Talk on Denial and the Transmission of Trauma by Mrs Ruth Barnett - May 2003
INTRODUCTION
I am immensely honoured to have the privilege of addressing an Armenian community this evening as part of the annual commemoration of the Armenian genocide. I want to emphasise that remembering this genocide is an enormously important task that, sadly, the Armenians and their diaspora are carrying, at the present time, almost totally alone. It is a task that the Armenians are carrying for all humanity. The 'Armenian problem' of today is not an Armenian problem at all. It is the problem of non-Armenians who have difficulty facing what their ancestors have done or allowed to be done to their Armenian fellow humans. Armenians have to carry this burden of keeping the knowledge alive until the world is ready to acknowledge and mourn the loss to humanity of their murdered ancestors.
My personal reason for joining you to remember and mourn the Armenian genocide is because I believe that we Jews, who have had our losses and suffering acknowledged and validated, albeit after 50 years of denial, carry a responsibility to fight with and for those whose trauma has not yet been validated. Sadly, not all Jews feel this way. Many claim the Holocaust is unique and therefore they have a monopoly on suffering. Some are simply ignorant and not interested. Most shameful is the current official position of Israel - that there was no Armenian Genocide.
All of us need to be open to knowing and bearing to face what all our instincts urge us to avoid and we need to help each other with this through dialogue. Therefore, I want to say to the Armenians present today, "Those of us who can, mourn with you".
GENOCIDE
We need to be clear what we mean by genocide. So I am going to start by defining genocide in the way that I shall be using the word in this paper. Genocide is an attempt to wipe out a whole people; an attempt by a powerful well-armed group to decimate a vulnerable group that has neither the means nor the intention of harming the aggressors. The perpetrators are usually fundamentalist fanatics planning their genocide in the name of a distorted religion or ideology that has developed anti-morality elements. Their victims then carry the bit of morality that has to be wiped out so that the perpetrators' ideology or religion can flourish. The Armenians were regarded by the Turks as infidels and traitors; and the Jews were labelled vermin that had to be purged to purify Arian blood. The Aborigines were considered sub-human by the British colonists and not deserving a place in the human race. The Africans were considered by slave-traders as on a par with wild beasts to be captured and put to work.
The perpetrators' murderous plan unfolds by a process of stages. It starts with vilification and persecution of the chosen scapegoat group and progresses through dehumanising and demoralising them with restrictions and pogroms. When these are not countered by neighbouring nations the perpetrators continue with impunity to planned mass-murder. The final stage of genocide is the establishment by the perpetrators of denial that there ever was genocide involved: "It was just war!" or "the victims started it and had it coming to them" or "The victim group had secret plans to take over the world" or "They were vermin that had to be got rid of".
At least 50 genocides were perpetrated round the world in the last century and this new century seems to offer little change. Why? I believe this to be because we have failed again and again to acknowledge and mourn the trauma and loss of genocide. The philosopher Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." We need to go back and remember the past genocides. We need to acknowledge and mourn with the survivors' descendants the loss to humanity of their forgotten murdered ancestors and restore to them their rightful place in history.
Genocide goes back to the origins of the human species. One of the first recorded genocides is told in the part of the bible that Christians, Jews and Moslems share. In the book of Deuteronomy, God is quoted as saying to the Israelites in the desert:
"When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; though shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them." (Deut. 7:7)
This is clearly genocide as I have defined it. Did God really order this slaughter? Or was it that by displacing the responsibility onto God, the aggressors avoided acknowledging the genocide and mourning the slaughtered Hittites, Girsherites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. Where are the museums and memorials that honour the memory of these seven tribes?
Those who live through war, both as soldiers and civilians and particularly the children, are profoundly affected and many are traumatised. Genocide, as I have defined it, is an unjust deadly attack by an overwhelming power to whom the victimised group presented no actual threat. It is more than a slaughter of the victimised group's physical bodies. It is an attack on the inner world or psyche, the core of being, attacking the group psyche with humiliating powerlessness. This is deeply traumatising. So much so that most of the first generation of survivors of a genocide are unable to begin the task of dealing with what they experienced, knowing it, making meaning of it and morning the loss. This means that their children, the second generation are profoundly affected and inherit the task. The second generation get a 'second chance' to do this work of knowing and mourning. And if the second generation cannot tackle this 'working through', the trauma is transmitted to future generations. Genocide cannot be worked through while it is going on. Many genocides continue today in the last stage of denial. While we persist with this denial, healing of the trauma cannot begin. Each manifestation of denial re-opens the wounds and re-traumatises the descendants of the survivors. The descendants experience denial as a denigration of their roots within themselves accompanied by feelings of powerlessness, helplessness and doubts about their right to be. As one fourth generation survivor said to me, " My ancestors are denied existence and if they have never existed, so how can I ?"
