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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. |
