Editor’s Note: After the 17th Meeting, IDI Board Member Edward R. Shapiro, M.D. circulated the following articulation of an IDI method of engagement.
International conflict is marked by powerful feelings, often poorly understood, across cultural and ethnic boundaries. These feelings emerge around security concerns, economic needs, religious tensions and traumatic pasts and regularly lead to impasse. The International Dialogue Initiative (IDI; www.internationaldialogueinitiative.com) brings together a small group of psychoanalysts, political scientists, politicians, lawyers, historians, economists and other leaders from a range of nationalities, generations and ethnic groups to study human experience through the lens of differing disciplines in order to maximize psychological understanding. We focus on the psycho-historical origins of conflict and the possibility of gaining perspective on unmanageable feelings. We have increasingly recognized, through the work of Vamik Volkan, that each large group (ethnic, national, religious) carries with it an organizing “identity”, created through the transmission of narratives, symbols, and the residue of chosen trauma and glories. This identity can readily be reactivated by political leaders, leading to wishes for revenge and retribution. But what aspects of such trauma are carried by individuals – and how can those aspects help us understand the large group?
We take as a given that individuals are representatives of their cultures, nationalities, multigenerational pasts, and ethnic traditions. Even if they are not aware of it, they represent to others these elements of their identity. Given the group’s commitment to deepening international dialogue and studying conflict, we attend to painful feelings as they emerge in individual reports and note the group’s process during our meetings as potentially reflective of international tensions. In this brief communication, I will illustrate this method through the use of two cases.
In an opening discussion about the way Germany has borne the full burden of guilt and responsibility for World War II and its atrocities, a British negotiator in our group notes that Americans and the British also carry some responsibility for carrying out terrible things during the war. He tells the story of a heroic Polish woman who spied for the Allies, taking enormous risks and saving many lives. After the War, the British refused to give her a passport and she was murdered in a British hotel. He suggests that the entire burden of guilt might more appropriately be shared if it were understood more complexly, rather than located in stereotyped and polarized delineations of German “perpetrators”, Jewish “victims” and allied “heroes”. Following this discussion, we turned to our first case.
Case 1: A young Polish psychologist presents a social intervention she has organized in her country about reflective citizenship. Since many World War II concentration camps were located in Poland, they are often attributed to the Polish people, though they were run by the Nazis. Her intervention invites Poles to consider what aspects of the war actually “belong” to Poland? The group asks how this commitment evolved in her own life. She hesitates to respond, indicating that she doesn’t like to think about her past because, when she does, she weeps. She then reports the following:
Her grandmother lived through World War II, and her mother was born right after the war when Warsaw was totally destroyed. Overwhelmed by managing post-war survival, grandmother did not speak to mother about the war; she softened the traumas of the war for the developing family. Our presenter reports that her favorite childhood book, given to her by her beloved grandmother and kept behind her bed, contained stories about the soap that was made from the fat of Jewish corpses. Grandmother told her, as a child, stories about the war that frightened her. In school, she watched horrifying documentaries. She often woke up screaming at night. No adult helped her with these feelings or put these stories and films in perspective. This is an example of transgenerational transmission of trauma, placed into a child without conscious awareness. As an adult, her ability to tolerate these war images ended when she had her own children (mirroring her grandmother’s inability to share the war with her children). She can no longer watch such movies and limits herself to seeing romantic comedies. An IDI member asks her what might allow her to look again at such movies and she answers, “I might be able to do it if some others watched them with me and held my hand.” The group recognized the parallel of this story with the earlier discussion in the group about the need to spread war guilt around more countries.
This Polish grandmother, a war survivor, unconsciously located confusing and complex feelings of terror, guilt, and anger in a child who could not manage them. The group considered the possibility that the story might reveal a parallel in the behavior of nations, who have simplistically parceled out this range of feelings, preserving ‘heroism’ for the victors and inhibiting international integration and perspective. What are the implications of this insight for international discussions? Might each individual carry in their experience a map of generational and national trauma, offering a perspective to understand what these representatives carry that contributes to impasse in conflict negotiations?