VIGNETTE
To illustrate the way that trauma affects the individual I will give you a piece of my work with an asylum-seeker:
A man I shall call Hamid (not his real name) was referred to me by his solicitor for psychotherapy. Hamid was not allowed to work while he was applying for asylum. As he had no means to earn money the court was to pay for his therapy. Hamid had been assessed by a psychiatrist who found him unco-operative and argumentative and diagnosed him as paranoid and violent and recommended psychotherapy to help him take responsibility for his violence. The court banned him from seeing his children until he had complied with the psychiatrist's recommendation. Hamid was anxious to co-operate with anything in order to see his children and restore his family.
I saw Hamid six times. Alternately he was over-polite and pleading and then he flipped over to being aggressively uncooperative. He did not want psychotherapy, did not agree that he needed it and did not think it could help him. He had not seen his children for two years, he missed them terribly, and most of all he needed to pour out his story to someone who would listen and believe him: Back in his country of origin his family had been persecuted for their unwillingness to convert to the 'right religion'. His parents and many of his large extended family had been murdered Just before he and his wife and children were due to leave the country, Hamid was arrested and tortured brutally. He held out long enough for his family to get out to Britain. His story became incoherent about his time and treatment under inhuman conditions in prison and how he escaped or was he released. When he finally reached London he found his wife wanted a divorce as she
and their children were living with a 'cousin' who was her solicitor as well as her lover. This is something extremely shaming in Hamid's culture. Without much of a command of English and in a state of confusion he had signed papers his wife's lover demanded he sign before he could see his children. In fact the document was an admission that he had been violent to his family. On the basis of this paper, the court had deprived Hamid of all contact with his family and ordered a psychiatric assessment. For a period of two years the court had repeatedly adjourned Hamid's case for reasons he did not understand. (Nor was his solicitor able to enlighten me).
The psychiatric report mentioned nothing of Hamid's trauma before the family left their original home or the compounding trauma he experienced on reaching England. Hamid was able to defend himself to some extent against the trauma of torture through the belief that he was protecting his family. Uprooted and disoriented by being in a strange country with an unfamiliar language, he was too vulnerable to cope with the traumatic shame he suffered in losing the family he had been protecting. Officious authorities questioning him, not believing his story and discounting his experiences added to his trauma. Not surprisingly, he succumbed to fragmentation of his identity and lost his hold on reality. I was left experiencing some of his helpless despair as I was unable to help him even to see his children. I could only hope that my listening to him and drafting a report with him for the court may have given him some atom of hope.
TRAUMA
Some confusion is caused in that the word trauma is used to mean both the event that acts as a traumatising agent and the effect of that agent on the person. There are many ways of attempting to define what is trauma. I can only suggest some books that explore and clarify the psychic processes in the experience of trauma; books such as "Trauma and Recovery" by Judith Lewis-Herman and "Understanding Trauma" by Caroline Garland or "War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists" by Ben Shephard.
For the purpose of this paper I shall define trauma as 'a break in the continuity of being'. Severing the last tenuous connection to a person's roots is a very severe trauma. Persecution forced Hamid to flee his country and sever his roots there. He could hold himself together at a psychic level through this and the torture preceding it as his family represented his roots and continuity of being. When his family too cut him off, he lost his last root. This was a massive wound that breached his psychic skin. The people who might have helped him to hold his battered self together did not understand, could not communicate with him, disbelieved him and discounted his experience. Probably, without realising what they were doing, they added to his already severely traumatised state. Small wonder that his outward behaviour seemed aggressive, unco-operative and paranoid.
Healing begins with reconnecting and reclaiming severed and denied roots. Many people have difficulty giving up their own denial of unbearable experiences. If the outside world denies their experiences, this acts as a reinforcement of their own denial. When they are able to bear to know and feel their experiences, healing can begin because the way is then unblocked to reconnect to their roots.
CUMULATIVE TRAUMA (Masud Kahn)
Trauma often has a cumulative effect when there has not been safe time and space to deal with one wound before the next trauma impinges. This was evident in Hamid's case. The 'undigested' elements of trauma may remain in the psyche like 'foreign bodies' blocking normal functioning directly or by taking up psychic space and psychic energy if they are kept repressed, denied and encapsulated - locked away in a corner of our mind. People caught up in major disasters like war and genocide are likely to suffer repeated trauma without time in between to deal with the effects. The cumulative effects of this are obvious. This also applies to other forms of cumulative trauma such as the effects on young children of severe deprivation or physical and sexual abuse. Cumulative trauma may not be outwardly manifest or immediately apparent. The child or person may appear to function normally but their adaptation is likely to have arrested development and/or restricted or distorted their inner world.
