somatic and/or psychical effect of ‘unbinding’ the ‘drives’ formerly held in some kind of equilibrium and producing thereby neurotic or psychopathic states resulting in the disfunctionality of the organism.” Intellectualizing the effects of trauma is not the responsibility of the observer, it is the imprisonment of the mind affected.

            After the battle, Tolstoy describes the position of the Russian general Kutuzov, “he understood that one man cannot lead hundreds of thousands of men struggling with death, and he knew that the fate of a battle is decided not by the commander in chief’s instructions….but by that elusive force known as the spirit of the troops, and he watched this force and guided it, as far as that lay in his power.” The power is trauma is at the center of Tolstoy’s War and Peace because he had an understanding of its transcendence across time and its significant role in history. White’s “The Practical Past” unraveled the mysteries of “the traumatic event” by contrasting the human experience of trauma to the social development of trauma. Both of these testimonies provide a new way of thinking about how trauma and survival are bound together in the act of bearing witness to history.

 

 

Nas, Alparslan. "Cultural Studies Blog." Trauma in Freud and in Lacan ~. N.p., Aug. 2009. Web. 03 Apr. 2016.