INTRODUCTION
Europe
is now in the throes of a wave of xenophobia fomented by a noisy right
wing movement. When the pendulum swings back, what will stand out most
in its aftermath however, will be the passivity and denial of
responsible people who were unable to face their own powerlessness
over it. They will be remembered as bystanders and witnesses who
failed to help, and who allowed refugees1 to suffer under
dehumanizing conditions while the raucous right carried out its
xenophobic practices.
This
failure of the bystander/witness is central to the posttraumatic
condition as it confirms the experience of helpless abandonment during
traumatization.
Refugees/asylum
seekers have become the chosen strangers of the European political
scene. They embody danger. They are perceived as carriers of
“trauma” which, intrinsically and naively, is associated with a
simplistic trope about violence: “yesterday’s victim may become
tomorrow’s perpetrator”. The mere possibility of being destroyed
and the nameless anxieties connected with the atrocities that many
refugees have experienced, contribute to making the traumatized into
frightening aliens ready to be cast in narratives about fundamentalist,
fascinating, and frightening Islam.
This
essay will discuss how this state of affairs has come to be; how
these suffering people, all of whom have lost their homes and who seek
peace and new possibilities, have come to represent such a medieval
image of a frightening and disruptive other. Maybe they arrived at a
convenient time when rising socio-economic and psychosocial
insecurities caused anxiety and created the need for an external
object, an alien force, to encompass this anxiety and the violence
connected with it.
On
a grand scale, refugees now seem to represent an encounter with the
“Uncanny”—an unfamiliar but nevertheless known entity, whose
human characteristics are diminished or completely denied.
REFUGEES
We
now turn to a refugee family from Iran, stranded on the Island Nauru
in the Pacific, after trying to enter Australia. Below is part of a
letter the father wrote to United Nations SecretaryGeneral
BanKiMoon and Peter Thomson, president of the United Nations
Summit on Refugees, held in New York on September 19, 2016:
We
simply trusted what they told us. Yet over three years later we are
still trapped in Nauru, like rare animals living in an Australianmade
zoo. After being brought to Nauru we spent almost 24 months in
detention, before we were finally found to be genuine refugees. Since
then I have not slept even one night without having recurring
nightmares of those endless months living in a hot, mouldy tent. We
became so alienated from our humanity, we were thoroughly transformed
into a bunch of animals after years of living in the most appalling
conditions possible (Herald, 2016).
Here
is a letter from a mother, stranded in a refugee detention center in
Greece:
1.
I used to live in Damascus with a small family.
2.
We left because of the war unforgiving.
3.
and I had a good home and work.
4.
and we have not and will not give up because we draw our strength from
the children’s innocence and for the future.
5.
Although my dreams lost” (Kingsley, 2016).
Another
newly arrived refugee told me, “The worst part of our flight was
when my wife and child, 1.5 years, did not get out of train somewhere
in Europe. Suddenly the train left and they disappeared”. This
Syrian man was head of a family with children, a grandmother, and
siblings. They had managed to get out of Syria, and had lived in a
refugee camp for a time before they ventured by boat across the
Mediterranean. They tried three times before they succeeded passing
the coast guard. The boat got lost and what should have been a
halfday journey lasted 12 days. This was less terrifying than the
extreme fear he experienced when trying to find his wife and child.
She could neither speak English nor any foreign language. When the
family at last was reunited, they continued, and by chance ended in
Norway. “Then the worst was to come”, he told us. Endless waiting,
inactivity, moving from one asylum center to another. Everybody in the
family suffered, had anxiety, and slept badly. The grandmother was on
the brink of breaking down. They didn’t dare tell her that her
sister recently had been killed.
These
are just a few of many refugee experiences. Although different, all
are marked by experiences in their homecountry, by the dangers
during flight, and especially by how they were received when they
finally reached a supposedly safe country.
Having
to endure extreme dangers during flight and then receiving years of
poor treatment in many European and other host countries in the West,
can be illnessproducing experiences for refugees. This can result from
longterm exposure to attitudes of fear and exclusion, based on
politicallymotivated xenophobia, and can best be described as
structural violence—a violence harmful to underprivileged groups
through intolerable living conditions (Galtung, 1969).