THE WAITING ROOM
I sometimes think of life as 'being in a waiting room'. We are all together in this gigantic 'waiting room' waiting for our time to move on into death that will inevitably come, sooner or later. It is a beautiful waiting room, big enough for us all and fitted out with every possible comfort and potential source of pleasure and satisfaction. But what do we do with it while we are waiting? Instead of sharing and helping each other to enjoy the amenities, we are consumed with greed for more than our share and lust for power. We make wars that slaughter or traumatise each other. We avoid responsibility by splitting and projecting what we desire and lust onto God. I shuddered when I saw on TV recently someone (I don't recall who) wishing "our boys Godspeed on their way to Kuwait". Our own TV showed Bush and Blair praying together and, courtesy Al Jayeera TV we saw Saddam and his bodyguard praying. Nothing has changed. We still don't get it that God has nothing to do with the atrocities. "Where was God at Auschwitz?" is a non-question that implies the Holocaust was God's responsibility not ours. From a peaceful garden of Eden, we have made the still beautiiful 'waiting room' into Hell on Earth. We need not have done so. Not God's but ours is the responsibility.
I often get bogged down with depressing feelings that there is nothing I can do about all this - the wars and the massive trauma they cause - that it will simply go on and on. War and genocide inflict such deep wounds, so much pain and humiliation, so many uprooted and dispossessed refugees, so much suffering and thirst for revenge. How can we begin the process of mourning and healing the trauma before we are overtaken by the next round of war and slaughter? I feel as though there is nothing I can do that would make an atom of difference? I tell myself I must not give up. I must keep the talking and listening going. If this paper achieves nothing more than inspiring you too, as therapists and simply as human beings, not to give up, then I shall feel my efforts are worth making. So I offer you my view that the only way forward is through education - getting people talking and listening, thinking and sharing. I do this when I go into schools and talk with teachers and children in their Holocaust education projects. It is also what I do as a therapist - getting my patients talking and listening to their inner self. Because I was a teacher for 19 years before I became a full time psychotherapist, I prefer an educational way of understanding psychotherapy to the medical model.
ASYLUM SEEKERS
I am going to talk about some disturbing things to do with trauma and genocide. You may disagree with some of what I say and, hopefully, this will lead to useful discussions throughout the day. You may have difficulty, like I do sometimes, in holding unwelcome images in mind long enough to think about them. I believe that bearing to know about trauma and genocide has to be faced. Putting what is unwelcome, unbearable, and unthinkable into words is both therapeutic and vital for our own mental health and that of our patients, our profession and our society. I would go so far as to say the future of civilisation as we know it depends on this.
When I came to England in 1939 I was one of 10,000 unaccompanied child refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution. 10,000 children, the Kindertransport, presented a major problem - hostels and foster-families had to be found and a sponsor for each child. The parents were not allowed to come to Britain. People could feel sorry for and tolerate foreign children suddenly appearing in their community, adults would present a threat and generate hostility. To outward appearances, the children settled very well. Most of them were as well cared for as was possible in wartime. After the war, most of them stayed in Britain, became British citizens (subjects) and led successful careers. There is no question that Britain gained richly by taking in these 10,000 children. Why then is there so much hostility and scare-propaganda about refugees seeking asylum in Britain today?
I don't hear of refugees any more. People escaping from atrocities in their own countries and fleeing to Britain for safety are called asylum-seekers, economic migrants, parasites, layabouts or even more insulting names. Their numbers have increased rapidly year by year as wars and genocide continue all over the world. (We are now on the brink of another major war on Iraq). Whatever else does or does not result from this war, there will be horrific slaughter and large numbers of traumatised survivors. (I include the close relatives of the dead as traumatised survivors.) This is likely to mean even more asylum-seekers pouring into Europe.
How do we react to those who reach Britain? On the whole we add to their original trauma. I am sure there are some among them who are opportunist migrants and even a few with evil intents. I am also convinced that treating all asylum seekers as sub-human helps neither us, nor them, and probably adds to the number who are anti-social. By being so unwelcoming and not respecting them as fellow humans to be treated decently we re-traumatise them. The communities in which they take up residence, or are put in, feel threatened and become hostile and rejecting. The government fears losing votes and its policies reflect this and not the welfare of the asylum seekers The media report incidents and atrocities involving asylum seekers mainly to sell newspapers rather than to be informative. Hostility then increases.
Tension rises with hostility, people feel threatened. They become overwhelmed with powerful unmanageable feelings of fear, panic rage etc. These feelings become an internal threat. Attempts are then made to control these unbearable emotions by projecting them into the other party. A human drama develops in which everyone present plays a role that is partly projected into them by others and partly their acquiescence or collusion. Assignation of roles may be largely if not totally unconscious. There are only four roles to play though unlimited ways of playing them: victim, aggressor, rescuer and bystander. The bearers of tension and hostility become victims and aggressors. The victims project their violence into the aggressors so that they can be unaggressive but at the cost of carrying the fear and weakness that the aggressors can't bear to own. Everyone else present in the drama chooses to take sides or become rescuers. Usually the largest group are the bystanders who choose their role by default: "Its nothing to do with me" or "I can't do anything about it". Yet it is usually the bystanders who have the power of numbers to halt the drama from becoming a fight, war and finally genocide. So often they do not organise their power to do so. Not "Where was God at Auschwitz?" but "Who were the bystanders?"
