| In
the introduction to the first printing of his
book about the tribulations of Vietnam veterans,
Home From The War, Robert Jay Lifton, perhaps
inadvertently and certainly personally, defined
"psychohistory" (Lifton, 1973). In discussing
the previous eighteen years of his "psychological
investigations of historical issues",
he ruminates that his endeavour "halfway
along, came to be known as psychohistory."
At about this same time, in the early seventies,
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a writer of personal and
impassioned history of contemporary Soviet studies,
allowed his GULAG Archipelago to be released
in the West. The subtitle to his comprehensive
study of hundreds of inmates of the repressive
Soviet penal system is An Experiment in Literary
Investigation. Both authors, the latter seeking
to record an indelible truth of suffering in history
and the former attempting to explore a "trinity
of psychobiological universals" (including
guilt and cultural determinations interwoven with
contemporary historical elements), deal with the
larger theme of psychohistory:-the psychological
impact of being exposed to a trauma precipitated
by being in a place and time of historical significance.
The study of psychohistory
is, however, a discomforting business at best.
Lifton refers to one reason for this when he underlines
the need for what he refers to as "articulated
subjectivity" in the psychohistorian, or
the deliberate intrusion of the investigator in
an empathetic role in working with participants
(Fontana et al. would add "agents, targets
and witnesses" [Fontana et al., 1992]) in
a traumatic event in history. Charles Figley would
later name this sometimes overwhelming subjective
response to stories of horror, terror and helplessness
as "Compassion Fatigue" and he has written
of his strong sense that the most empathetic therapists
are the most vulnerable to compassion stress (Figley,
1995). Solzhenitsyn adds another uncomfortable
rigour for such studies of the confluence of trauma
with history, with his insistence on the cleansing
ritual of revealing as much of the truth about
the rationale, imposition and impact of suffering,
as possible. His dedication to his monumental
work on the GULAG reads
I dedicate
this
to all those
who did not live to tell it.
And may they
please forgive me
for not having
seen it all
not remembered
it all,
for not having
divined all of it.
For Dostoyevsky,
this would be the natural course of his fictional
masterpieces--the purification of character through
the absorption of illuminating suffering. For
the psychohistorian, it is a field of investigation
under constant objective and subjective challenge.
The source material is what can be respectfully
referred to as "survival literature."
In the written or verbal testimony of those who
have endured the hell-on-earth of an Auschwitz,
or a Kolyma camp, or a My Lai, the psychohistorian
will look for the truth in the telling of suffering.
It may well be impossible to disentangle this
truth from a moral mandate to reveal the
shattering impact on the psyche of the larger-than-life
event. The psychohistorian defends the rightful
place of such suffering in the footnotes of history,
and also enlightens the trauma therapist about
the historical context in which the trauma was
endured.
This is not an
easy task. The "historian-half' of the psychohistorian
must be prepared to shed a purist view of historical
truth and expand his/her boundaries of imaginable
horror and terror. There must be a recognition
of the profound dictates from the very souls of
survivors of historical trauma to ensure that
the story they tell is so compelling that the
"never again" vow is on the lips of
every member of the audience or readership. There
is generally no need to do more than be faithful
to the truth of their experience and the experiences
of those they witnessed in their suffering. Witnessing
breakdowns or assaults of the "physical integrity
of self' or others is now considered evidence
of confrontation with a traumatic stressor, according
to the description of Criterion A of Post-traumatic
Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the DSM-IV (APA, 1994).
For historians,
this perception of traumatic reality is acknowledged
to be influenced by many factors, including the
temperament of the witness and the current prevailing
situation of deprivation or physical pain. The
psychohistorian must be willing to view the individual
in distress as intimately connected to two often
conflicting worlds that will be influenced not
only by his/her personal psychological history,
but also by his/her perception of both the microcosmic
world in which the trauma was endured and the
larger macrocosm of the society that generated
or sustained the microcosm or "world of hurt".
It is assumed that the healing from the psychological
impact of the exposure to trauma takes place in
the therapeutic safety of the alliance between
therapist and client: a microcosm of its own that
is influenced by the larger recovery environment
of other emotional attachments for the client.
Historians, by
and large, prefer if the poets record the emotional
pain of history sustained by its survivors. Poets
have demonstrated a remarkable capacity for this
but some of the best are writing their own psychohistory
- their own reflections of their personal experiences
of survival and of madness. Siegfried Sassoon
wrote of his exposure to the trenches of WWI:
When thoughts
you've gagged all day come back to scare you;
And its been
proved that soldiers don't go mad
Unless they
lose control of ugly thoughts
That drive
them to jabber among the trees.