In
Europe, 2015 was a year of profound change regarding “strangers”
or “foreigners”, especially refugees and asylum seekers. The
prevailing narrative became that European culture and cohesion were
suddenly being threatened by exposure to a massive influx of refugees
who were flooding the continent by boat, on the Mediterranean, and on
foot through the Balkans.
While
it is true that many refugees arrived in Europe in 2015 and 2016, the
magnitude is not exceptional, historically. After WWII, for example,
Germany took in roughly 14 million refugees. Several hundred thousand
refugees fled into Europe during the Balkan Wars during the 1990s.
What distinguishes 2015 and 2016 is the marked change in attitude
towards refugees and in the intensity of actions taken to prevent them
from entering Europe.
This
is a multifaceted and complicated issue. Some countries have been
extremely generous, accepting many who are fleeing their homelands
(e.g., Germany and Sweden) while others, because of their location at
the borders of Europe, have managed to find compassionate and
effective ways of caring for almost all who have come, by boat, by
foot or other ways (e.g. Greece, Italy, Serbia).
Strong
political and ideological forces have surfaced in almost all European
countries characterized by tremendous antirefugee sentiment in the
form of enormous suspicion, conspiracy theories, and an outlook that
devalues strangers. These expressions of traditional xenophobia lead
to attitudes and practices that are blatantly dehumanizing.
On
the other hand, many grassroots movements welcome refugees and
represent an opposing compassionate, trend. It should also be
underscored that when refugees are granted asylum, they often meet
with enthusiastic, effective, and empathetic employers and NGOs whose
wellrun community integration programs offer them local employment.
In spite of xenophobic propaganda, such integration methods work very
well in many local contexts.
On
the whole, however, refugees now encounter even greater difficulties
during flight and upon arrival. They face malignant xenophobia, on a
massive scale, by citizens whose governments increasingly condone or
justify inhumane treatment of foreigners. And, they face severe
deficiencies in health care, both physical and mental.
In
my opinion, the treatment strategies for refugees, which have mainly
been developed outside psychoanalysis, do so with an insufficient
understanding of the plight of refugees and are, therefore, inadequate
and problematic. Professionals, and to a large degree the public,
identify the refugee’s psychological suffering as problems that are
“trauma related”. But their concepts of “trauma” and
traumatization are far too simplified and insufficient to fully
comprehend or treat the problems that refugees face (Lesley &
Varvin, 2016). As illustrated by the vignettes cited at the beginning,
the refugee experience is complex and comprises much more than
“trauma”. “Trauma”, in these contexts, tends to become less of
a theoretical concept and more of an object containing the deepest of
human fears and images of the most terrifying violence. “Trauma”,
thus, tends to become an uncanny object not only in political
discourse but also, to a certain degree, in clinical discourse. I will
return to this later.
COMPASSION
AND DEHUMANIZATION
The
word “compassion” is Latin, and means “cosuffering.” More
than simple empathy, compassion commonly gives rise to an active
desire to alleviate another’s suffering. It is a concept developed
mainly in religious contexts and seldom used in psychoanalysis, except
in selfpsychology and by some relational psychoanalysts (see Orange,
2006; Rubin, 1993).
Dehumanization
is a process that is simultaneously sociopolitical and psychological,
in which fundamental human characteristics are disavowed in other
people, such that others are perceived as less than human or nonhuman.
Consequently, actions resulting from dehumanization can threaten the
basic rights of these “others” and endanger their lives and safety.
Dehumanization
on a societal scale goes handinhand with xenophobia (Kogan, 2017).
When xenophobia becomes part of a political or religious narrative and
is used to foster intergroup conflict, unconscious processes, both at
individual and group levels, are set in motion. These unconscious
motivational forces are organized at primitive mental levels (i.e.,
undifferentiated and not well structured) and involve fantasies that
may be shared by many people in a group or community. Such fantasies
are often related to common life themes such as sibling rivalry, the
struggle between good and evil, or separationindividuation (Bohleber,
2007, 2010), but they are magnified in the xenophobic context where
libidinal aspects are separated or split from aggression.