A large number of these asylum seekers will remain in Britain and eventually become British citizens (subjects). They have to deal with being treated as 'unwanted', not allowed to work, the indignity of food vouchers etc when the one wish of most is to work and earn their keep. Idleness fosters depression while work is likely to be therapeutic. Healing the wounds of the original trauma cannot begin while their daily life feels so humiliating and their hosts so rejecting. What will they tell their children? The children will be influenced even if the parents are not able to tell them what they went through. I am sure most therapists in the audience will by now have met and worked with patients whose emotional problems originate in or have been exacerbated by the treatment they or their refugee/ migrant forebears suffered. We can learn something that might help us to understand the complexities of response to trauma by studying the experiences of the Kindertransport and other survivors of the Holocaust.
The Kinder contributed immensely to British culture and economy. We now know that this adaptation was at a very high cost in terms of the internal emotional lives of the children and I will come back to this later. Most of the Kinder were treated kindly and with good intentions. Not so with most of today's asylum seekers. The Kinder suffered, in personalised form the collective trauma of being uprooted. Here I recommend two books, one by an American researcher "The Uprooted: a Hitler Legacy" and the other by a British researcher "The Leaves Have Lost their Tree". Asylum seekers, whether or not they have already suffered atrocities in their country of origin, are uprooted and disoriented when they arrive. They suffer further trauma and emotional damage through their experiences at the hands of hostile host communities and government mismanagement. Not nearly enough helpful treatment is made available soon enough to be effective in preventing retraumatisation of the first generation and transmission of trauma to their children..
I am involved with the Refugee Support Centre in Vauxhall. I admire enormously the therapists who offer what they can to their clients, many of whom understand little English and even less of the government systems in which they are trapped with no means of supporting themselves or their families. The work of these therapists is like putting a bandage on an open wound that is torn wider open with every movement the sufferer makes. The asylum seeker attempts to tell her story to the officials. Experiencing it being dismissed is like denying there is a wound. That denial tears it wider open. The work of healing cannot begin until the wound is acknowledged to exist. The demand for asylum seekers to face questioning (by immigration officers, benefits distributers, lawyers, courts etc) represents some doubt about their story. The experience of 'not being believed', in their vulnerable traumatised state, can mean fragmentation of their internal structures and losing hold on reality. They start to doubt their story themselves, become confused and lose hold on their own identity as Hamid did.
We know, from our work as therapists, what can happen in the internal world of a child when her experiences are discounted. For example when a child is told "No you can't be angry" when she patently is angry; or "Nice little girls don't hate their baby brothers - you really love him not hate him" when she does not at that moment love him but is overwhelmed with nasty feelings of rage towards him. The basic needs of asylum seekers for food, human support and dignity are not met. Their stories are constantly discounted with things like "Your country is OK now the war is over and you will be safe going back" or "You could have made those scars yourself just to get asylum status". Our patients sometimes tell us narratives that are widely diverging from 'historical truth'. Asylum seekers are disoriented and little able to trust and may tell us what they think we want to hear or what they think we will react kindly to. Healing cannot begin until they experience being heard and believed. Whatever the client's narrative that she tells us, it is her story at that moment and has a direct connection with her roots. This may be a very tenuous and/or consciously or unconsciously disguised connection. Breaking this connection by our disbelief is traumatic for an already traumatised person.
How can we believe the trauma of our clients when we can't even hear it in their narrative? I will illustrate an answer to this question with my own experience.
MY OWN EXPERIENCE AS AN ILLUSTRATION
I don't remember specifically what I was told in my childhood but it added up to "You were rescued and nothing happened to you. You should be happy and feel nothing but gratitude to your parents for sending you to safety and to Britain for taking you in." I felt none of these feelings but felt I ought to and persuaded myself, only partially successfully, that I did. That reinforced my own denial of loss and homesickness. I was lucky enough to enjoy school and university, to have a career, marry and have children. I was outwardly normal at the cost of not even knowing about the empty hole in my inner world because I filled it every day with manic activity and escaped into exhausted sleep at night.
I was not ready until 14 years ago when, in June 1989, Bertha Leverton organised a two-day conference for everyone who came to England as a child without parents in the late 1930s and called it the 50th Reunion of Kindertransport. It was a shocking awakening for me! Until then, I had not even taken the word kindertransport into my vocabulary. I had no idea that any other children, apart from my brother and I, had been sent to England for safety. 10,000? That was incredible! There they were, about 1000 of them in the Harrow Leisure centre, chatting at tables and listening to people from the stage. The stories they were telling were amazing, some horrendous and all unbearably moving. It was mainly a joyful event, a celebration of survival. We were no longer victims of Hitler's evil racism but survivors of his 'Final Solution' for the Jews. But of course memories were tangibly there of relatives who had been murdered. Cherished photos of them were shown around and we said prayers for them. This made it a therapeutic and healing event.