Case 2: A discussion between an older senior Israeli former official and a British negotiator comes to a stop around an exploration of the current Palestinian conflict. A Palestinian member reports on the current disengagement of Palestinians, their dissatisfaction with their own leaders, and their increasing long-term sense of helplessness. The Israeli states, however, that things are much better between the two cultures in Israel because the economic situation for Palestinians has so much improved. In his view, Palestinians, especially Israeli Arabs, have consolidated their political parties and can have an impact on the formation of the government, though they will not be able to take up leadership roles in Israeli society because of the structure of “The Jewish State”. The British negotiator suggests that open dissent from the impoverished and disenfranchised is much more easily managed than the dissent that begins to emerge once the group is better off and less marginalized. With beginning economic and political power comes stronger demands about equal participation. The implied challenge to the existence of the “Jewish” state emerging in this discussion evokes such a passionate response in the older Israeli that the conversation cannot proceed. A second Israeli reports on his conflict between wanting a Jewish state and wanting to be forgiven for wanting it. The conversation turns to the current power operations of the white majority in America. What would it take in any nation for the dominant voices of the more powerful players to put their own strongly held beliefs and sources of power on the table for review in order to get beyond impasse?
DISCUSSION
These two examples represent the range of opportunities the group’s discussion offers. But the method for effective engagement requires attention to some technical considerations. The first is how to help presenters recognize that their psychological conflicts are not to be understood as individual psychopathology to be opened up for “psychotherapy” from the group. The presenters are not asking to be in the role of ‘patient’ and psychologically trained IDI members are not taking up roles as ‘therapists’. Instead, the group has negotiated a recognition that each of us can be understood as a representative — both conscious and unconscious — of our nations, our ethnicities, our multigenerational pasts. The troubles we carry around with us derive from our environments and represent aspects of social conflict that we have unwittingly been invited to carry on behalf of others.
For example, if I am a third-generation post war Polish woman and my grandmother who survived the war has repressed the horror and is too traumatized by the immediate post war management struggle to make sense of it, she is unavailable to help me understand our history. If she cannot recognize the adult protection her grandchild needs because no one protected her and she unwittingly passes on the horror onto me and, if it is unmediated by my mother who is part of a shared family denial, I will be terrorized as a child by a range of powerful feelings I don’t understand. But when I am an adult, I might be able to begin to see what I need from others to put that trauma in some perspective. I will need the help of others who have differentially managed the trauma of post-war anxiety and social reflection on guilt in order to put my own experience in perspective.
Is this discussion usable as a metaphor for three- generational transmission of trauma — and is it a beginning recognition of the consequences of simplistic formulations about perpetrators and victims, and the need for more complex international management of war trauma? The presenter’s case was about reflective citizenship. Can coming to terms with these experiences and putting voice to them mobilize more effectively the citizenship role? Speaking these memories to our group appeared to allow the presenter to take up leadership, an authority that she had not previously exercised in the group.
The second technical challenge is to help individual IDI members begin to recognize that their national experiences — and the group’s process — can be used as metaphors for the range of global conflicts. For example, can the passionate (and seemingly unmovable) commitment to a Jewish State (“Never again!”), though derived from a unique experience of the Holocaust, be used to begin to understand the anxiety, resistance, and power politics mobilized by other seemingly unipolar national majorities in the face of the impending ‘threat’ of integrating difference, e.g., the anxiety of the white majority in America about the challenge of immigration, the anxiety in Jordan about the sizable Palestinian population, etc.?
Once similar dynamics are recognized across cultures and nations, there is an opportunity to go deeper within each culture to tease out the unique cultural histories, the significance of particular ‘chosen trauma’ and the symbolic connections that make each culture unique.
Summary Concepts:
- Individuals, small groups, organizations and nations are all open systems. Each is configured with an internal world, an external world and a boundary function that mediates between the two (A. Modell, E. Erikson).
- Open systems are linked through the communication of feelings (A. Modell).
- For individuals, that boundary function mediates between the internal views of the self, and the views of others. For groups and organizations, the mission is the boundary.
- Each individual is representative of their culture, gender, race, ethnicity, multigenerational history, whether they are aware of it or not. They carry signs of these identities that others can perceive and relate to (E. Shapiro).
- Painful experience, when put into words, can illuminate aspects of personal and social history. Integration of multiple role identities within an individual increases the potential for engagement as citizen. For groups and organizations (and nations), differences can be put to use if subordinated and integrated with a mission (E. Shapiro).
- A group’s affective responses can illuminate hidden meanings and pathways for understanding related to the topic under discussion.
References
Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton
Modell, A (1984). Psychoanalysis in a New Context. New York: International Universities Press.
Shapiro, E.R. (2020). Finding a Place to Stand: Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders and Citizens. Oxfordshire: Phoenix.
Volkan, V. (2006). Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts. Charlottesville: Pitchstone.
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