Relationships and social fields of mutuality are transformed into
fields of projections where the other is cast in the role of projected,
unwanted parts of the self or of the groupself. As the other is
perceived as “not human”, not like “us”, then inhumane and
violent behavior may be justified (Hott, 1974, p. 308), as fight/flight
response (Bion, 1952).
When
groups or nations have a collective memory of past traumatization and
humiliation, the nature of these fantasies can become even more
violent, severe, and destructive precipitating revenge or
rectification of wrongdoings (Volkan, 2003). A demand for sameness
and purity may dominate (Miller, 2017), in order to free oneself and
the group from “elements” that endanger its cohesiveness and unity.
In response to, or as a defense against, individual or collective pain
and frustration, for example, cultural, political, and religious
discourses may use paranoid rhetoric or tacit support for perverse
behavior to stimulate fantasies against a defined enemy or guilty
party.
There
is little evidence to support the claim that socioeconomic
inequality or protests against the elite are primary factors
underlying our current rejection of refugees. Ideological narratives
that use and provoke existing anxiety, and also incite aggressive
impulses, play a more significant role (Turner, 2015).
CURRENT
SITUATION OF REFUGEES
At
the time of this writing, in May 2017, more than 65 million people are
displaced worldwide due to conflict and persecution (this includes
refugees and internally displaced people or IDPs). Of these, 21.3
million are refugees, over half of whom are under the age of 18. There
are also 10 million stateless people who have been denied a
nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare,
employment and freedom of movement. Approximately 34,000 are displaced
every day (UNHCR, 2016). One out of every 133 people in the world
today is displaced. Over the past five years, 50 families in Syria
were displaced daily and we are now seeing unimaginable suffering due
to indiscriminate attacks on civilians. The suffering due to war and
persecution is enormous and we can expect serious consequences of this
massive traumatization in the years ahead, especially for coming
generations.
For
refugees, flight has become increasingly dangerous and death tolls are
rising (UNHCR, 2016). Women are raped and abducted for prostitution,
men are killed, children are violated and forced into the sexindustry
or slavery [there is increasing evidence that human trafficking
networks cooperate with organized crime (Europol, 2016)] and many
victims are maltreated and/or tortured by police, border guards, or
organized crime during flight (Jovanović, Trivunčić
& Đurašinović, 2015).
Conditions
for refugees upon arrival are growing worse. Stranded in the refugee
camps of Greece, Italy, Serbia and Australia, thousands must survive
with little or no access to health care, poor sanitation, insufficient
food, and minimal human concern. In refugee camps near war zones,
conditions have worsened since 2015 when UNHCR budgets were cut by
more than half (Clayton, 2015). Many describe their conditions after
arrival, even in more affluent countries, as the worst part of their
refugee journey, as we can see in the stories described earlier in
this paper. On a daily basis, they face long waiting times,
bureaucratic red tape, inactivity, and the possibility of being forced
to return to their homelands. It is described by many as mental
torture.
Refugees
who arrived in Europe in 2015 represented less than 0.1 percent of the
total European population, underscoring the fact that images showing
waves refugees or foreigners flooding the continent, are grossly
exaggerated.
I
could go on describing the situation by listing statistics or quoting
refugees my research team has interviewed but I think this gives a
fairly accurate picture of the humanitarian catastrophe in Europe is
and with which it is clearly unable to cope. It represents a morale
collapse of European humanitarian values and adherence to human rights.
This situation did not, however, emerge overnight. Its political roots
have developed over decades.
SHORT
NOTE OF THE HISTORY OF REFUGEES
Refugees
or stateless people, as they were called after World War I, had few
rights and there were no international laws or conventions regulating
their treatment and care. They were also then by many seen as a danger
and fears were similar to what we see today, but mostly directed
toward Jewish refugees. It was said that if one opened the door to
Jewish refugees from Nazism, floodgates would open and cause an influx
of hundreds of thousands more Jews from Eastern Europe (Loescher,
1993). As we now know, putting those ideas into practice had deadly
consequences.
Ambivalence
and skepticism have always characterized some individual and national
attitudes towards refugees. However, at different times these
characteristics may have been tempered or even dominated by more
protective and welcoming positions and practices.