My experience of this Reunion was an epiphany. It was as if scales dropped from my eyes and ears. I had been a psychotherapist for nine years and a marriage counsellor for four years before that. Suddenly, my patients started telling me about what they or their parents had gone through as a result of the policies of Hitler's Third Reich. One client revealed to me that he had been caught up in the war between Pakistan and India as a child. This was entirely new material, as it was with several of my clients. Was that due to the world outside my consulting room beginning to talk about the atrocities and horror of WWII? Lately there had been a lot of documentaries on TV, articles in the paper and films on the theme. Or was it that my eyes and ears had been 'closed' for fifty years to anything I feared unconsciously might trigger memories and feelings that could overwhelm me, that I wasn't ready to face?
From the time of the Reunion, I saw things differently. I realised I had been avoiding knowing things I must have heard and seen. Had my therapy patients unconsciously sensed that certain things were not to be talked about - things I would not hear or would not want to hear? Perhaps they sensed a change in me in 1989 and dared to talk about formerly 'unspeakable' things. For their sake, but perhaps even more for myself, I made up for lost time by exploring every avenue to discover missing details of my life story. Of course this plunged me into the horrific backdrop of the world war in which I grew up and which I had been avoiding knowing about ever since the war ended. I had positively avoided films and documentaries about war.
We each have our individual defence systems that may, effectively block us from getting to know all our deeply buried and sealed-off personal trauma. One of these defences we may use, is to become a therapist and address the trauma out there in the patient and thereby avoid knowing it in ourselves. Years of personal therapy may not reach our deepest trauma if we are not ready to find the key. This was the case for me. However, a 'good-enough' therapy gave me a sound foundation and resources that enabled me to do further work in a different setting when I became ready.
TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA - THE SECOND GENERATION.
There have been many studies of the psychological effects on people who grew up as the children of Holocaust survivors and also some studies of how the children of perpetrators were affected. Peter Zivrovsky wrote "Schudig Geboren" (Born Guilty) containing material from interviews with children of convinced Nazis. Several children of Holocaust survivors have written their own story. Anne Karpf "The War After" is one notable example. Up until a recently, children of Holocaust survivors did not recognise themselves as having been affected by living in the shadow of their parents suffering. They wanted to spare their parents further pain. This often influenced these second generation children profoundly in the way they developed. They did not feel entitled to ordinary feelings of emotional pain because nothing could be significant compared with what their parents had suffered. "You don't know what suffering is! And, please God, may you never find out" is something Ilan, the adored youngest son of a father who survived as a child in a concentration camp, remembers his father saying many times.
Another patient, Harry, reported his parents could not bring themselves to tell him about their Holocaust experience. Harry knew they wanted to protect him from the horror they had experienced as that is what they told him. He didn't ask questions because he wanted to spare them the pain of remembering and reliving trauma. In therapy he discovered that he was protecting himself from unbearable things he might hear, and his parents were protecting themselves as well as him. When therapy helped him to pluck up enough courage to ask questions, he found his parents quite relieved for him to take the initiative. He discovered he had been named after his mother's little brother Hansi who had been murdered in an extermination camp. Consequently he had not been able to be himself as he had to live the life of this lost uncle as well as his own. (Dina Wardi describes this phenomenon in detail in her book "Memorial Candles".)
Dinora Pines, a psychoanalyst, wrote of her work with children of survivors in a paper "The Impact of the Holocaust on the Second Generation":
"By living through their children, the parents hoped to re-establish a family life that had been destroyed, and vicariously live through them parts of the life cyclethat they themselves had been deprived of. Naturally, many of these children are over-valued and over-protected by their parents, whether the secret of the Holocaust is revealed or not. Many children are expected to live in a state of perpetual happiness in order to make their parents happy".
From all that has been written in the therapy literature, it is clear to me that many survivors were too intensively traumatised by their Holocaust experiences to begin the process of acknowledging and mourning the massive loss and wounding of themselves, their families and communities. Inevitably then, the trauma has been transmitted in some form to their children. This second generation then gets a second chance to begin or carry forward the work of knowing, bearing and mourning - otherwise the task may be transmitted to further generations.