……………………………………………..
why, you can
hear the guns.
Hark! Thud,
thud, thud, -- quite soft.. .they never cease
-
Those whispering
guns - 0 Christ, I want to go out
And screech
at them to stop - I'm going crazy;
I'm going
stark, starring mad because of the guns.
In his eloquent
study of the survival literature of both the Holocaust
and the GULAG, Terence Des Pres argues compellingly
for the recognition of the survivor's scream of
anguish and psychic pain: "In the literature
of survival we find an image of things so grim,
so heartbreaking , so starkly unbearable, that
inevitably the survivors scream begins to be our
own. When this happens the role of spectator is
no longer enough" (Des Pres, 1976). How to
deal with this source material and exactly what
role, beyond that of spectator and scribe, to
assume when confronted by the survivor's enduring
agony, is the dilemma of the psychohistorian.
Then along comes
a book of the psychological pain of history set
in the discipline of the DSM-IV description of
PTSD: Soldier's Heart. Here is the melding
of psychology (Sarah Hansel, one of the editors,
is a clinical psychologist) and history (Ron Zaczek,
the principal editor, is a Vietnam Veteran - a
helicopter crew chief). In this book of poems,
letters and reports from survivors of the Second
World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War,
the editors have endeavoured to structure the
"symptoms" referred to in the letters
to the editors, within the rubric of the symptom
constellations of PTSD, as described in the DSM-IV.
In a section entitled "Intrusion," there
is this description of a flashback and a somatic
memory fragment that can be instantly associated
with the emotional history of the Vietnam War
for many veterans:
And whether
I am awake, or asleep, Out from the depths,
like a crazed demon, it comes. Unmercifully,
all enveloping and soul possessing it comes,
it comes, it so damn surely comes. You are
flung back as if it were happening right then.
The smell, the flashes, the concussions, the
explosions, the smell, the smell, the God
awful smell of powder and flesh and blood
and screaming and crying and swearing
Ursano, (1992)
in a commentary on the paper by Fontana et al.
which describes and ascribes different levels
of intensity of PTSD symptoms to those who have
inadvertently played differing roles in their
entrapment in traumatic history, discusses his
belief that the meaning of trauma shifts in time
with regard to the personal perception of risk,
threat, and responsibility. In effect, this is
the subtle invocation of the study of a person's
HIS-Story or HER-Story. The meaning of a trauma
becomes integrated not only in the social history
of the times, but also in the private recording
devices of the individual spirit to withstand
and to make sense of the chaos of meaning which
is trauma. Perhaps this too is the venue of the
psychohistorian, who truly seeks to comprehend
and vivify the intimate connection of trauma and
history. This humanistic concept of psychohistory
which requires a willingness to venture into the
depths of the horror of personal and historical
terror, is particularly clearly revealed in this
poem about the Holocaust by Edward Bond (Schiff,
1995):
We--even our
subjective self--
Are products
of history
Of political
changes
In history
two things join
our will and
things beyond our will
We remain
human only by changing
Each generation
must create its own humanity.
Reference
Bond, E. in Holocaust
Poetry, Compiled by H. Schiff, St Martin's
Press, New York: 1995, p.155.
Des Pres, T. The
Survivor. Oxford University Press, New York:
1976, p.49.
Figley, C. (Ed).
Compassion Fatigue, Bruner/Mazel, New York:
1995.
Fontana, A., Rosenheck,
R., Bret, J. (1992). War Zone Traumas and PTSD
Symptomatology. Journal of Nervous and Mental
Disease, 180:12.
Lifton, R.J. Home
From the War Vietnam Veterans
Neither Victims nor Executioners,
Basic Books, New York: 1973.
Rice, M. in Soldier's
Heart Survivors' Views of Combat Trauma,
S. Hansel, A. Steidle, G. Zaczek, R. Zaczek (Eds).
The Sidran Press, Lutherville, Maryland: 1995,
p.32.
Sassoon, S. "Repression
of War Experience", in The War Poets.
R. Giddings (Ed), Orion Books, New York: 1988,
p.142.
Solzhenitsyn,
A.I. GULAG Archipelago 1918-1956. Dedication,
Harper and Row, New York:
1973.
Ursano, R., Kao,
T.C., Fullerton, C. (1992). PTSD and Meaning:
Structuring Human Chaos. Journal of Nervous
and Mental Disease, 180:12.
©1997
by The American Academy of Experts in Traumatic
Stress, Inc. |