With
the founding of the League of Nations in 1920, the Commission for
Refugees was established on 27 June 1921. Among other forms of
assistance, the “NansenPassport” was created to give the stateless
some official recognition. (Britannica, 2016). Even after the
establishment of the United Nations Convention on Refugees in 1951,
ambivalence continued. In general, attitudes and practices regarding
refugees are highly dependent on current ideological and political
priorities. Hungarian refugees were basically welcomed in 1956 while
later groups, for example those coming from Afghanistan, are now met
with closed doors.
For
decades, fleeing one’s country and organizing entry into another has
been the sole responsibility of the refugees, themselves (except those
under the United Nations quota system). Over time, this has caused the
creation of a huge, welloiled human trafficking machine, now a
significant profit center for organized crime (Europol, 2016). It is
fair to say that attitudes in the West fostered the development of
these horrific human smuggling practices, which it now so vociferously
decries and condemns.
For
a long time, right wing propaganda has identified refugees or migrants
with Islam. Flourishing conspiracy theories warn of the dangers of
Islam taking over Europe and instituting Sharia Law, and refugees are
often pictured flooding European borders en masse. Less extreme
versions of this narrative have gradually become main stream and even
political parties that claim to be social democratic now practice what
they call “strict and just” policies towards refugees, with closed
borders and massive rejection.
A
fearful narrative about Islam is increasingly dominating the political
scene. These narratives of fear and the ideation and collective
fantasies molded on their themes, have roots in European History.
EUROPE
AND ISLAM
Islamism
or Islamic fundamentalism, as we know it both in Europe and elsewhere,
does not signify a “clash between civilizations” but instead
represents internal conflicts and contradictions within Islam,
determined by historical, cultural, and social contexts also rooted in
Western history. Meddeb, an Arabic intellectual and Muslim, analyzed
presentday fundamentalism, as the result of a “malady” within
Islam: Namely, a generalized intellectual deterioration, such that
ideologies alien to the intentions of the Qu’ran are used for
political purposes having more to do with the cohesion of the group,
than with the spread of Islam (Meddeb, 2003). According to this view,
we are not dealing with tensions between them and us, Islam and the
West, but more between modernism and traditionalism. This is a theme
that has been important in the West especially in relation to National
Socialism and the rise of Nazi Germany and earlier in relation to the
reactionary “antienlightenment” and antimodernistic trends,
which incorporate themes from 18th century Romanticism.
Europe’s
relationship to Islam is steeped in a long history of skepticism and
fear, marked by projections of aggression and mysticism as far back as
medieval times (Geisser, 2004). Back then, Europe needed a common
enemy to achieve religious and ideological unity. The image of this
medieval enemy reemerges from time to time. In the 19th century, a
fearful picture that involved danger and threat to Western values
emerged once more, and later, in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of
the Balkan wars, malignant antiIslamic activities developed in
tandem with an ultranationalistic ideology (Volkan, 1996).
The
traditional theological contest between Islam and Christianity (Jihad
vs. Crusade) and the need to protect and unify a European Christian
identity have prevailed for centuries. According to the European
Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia, as the number of Muslim
communities in Europe has increased in the last 50–60 years, so has
xenophobic fear and violence.
European
Islamophobia has gained strength as a result of the recent development
of more radical forms of Islamic fundamentalism, which portray the
West, especially its urban culture, as sinful. In these ideologies,
large cities are believed to be filled with corrupt people hungering
only for wealth and pleasure (Heine, 2001, 2002; Laqueur, 2001;
Serauky, 2000). On the other hand, the Islamic State, governed by
Sharia Law is seen as the ideal way of organizing society–one
portrayed as a place where all needs are satisfied. Islamists claim
that Islamic law shall “triumph on the scale of all humanity for
such law is considered the ultimate expression of divine truth” (Meddeb
2003, p. 157). Taken to its extreme, as exemplified now by the
socalled Islamic State (ISIS), this implies the horrifying possibility
of either converting or killing anyone who does not accept this
“divine truth”. Central parts of this type of ideology are found
in Europe as well.
