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Societal PTSD? Historic shock in Northern Ireland
Abstract
Can there be a societal form of PTSD? Do other individual constellations have a societal parallel? Are there implications for psychotherapists? The answer to these questions is ‘yes’; but this must be systematically demonstrated. In the world of psychoanalysis there has been a tendency, in addressing societal questions, to abandon the rigour of the consulting room, and to resort to long-distance speculation.This paper describes some of the work of the Irish Institute for Psycho-Social Studies in studying the Protestant community in Northern and Southern Ireland, and particularly a paramilitary-dominated community in Belfast. It details both methodology and findings, and shows powerful parallels between the experience and attitudes of this community and the experience of individual PTSD. This ongoing work will undoubtedly have value for policy makers. For psychotherapists there are important implications about the existence of cultural pathology in a client's psyche – and perhaps the psychotherapist's! Copyright © 2004 Whurr Publishers Ltd.
... Whereas the national psyche is not identical to an individual one, the similarities offer a conceptual framework that is valuable for the analysis of socio-political processes (LaCapra, 2014). In fact, it is possible to think of collective trauma as a " societal PTSD " that strikes an entire community and affects all of its members (Elliott, Bishop, & Stokes, 2004). This may explain why nations sometimes react in a way that is reminiscent of a national trauma, while the trigger event may actually have affected only a few individuals. ...
This paper analyzes the impact of past trauma on national behavior in times of threat, applying Volkan's (2001, 2004) theory of multigenerational impact of trauma on large groups, and La Capra's (2014) theory of the use of the concept of individuals' trauma for understanding the behavior of traumatized collectives. The study of the Israeli response to the abduction and murder of three teenagers in summer 2014 is consistent with these theories, and shows how a collective with trauma in its past behaves similarly to a posttraumatic person. The paper contends that due to its traumatic past, the Jewish Israeli public perceived a tragic but limited (from a national security standpoint) hostile action as a grave collective threat, which invoked past demons and brought back existential fears. These feelings were inflamed by the Israeli media and leaders, paving the way for an escalation of the event into an armed battle.
... Nancy Hollander (1997) explored events in South America and later (Hollander 2010) in the United States after September 11, 2001. Mitch Elliott, Kenneth Bishop and Paul Stokes (2004) and John Alderdice (2007, 2009) examined the situation in Northern Ireland. Samuel Erlich (2010) tried to understand terrorist mind . ...
... During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, deeply disruptive phenomena have been observed at the societal level that closely paralleled symptoms of PTSDs at the individual level: pattern repetition; disrupted relationships between individuals, between groups, and individual to group; emergency mode of community functioning; decivilization or societal regression; political paralysis and a confused identity at the societal level. 11 A recent research report on the situation in Afghanistan notes that in some provinces, ''[w]hen asked about their emotional state, more than half of the interviewees spoke of feelings of anger, and almost a third felt depression and frustration.'' 12 Furthermore, according to Afghanistan's health minister Dr. Suraya Dalil, 60 percent of the Afghan population is suffering from mental health problems. ...
Abstract This article discusses the potential of emotionally based strategic communications (EBSCs) as an extension of traditional strategic communications in prevention of societal stress-related disorders. The concept of EBSCs takes into consideration dominant emotional maps of a specific sociocultural environment in which communications take place. EBSCs may have a significant potential to transform mainly negative-dominant emotional maps of targeted social groups into more positive ones, as a precondition of building a more resilient and stress-resistant social environment. A better understanding of dominant emotional maps and their conditioning may facilitate restoration of more positive emotional maps by touching the right emotions of significant parts of the targeted social groups in the right way. Dominant emotional maps of societies afflicted by economic downturns, natural disasters, conflicts etc., are typically characterized by negatively valenced emotions. Persistent negatively valenced group-based dominant emotions may be used as a quantitative statistical measure of potential stress-related disorders and post-traumatic stress disorders among respected group members. The toxic power of extreme negative emotions, attitudes, actions, and behavior might be reduced by EBSCs as a communication method for transforming negative-dominant emotional maps into more positive ones. EBSCs are conceptualized as the positively valenced stimulation of a negatively emotionally affected group by an appropriate communication strategy to minimize dominant-negative emotional maps and behavior of the targeted group.
In February 2023 98-year-old former President Jimmy Carter entered hospice care and began spending his remaining time at home with his family. This paper describes his personal, and The Carter Center's financial, support for applying psychoanalytic approaches to understanding and calming large-group conflicts in Estonia and Albania and helping to enrich psychoanalytic knowledge of large-group psychology.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of prison experience in ex-political prisoners in Northern Ireland in the context of changing and conflicting master narratives.
Design/methodology/approach
A series of nine interviews were conducted with Loyalist and Republican political ex-prisoners in Northern Ireland. Eight were male and one was female. All had been in prison for substantial sentences relating to the Troubles.
