ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysts have long known that, when an event stirs up intense emotions in an individual, this person will tend to recall past events associated with the same emotions and will sometimes get involved in new events that induce these same emotions again. Sometime such past events are those that took place before the person’s own birth, their images having been passed down through generations. When the event and what it stirs up are shared, communities and large groups’ common feelings, fears, and mental defences against these fears express themselves in political, social, or cultural actions and processes. In the previous chapter I described the reactivation of a firmly established chosen trauma. Chosen traumas can be reactivated with the aim of supporting the large group’s narcissistic investment in large-group identity with accompanying “bad” externalisations and projections on the Other without leading to human tragedies, and sometimes, as described in the previous chapter, with massive traumas. Besides reactivation of established chosen traumas, large groups under the influence of certain events sometimes go back into their histories and intertwine historical “memories” and associated affects with current political issues. This chapter provides an example of this intertwining.