ANTI-MODERNISM
AND EUROPE
Bohleber
described similarities between basic beliefs and fantasies in Nazi
ideology and those found in religious/political fundamentalist
ideology (Bohleber, 2002). Common among them are a myth of an ideal
past, a dream of the perfect utopian society, a need to defend against
external threats (e.g., modernism and Western influence) and a death
cult. Additionally, both are preoccupied with purity and blood, a
sense of entitlement and a concomitant glorification of victimhood and
martyrdom (Volkan, 2003), and also the subordination of women and
rejection of homosexuality.
Burma
and Margalit claim that antagonism against modernism was deeply rooted
in European culture, well before the Nazi cult. As a parallel to
“Orientalism” (the study of the West’s representations of the
East—in art, etc.—as culturally inferior), they developed
Occidentalism (the study of the East’s representations of the West),
and claimed that antimodernism in Islamic fundamentalism borrowed
from discourses that aroused European opposition to the enlightenment
(Burama & Margolit, 2004).
Embedded
in these ideological beliefs are collective fantasies of group
cohesion of purification and cleansing (of the unwanted or dirty), of
sacrifice, and of scapegoats. Women are seen as both sexually
provocative and dirty, and have to be controlled. Furthermore, there
are fantasies of becoming one with the group through a holy quest and,
in the case of sacrifice and martyrdom, unification with God in
paradise.
It
follows from this that Islamism and Islamophobic and xenophobic
fantasies have similar or parallel roots in ideologies that oppose
modernism (and now globalization) and that this has historical Western
roots in antienlightenment movements.
The
growing xenophobia in Europe parallels similar trends in the orient,
especially in Islamic extreme fundamentalism’s fearful image of the
modern West. Victims of this “ideological clash” are, among others,
the refugees who now find themselves in painful conditions in camps or
detention centers in southern Europe and elsewhere.
This
antimodernistic image of foreigners influences how refugees are
perceived in Europe. Are there echoes of this fearful imagery in
clinical practice, as well? In the following section, I will discuss
this question, but limit myself to a few aspects of the care and
treatment that refugees receive and what may be relevant for
psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic response to the present crisis.
POSTTRAUMATIC
PROCESSES
As
a rule, refugees live under circumstances that are unsuitable for
healthy development and, more often than not, conditions that cause
illness. Preventive measures and treatment that could be implemented
upon arrival are often unavailable. For example, identifying the most
vulnerable groups might be helpful but seldom occurs, so, mothers with
small children, pregnant women, torture survivors, elderly, who could
be helped by such measures, seldom get it (NRC & Oxfam, 2017;
Turner, 2015; UNHCR, 2017).
Clinicians
often identify refugees as persons who have experienced “trauma”
or as persons with “trauma”. Furthermore, in psychoanalysis, using
the word “trauma”, is in and of itself, highly problematic because
the word implies something static and reified, like a “thing” in
the mind, and this usage tends to divert attention from the dynamic
and reorganizing processes in the traumatized person’s mind, body
and relationships with others that occur after having been exposed to
atrocities (Oliner, 2012) and it coheres with mechanistic models of
the mind (van der Hart, Nijenhuis & Steele, 2006). Posttraumatic
processes depend on the level of personality organization, on earlier
traumatizing experiences, on the circumstances during the atrocities,
themselves, and, most importantly, on how the survivor is responded to
afterwards (Classen et al., 2006; Keles, Friborg, Idsře, Sirin
& Oppedal, 2016; Opaas, Hartmann, WentzelLarsen, &
Varvin, 2015; Opaas & Varvin, 2015; Varvin &
Rosenbaum, 2003; Vervliet, Lammertyn, Broekaert, & Derluyn,
2013). It is the individual’s responses to the atrocity, as well as
the responses of others, and of society as a whole, which will, to a
large degree, determine the fate of the traumatized person or group.
Convincing research has confirmed the importance of responses to the
traumatized afterwards, beginning with Hans Keilson’s seminal work
on Jewish children survivors after the Second World War and continuing
with later research (Gagnon & Stewart, 2013; Keilson &
Sarpathie, 1979; Simich & Andermann, 2014; Ungar, 2012).