TRANSMISSION OF TRAUMA IN THE PSYCHE OF COMMUNITIES AND NATIONS
TRIBALISM
One of our basic human needs is to feel that we belong and are accepted in "our group". To establish the security of belonging to an "us", we differentiate ourselves from "them". This mechanism has been there in tribalism and tribal ideologies (including religions) since biblical times. A tribe is a group who have all been initiated into the ideology of the tribe. Though the ideology may include physical and genetic criteria, these are largely imaginary but reinforced by the belief that "My tribe is superior to your tribe" and the drive to prove this in competition and feats of strength and heroism. A modern version of tribalism is to be found among football fans chanting the superiority of "their team". More sinister versions of tribalism include 'the chosen people', the British class system, the Hindu caste system, white supremacy and the Arian Master-race. In every tribal system there is a weaker group that tends to be victimised, scapegoated and traumatised. This scapegoat carries the projections of the self-styled superior group who get rid of all the imperfections that fall short of their ideology and ideal image of themselves by projecting them into the scapegoat. The projected attributes can then be hated 'out there' in the scapegoat and wiped out by killing the scape goat - driving it over the figurative cliff or, if it won't go, murdering it. The resulting problems are threefold. The 'sins' or projections of unwanted attributes of the aggressors are not really gotten rid of and new scapegoats will be needed. Secondly the scapegoat's children are traumatised and, if not addressed, this will be transmitted to future generations. Thirdly, the aggressors too are traumatised and their children will inherit the burden of what their ancestors perpetrated. Each living generation of the survivors' offspring represents to the perpetrators' descendents the shame of their ancestors. This operates at an unconscious level until the genocide is fully acknowledged and can be mourned. Only then it can be healed and laid to rest - inscribed in history, not forgotten.
THE ARMENIANS
We can apply this theme of transmission of trauma to subsequent generations at the level of communities. Transmission of trauma on a massive scale has undoubtedly taken place through failure to address previous genocides. Hitler is recorded as having said "Who now remembers the Armenians?" when his generals became concerned about what he was doing with the Jews. The Armenian story is very similar to that of the Jews: repeated persecution, denigration and waves of pogroms. The Armenians, as Christians among power-hungry Moslem tribes and empires, served as scapegoats from the start os Islam like the Jews were scape-goated by the Christians from the dawn of Christianity. The Armenian genocide is largely forgotten or denied. It is disavowed by the current Turkish government and the governments of all countries which strive to keep Turkey as an ally. These include the governments of Britain, the USA and Israel. Mention of the Armenian Genocide is missing from most histories of WWI and most school books. The third and fourth generations of Armenian survivors are profoundly affected. The murder of their ancestors is wiped out by denial. For them it is as if their ancestors had never existed. They cannot reclaim their roots until the genocide is acknowledged. They live without roots. My experience of the Armenians I have met recently is that they are a lovely, cultured and gentle people, somewhat withdrawn and shy as if something is missing - their roots and with these their own right to be.
THE ENSLAVEMENT OF BLACK AFRICANS
Going further back, we are now about ten generation on from the final end of black slavery by white Europeans and Americans. The massive trauma of several centuries of this brutal injustice, white supremacy and the Klu Klux Klan etc, does not 'disappear' in ten generations. A black American psychoanalyst, Joel Kovel, in his book "White Racism", details the psychic interaction between the slaves and enslavers and the legacy it has created.
Barbara Fletchman Smith, a black psychotherapist, has recently published a book "Mental Slavery". In this book she discusses with clinical examples of how transmitted trauma from their ancestoral history of slavery has affected the black clients with whom she has been working.
THE GENOCIDE OF THE AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES
On the other side of our global waiting room, but still very much part of 'us' there is the currently still maintained denial of the genocide of the Australian Aborigines. John Pilger describes this eloquently and horrifically in his recent book "The New Rulers of the World". He calls the Aborigines 'the first nation because in the Kimberley region in the remote north of Western Australia, these people have been there for 40,000 years - a great deal longer than the white colonists.
He quotes Martin Taylor, 1997 "Bludgers in Grass Castles: Native Title and the Unpaid debts of the Pastoral industry" Resistance Books, Sydney:
".. sections of the Queensland pastoral industry participated in the genocide of the Aboriginal people. By 1920, the indigenous people had been reduced from at least 120,000 to 20,000; this involved at least 10,000direct killings …… Brutalised Aborigines from the South were imported to form the Queensland Native Police, which was used as a death squad against Aborigines. Disease also ravaged the population."
(Does this not echo the co-opting of brutalised Lithuanians and Jewish Capos to do the Nazis' dirty work of terror and murder?)
Pilger describes how the remaining Aborigines today are imprisoned in ghettos in the outback, under punitive government control, with much less public money spent on them than the lavish amenities for the white communities, while blaming them as regressed, uncivilised and 'wasted on grog'. They are hidden from view, especially from visitors like medical inspection services, Human Rights inspectors and inspectors assessing Australia for the Olympic Games bid. To further cover up a few Aborigines are trained up to demonstrate their ancient dances and play the didgeridoo for tourists.
(In case we start feeling judgemental and 'holier that thou', is this very different to what we are doing today with asylum seekers here in Britain?)