Findings
This study highlighted the challenges faced by political ex-prisoners regarding the changing conflicting master narratives in Northern Ireland and identified how they deal with these challenges. The participants adapted to post-conflict society by attempting to understand and make sense of their experiences, including justifying their actions as appropriate for the era and identifying positive changes in society resulting from the conflict.
Research limitations/implications
A narrative approach can be beneficial for understanding the experiences of political ex-prisoners. It enables a theoretical perspective to look not only at the personal but also at social elements of why people behave as they do. The findings demonstrate that political ex-prisoners do have different experiences to non-political ex-prisoners. The sample size was small and was drawn from a specific group of political ex-prisoners who were actively seeking reconciliation. The findings may be different for other groups.
Practical implications
A narrative approach can help the practitioner understand the context in which a person lives; ex-political prisoners may be very different from ordinary ex-prisoners because of the context in which they were imprisoned and the reasons for which they were imprisoned. They are likely to continue with the narrative of the conflict they fought in and may still have the same aims (e.g. Northern Ireland to become part of Ireland), though they may or may not believe in the same means. These are issues that should be discussed and elaborated when working with ex-political prisoners.
Social implications
The master narratives active in the society into which the political ex-prisoner is released may impact the success or otherwise of their re-integration into society.
Originality/value
Understanding the role of conflicting master narratives in dealing with the implications of being an ex-political prisoner.
This paper illustrates how psychoanalyst should consider an interdisciplinary approach in examining the gun violence in the United States. Besides offering individualized and shared psychological causes it is necessary to understand environmental, cultural, and historical influences. By providing examples for other countries, this paper describes how grasping on one's large-group identity and being exposed to entitlement ideologies and malignant propaganda influence people to commit murders.
A modified formal grounded theory on the ethic of transfer after conflict resolution has been established. There are two parts to this account. First a phenomenologically driven set of basic assumptions is deployed to shape the praxis. Then a meta-ethnographic synthesis is used to combine different approaches to conflict resolution in order to create another discrete interventional practice in ways that make us uneasy about each of the prior practices.
The result is an interventional approach that allows practitioners of conflict resolution in fractured communities to begin their interventions with an understanding of the cultural habitus in the first instance, followed up with processes of transformation through psychopolitical dialogues and ending with grassroots projects that return the conflict-resolution project into the hands of the stakeholders whose cultural habitus was determined at the onset. Finally, psychopolitical dialogue with the select group of stakeholders ends with the choice of a number of grassroots projects that in turn generalize the results from small groups into the larger population.
Such an ethic of transfer then starts with gatekeepers to sanction the psychopolitical dialogues and returns to the same gatekeepers who guide the selection of grassroots projects. The result is a recursive loop that treats the ethic of transfer of a conflict resolution project as part of an organic whole rather than an addendum. Copyright
This keynote conference address argues that therapy can contribute to a positive future, but only if therapists recognize their own inherently side-taking position. It suggests that there is a polarization between therapy that views itself as a standardized ‘expert system’, and therapy as qualitative ‘local knowledge’, and that each of these implies its own position on how people and society should be. I then describe four fields where I believe therapy can contribute to a better future: work with conflict, societal trauma, ecopsychology, and power within the therapy relationship. Copyright © 2005 Whurr Publishers Ltd.
ABSTRACT In Northern Ireland's paramilitary-dominated communities (PDCs), the historically regressed social structure is reflected in rather different unconscious psychic structures in individual clients. Behind the bland exterior of male clients one finds an archaic superego, and role models more at home in the film The Godfather than in modern democratic society.
In his important book, first published in 1997, Thomas Scheff offers an approach to researching human behavior which relates the smallest parts of social interaction to the greatest wholes of social structure. These are the details and connections usually found only in the finest novels, but Scheff combines the insights of the humanities and social sciences to capture the same evocative details of sight, sound, and context, better to understand what he calls 'human reality'. He puts a fresh emphasis on the importance of emotions in the social bond, and describes in newly subtle ways the outer and inner lives of persons in real life, such as inner-city children, and in fiction, such as Jane Austen's heroines. By closely observing the significance of words and gestures in the context in which they occur, he is able to illuminate the connection between people's lives and the society in which they live.
Discusses context, cues, internal feelings, and social relationships of shame and anger in discourse. Shame has been viewed as a negative emotion as well as in a positive light in which it is a normal and natural occurrence in everyday human life. Shame can be overt or covert in nature. It is more difficult to detect bypassed shame, since it is covert. Identifying anger in verbal behavior involves words or phrases that refer to mild anger, such as being annoyed, and to extreme forms, like being enraged. Often shame and anger co-occur, as some verbal behavior implies involvement of both emotions. A method for detecting anger and shame has been outlined which can be used in verbatim transcripts, narratives, or other texts. Paralinguistic gestures have also been analyzed. Charting emotions, as they occur in relationships, may provide new understanding of human behavior, as well as the nature and function of emotions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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