ABSTRACT
Expanding on the theme of traumatised group-formations, Elisabeth Rohr’s article, Traces of trauma in post-conflict Guatemala: theoretical reflections on the effects of trauma on a social organisation, emphasises how the psychoanalytic debates about trauma invariably point to the world of politics, revealing political landscapes of human rights violations, political terror, war, and genocide. These conditions produce and reproduce trauma in many parts of the world (Jones, 2006). The author criticises the current uses of PTSD, post-traumatic stress syndrome, for medicalising trauma into a unilinear and decontextualised disorder. Its hegemony, she argues, has led to the neglect of collective manifestations of massive trauma and their impact on the surrounding society as areas of scientific inquiry. “Extreme trauma” (Bettelheim, 1979) or “massive trauma” (Volkan, 2000), it is argued, cannot be cured individually when the social and political context remains repressive, human rights violations are unprosecuted, perpetrators remain in power, and society as a whole denies the losses and avoids mourning. From the notions of a psychosocial concept of trauma, the author moves on to describe through her own experience how trauma invades, intoxicates, and damages the relationships within a social institution. A thirty-six year genocidal war has
taken place in Guatemala, obliterating 440 Indian villages in six years. Two hundred thousand Indians were massacred, often after torture. Although documented in detail in the reports of two Truth Commissions, the atrocities and the victims’ suffering have never been officially acknowledged. Today’s Guatemala is hostage to chronic and perpetual crisis, characterised by random, endemic, and epidemic violence, as well as interminable impunity. The victims of the war have locked up their horrifying memories in silence. Violence seems to be the only language spoken and understood by everyone. The author was asked in 2010 by the government-owned German Technical Cooperation to offer a workshop on “Psycho-emotional support and stress management” for employees of a large national institution, set up to restructure and reform the malfunctioning system of criminal prosecution. We are given a striking description of how the author, from the moment she arrived in Guatemala, was confronted with severe interferences. Times were suddenly and surprisingly changed, the number of participants unilaterally enlarged, rules of confidentiality previously agreed on suspended, and the workshop put under surveillance. No attempts were made to establish a dialogue or a trustworthy professional relationship. The abrogation of major agreements, lack of communication, and denial of cooperation, seemed like an act of violence, leaving the author feeling degraded, intimidated, disempowered, and infuriated. She later realised that the constantly changing structural components of the workshop, the denunciation, and her countertransference reactions were the signs of an ongoing psychosocial trauma that had invaded the institution, the employees’ professional relationships, and also the workshop. The participants had been forced to be part of a workshop they had never asked for, without having been told why, or what the workshop was about. The institutional violence they were subject to was added to the widespread results of the trauma they were meant to deal with on a daily basis in their work. Rohr writes that the experience made her understand how it feels to be part of a traumatised institution: having to confront and cope with broken structures, authoritarian rule, aggression, and violence. This is a situation of loneliness and guilt, the perspective of the victim. The experience also conveyed how unprotected and vulnerable this institution must feel in its daily confrontation with the abysses of a traumatised society. Any show of weakness, through negotiation or cooperation, was seen as too dangerous in this situation, thus the institution always had to be strong and successful.