TRAUMATIZATION
AND ITS RESPONSES: A SHORT EXPOSITION
Traumatized
people struggle with mental and physical pain, which is often
difficult for them to understand or put into words. Their pain may be
expressed as a dissociated state of mind, as a physical pain or other
somatic experiences and dysfunctions, as overwhelming thoughts and
feelings, as behavioral tendencies and relational styles, and as ways
of living. The effects of both early and later traumatization may show
up in the symptoms of many diagnostic categories, of which PTSD is
just one. Other manifestations of traumatization psychiatric illness
may include depression, addiction, eating disorders, personality
dysfunctions and anxiety states (LeuzingerBohleber, 2012;
Purnell, 2010; Taft et al., 2007; Vaage et al., 2010;
Vitriol, Ballesteros, Florenzano, Weill & Benadof, 2009).
Common
to these manifestations are deficiencies in the representational
system related to the traumatic experiences. These experiences are
painfully felt and make their impressions on the body and the mind
without, however, being inscribed in the mind’s life narratives.
They are either not symbolized at all, or deficiently symbolized, in
the sense that they cannot be expressed in narratives in such a way
that meaning can emerge and be reflected upon. The traumatic
experiences remain in the mind as dissociated or encapsulated
fragments that have a disturbing effect on mood and mental stability (Rosenbaum
& Varvin, 2007; Sossin, 2007).
As
a rule, extreme traumatization (like rape and torture) eludes meaning
when it happens and it also precludes the formation of an internal
third position where the person can create a reflecting distance to
what is happening and what has happened. This inner witness, so vital
for making meaning of experiences, is attacked during such extreme
experiences and when an external witness who could contain and confirm
the pain also fails, the traumatized person is left alone (Vińar,
2017).
The
traumatized person will try to organize experiences in unconscious
templates or scenarios that are expressed in different, more or less
disguised, ways in relation to others and the self. When working
psychoanalytically with traumatized patients, the analyst will
inevitably become involved, through projective identification, with
these unsymbolized, fragmentary, and usually strongly affective,
scenarios related to the patient’s traumatizing experiences. This
happens from the first encounter with the patient and is mostly
expressed in nonverbal interaction with the patient. It may take a
long time before these manifestations can be woven into a meaningful
narrative with a historical context that relates to both traumatic and
pretraumatic experiences (Varvin, 2016a).
There
is increasing evidence that psychoanalytic therapies are helpful for
people who have been traumatized in comprehensive ways. This approach
may help address crucial areas in the clinical presentation of complex
traumatization (Herman, 1992) that are not targeted by other socalled
empiricallysupported treatments. Psychoanalytic therapy has a
historical perspective and works with problems related to the self and
selfesteem, enhancing the person’s ability to resolve reactions to
trauma through improved reflective functioning. It aims at
internalization of more secure inner working models of relationships.
A further focus is work and on improving social functioning. Finally,
as substantiated in several studies, psychoanalytic psychotherapy
tends to result in continued improvement after treatment ends (Schottenbauer,
Schottenbauer, Glass, Arnkoff & Gray, 2008).
TRAUMA
AND THE SOCIAL CONTEXT
For
these unnamed, insufficiently or never symbolized experiences to
approach some kind of integration and be given some meaningful place
in the individual’s mind, they need to be actualized and given form
in a holding and containing therapeutic relationship. This means that
the analyst must accept living with the patient in areas of selfexperience
and memory that are painfully absent of meaning and at times filled
with horror (Varvin, 2015, 2016b).
As
a rule, however, this is not enough. Without societal, cultural, and
political acknowledgement of the traumatic events, working on them may
be extremely difficult for an individual or a group, and feelings of
unreality and fragmentation related to these disturbing experiences
may continue.
One
of the most difficult contributors to personal suffering in a massive
social traumatization (such as the Cultural Revolution, the genocides
of Rwanda, the Balkans, or Kampuchea, and now the Syrian disaster) is
the feeling of complete helplessness when observing close family
members, especially children, being mistreated, or killed, and not
being able to help or protect them. This underscores the importance of
Niederland’s seminal insights on survival guilt (Niederland, 1968,
1981), a theme very much marginalized in the trauma literature for
years.