There is a myth that millions of dollars (the missing millions) has been spent on Aboriginal welfare and wasted by them. Why? Asks Pilger and then adds: "Its part of the Australian psyche at some level. By believing that money has been spent and wasted, people move to the conclusion that conforms with what is in the back of their minds: that the real reason is innate or genetic. More important, it allows white Australians to say it isn't their fault, it's the fault of Aboriginal people themselves. A whole language of denigration backs this up - they don't look after their kids, they don't wash etc - and allows the majority population to distance itself from the truth that our first nation continues to be denied essential citizenship rights: basic services, housing, a decent access to education, a hope for the future."
Then there is the terrifying saga of the 'stolen generation' - a systematic policy of the government in 1933, of abducting Aboriginal children of mixed race to be raised in white communities in ignorance of their parentage to 'breed out the colour'. The white communities were kept largely ignorant of what was going on.
(I wonder where the Australians may have gotten this white supremacy/racist idea?Could it have come from Hitler? Or might it go further back and be something to do with the deportation of socially unwanted children from Britain to Australia that Alan Gill writes about so eloquently in his book "Orphans of the Empire"?
I quote the opening paragraph of his book:
"According to the history books transportation to Australia ended in 1868. Actually, it ended only recently. From the eighteenth century to the late 1960s, thousands of children were shipped from Britain to distant parts of the Empire; about one in three came to Australia."
A final quote from Pilger: "In my experience, a guilt about what has been done to and taken from the native people is deep within the Australian psyche. ….. it is often those with a powerful attachment to the land itself who are most aware that the land is not 'theirs' and that the indiginous people have a unique relationship with it."
This is strong stuff and hard to stomach. Unconscious elements of trauma are deeply buried, in our British psyche. We have difficulty hearing, knowing and owning the part our British forebears played in these denied, and therefore unmourned crimes against humanity. Unless we can we take up the task of mourning and working through them the trauma will be passed on to further generations. It reminds me of the struggle of post-war born generations of Germans struggling with the effects on the German psyche of two world wars and two genocides perpetrated by their ancestors. The Germans and the Australians are in 'the waiting room' with us. The Germans are our neighbours in Europe. The current Australians are the offspring of our own ancestors, many of whom Britain deported there as criminals. Only a few survived the horrendous cruelty and brutalisation they suffered there. I visited Port Arthur prison in Tasmania in 1985 and found it as powerful an experience as visiting Dachau and Buchenwald. I spoke with many Australians in 1985 and I was struck by their confessions of feeling guilty and inferior about their 'criminal' ancestors. At the time I countered this by suggesting Britain should be ashamed of its cruel treatment of people who only stole bread or poached the Landlord's pheasants to feed their starving families. Looking back now, I see this differently. Their guilt is about the genocide of the Aborigines which still can't be acknowledged. By the unconscious process of displacement they transfer the guilt onto that is bearable because it is no longer acceptable or practised. This is the way they avoid the unfaceable issue of how the Aborigines are still being treated.
PERSONAL ENCOUNTER WITH TRAUMA
Perhaps the most difficult part of our personal encounter with trauma is not only to know about the depths of depravity, violence and suffering human beings inflict on each other. We need to go further to recognise our own part in the human story. That we too have the capacity to perpetrate atrocities is undeniable. That we have murderous fantasies, that we may or may not be conscious of, may be hard to accept. It is the fantasies that we can't acknowledge that are likely to cause us problems. When we can allow ourselves to be conscious of violent fantasies we are in a position to choose to keep them in the realm of fantasy. It is when we can't own these fantasies, such as murdering the neighbour who repeatedly frustrates and goads us, that we are in danger of acting on them. Suppressing violent ideas and wishes can use up psychic energy and mask our capacities to have compassionate and caring ideas too.
Our psychic need for a denigrated 'other' into whom we can project our disowned unmanageable feelings and shortcomings is at best latent. Insecurity activates it and collectively we find a scapegoat, more vulnerable and insecure than ourselves -to make us feel better and more deserving. A tragic illustration of this is the 'pecking order' among Holocaust survivors which is created by themselves: comparing how many years you were in a camp or the intensity of cruelty and deprivation you suffered - a sort of competition for who suffered most and is therefore the most needy or deserving. It is not helpful to compare suffering. Intense feelings of powerless and vulnerability are hard to bear. The compulsion can become very strong to find a scapegoat to look down on and thereby elevate ourselves.
Only when we have dared to wade into this mire of ultimate inhumanity, dared to stand and face the murderer and the cowardly bystander as well as the rescuer and helper in ourselves, can we reach, in my opinion, the core of our own humanity. Only then we may become ready and open to know the trauma of others and capable of helping them to mourn and reclaim their right to be.
To come back to the Armenian genocide which we are here today to remember, the recovery from genocide goes through three stages:
The first is the transition from victims to survivors. The second is the transition from survivors dependent on their host community where they found refuge to having an equal right to be with all others. These two are internal emotional changes or changes in mental set. The third stage is one of passive to active - actively reclaiming roots and stories and a place in history.