In
summary: How extreme experiences will affect individuals and/or groups,
will depend on the severity, complexity and duration of the
traumatizing events, as well as on context, developmental stage, and
internal object relations. Furthermore, it will depend upon the extent
to which earlier traumatic associations are activated (Opaas &
Varvin, 2015), as well as the support and the treatment offered after
the event, and society’s responses to it in general.
OUR
ALIENATING DISCOURSE OF THE TRAUMATIZED
The
extreme experiences bestowed upon today’s refugees have
repercussions on individuals, but also on group functioning and on the
cultural anchoring of life in exile.
Extreme
traumatization is profoundly identity changing. Both children and
adults experience it as something unexpected that should not have
happened. It leaves them with a sense of deep helplessness and the
experience of being abandoned by all good and helping objects. These
profound feelings of helplessness and of being abandoned may continue
during the posttraumatic phase, wherein the survivor—to a greater
or lesser degree, depending on the circumstances—may develop a
deepseated fear of being alone in an impending catastrophe with no one
to help or care. An inner feeling of desperation, and fear of
psychosomatic breakdown, with a fear of annihilation may ensue and
much of posttraumatic pathology may be seen as a defense against
this impending catastrophe.
According
to Winnicott (1974), extreme traumatization, experienced as
catastrophic, evokes primordial anxieties related to earliest fears of
breakdown and doom, and life will be more or less impregnated by
impending catastrophe afterwards.
As
we see in Syria today, extreme experiences affect the totality of life
experiences and the trauma concept is insufficient to capture, or even
remotely describe, this situation, but may, however, give some relief
to clinicians (and others) from the intolerable feelings evoked by
extreme experiences. The term “trauma” becomes a place where alien
and intolerable elements may be placed so that some meaning may be
assigned to the uncanny experience evoked in the countertransference.
This
kind of reductionism is also found in psychoanalytic discourse, and
very likely has to do with longstanding conflicts about trauma theory
within psychoanalysis. At present, it probably also reflects the
limited exposure of most psychoanalysts to such extreme phenomena. On
the clinical level, a restricted and reductionist concept of
“trauma” may reflect the fact that “trauma” has become an
object (not a concept) of projection of uncanny fantasies.
“Trauma” has come to denote an area for extreme anxiety,
destructiveness, and perverted Eros, something utterly alien but
nevertheless known among others from the “fear of breakdown”.
There is, as Freud showed, a close connection with what is
“Unheimlich” and what is “Heimlich” (Freud, 1919;
Rosenbaum, 2006).
CONCLUSION
Our
encounter with refugees, today, implies confrontation with the alien
and uncanny on several levels. On a societal level, we see chaoslike
anxieties being stirred up and exploited by strong ideological forces
that evoke a fantasy of salvation through purity and rejection of the
alien. On group and individual levels, the anxieties dramatically
evoke the conflict between compassion and rejection and, at the same
time, undermine reparation and integration.
There
is a strong desire for unity and purity behind these projective forces.
The ideological climate that emerges, as described briefly, is rooted
in European history. The conflict between traditionalism and modernity
evokes anxieties, especially when confronted with the alien,
represented in narratives on Muslims or Islam. At a deeper level it
concerns the eruption of the Uncanny (das Unheimliche) (Freud,
1919).
Traumatization
implies an extreme meeting with primordial anxieties, and our relation
to the traumatized person tends to provoke similar anxieties. Our
attempts to theorize about the experiences of the traumatized may
suffer in this meeting with the extreme alien and uncanny, and may
lead to reductionism on a conceptual level or to avoidance in clinical
and other practices.
We
are now seeing alienating processes on a large scale in Europe and in
the West resulting in immense suffering. It is important that we be
aware of similar repercussions affecting the clinical field.
Notes
1
I use the term refugees for people who have fled from their country
and crossed borders in order to achieve safety when their country of
origin or residence has not been able to protect them. They will have
the status as asylum seekers when they arrive in a potential host
country. The UNCHR defines asylumseekers as individuals who have
sought international protection and whose requests for refugee status
have not yet been adjudicated, irrespective of when they may have been
lodged. Different terms are used with political and ideological
implications: BBC, for example, uses the word migrant for all, while
Al Jazeera use the term refugee. Different derogatory terms are often
used in rightwing, xenophobic media.
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