Here I want to mention the work of Sira Dermen, a psychoanalyst who visited Armenia several times to work with children and families of Spitak who were traumatised by the erupting volcano. She found herself dealing not only with the effects of the immediate trauma but also the re-activation of experiences of the 1915 genocide. She has written about this work in an article that has been included in a recent book "The Legacy of Winnicott" edited by Brett Kahr, Karnac 2002. She describes the healing effects as these children were enabled through her work to move from passive to active state of mind. She was also actively confronting the legacy of the Armenian genocide in herself by making the journey to Armenia to use her skills to heal traumatised Armenians.
I wonder why I have so far come across only one life-story by an Armenian - Nancy Kricorian's "Zabelles Geschichte". There is no indication whether Zabelle is Nancy herself. Why not? Is this fear of laying full claim on the right to be? Writing one's own story is actively making meaning out of one's experience and is a healing process. It is making an orderly narrative out of the disorder of fragments caused by the trauma.
I wonder if I am right in seeing the Armenian diaspora as somewhat stuck in the first two passive stages and needing to move to the third and active stage? Has lack of acknowledgement of the genocide led to a loss of confidence, energy and drive in the Armenian community? A crucial time is approaching for the EU. Will Turkey be allowed into the EU without owning the Armenian Genocide as well as its current crimes against humanity. How can the family of nations be made aware that the Armenian Genocide continues today through being denied, through bystander nations allowing Turkey to strangle and Azerbeijan to attack Armenia.
I want to finish with a poem from the Jewish service for the Day of Atonement (Gate of Repentance p268):
"How long shall the curse of Cain
Continue to haunt the human race?
How long shall Abel's blood, the innocent blood
Cruelly shed in countless wars,
Plead all unheeded that men are brothers,
And every man the keeper of every other?
Cannot the race whose mind and will have set men's feet upon the moon
Do equal wonders on its native soil?"
Ruth Barnett, April 2003
SOME USEFUL BOOKS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES
Aberbach, David, 1989, "Surviving Trauma: loss, literature and psychoanalysis", Yale Univ.Press.
Barker, Patricia - Trilogy of novels
Bar-On, Dan,1999, "The Indescribable and the Undiscussable: reconstructing Human Discourse after Trauma", CEU Press.
Bentovim, Arnon, 1992, "Trauma Organised Systems", Karnac Books.
Dalal, Farhad, 2002, "Race, Colour and the Processes of Racialisation", Brunner-Routledge.
Darke, Dorothy, 1995 "The Leaves Have Lost Their Trees"
Dermen Sira, "Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Traumatised Children: the Armenia Experience" in "The Legacy of Winnicott" ed. By Brett Kahr 2002 Karnac.
Fletchman-Smith, Barbara, 2000, "Mental Slavery", Rebus Press.
Freud, Signund, 1919, "Introduction to Psych-Analysis and War Neurosis", VolVXII Std. Ed. Hogarth.
Garland, Caroline,1998, "Understanding Trauma", Tavistock Clinic series.
Gill, Alan,1997, "Orphans of the Empire", Millenium Books, Random House, NSW Australia.
Karpf, Anne, 1996, "The War After: living with the Holocaust", Heinemann.
Kovel, Joel, 1988 (third Edition)"White Racism", Free Association Books.
Lago, Colin, 1996, ""Race, Culture and Counselling", Open Univ. press.
Lewis-Herman, Judith, 1992 "Trauma and Recovery" Basic Books.
Leys, Ruth, 2000, "Trauma: a geneology", Chicago Univ. Press.
Mischerlich, Alexander and Margarete, 1967, "Die Unfaeigkeit zu Trauen" (The Inability to Mourn) Piper Verlag Gmbh Munich (15th reprint 1998)
Pilger, John, 2002, "The New Rulers of the World" Verso, London & New York.
Rosenbaum, Alan (edit.) 1996, "Is the Holocaust Unique?: perspectives on comparative genocide", Westview Press.
Shay, Jonathan, 1994, "Achilles in Vietnam: combat trauma and the undoing of character", Touchstone.
Shephard, Ben, 2000, "War of Nerves:Soldiers & Psychiatrists", Jonathat Cape.
Sinason, Valerie, 1998, "Memory in Dispute", Karnac Books.
Weale, Adrian, 2001, "Science and the Swastika", Channel 4 books/ Macmillan.
Wiesenthal, Simon, 1998 (reprint in paperback) "The Sunflower:on the possibilities and limits of forgiveness", Schocken Books.
Whiteman, Dorit, 1993, "The Uprooted: a Hitler Legacy", Insight Books.
Virag,Terez, 2000, "Children of Social Trauma", (translated) Jessica Kingsley.