Thanatos and Massive Psychic Trauma: the Impact of the Death Instinct on Knowing, Remembering, and Forgetting

Abstract

The connection between massive psychic trauma and the concept of the death instinct is explored using the basic assumptions that the death instinct is unleashed through and is in a sense characteristic of traumatic experience, and that the concept of the death instinct is indispensable to the understanding and treatment of trauma. Characteristics of traumatic experience, such as dissolution of the empathic bond, failure to assimilate experience into psychic representation and structure, a tendency to repeat traumatic experience, and a resistance to remembering and knowing, are considered as trauma-induced death instinct derivatives. An initial focus is on the individual, on how death instinct manifestations can be discerned in the survivors of trauma. Next the intergenerational force of trauma is examined; a clinical vignette illustrates how the death instinct acts on and is passed on to the children of survivors. Finally, the cultural or societal aspects of trauma are considered, with an eye to how death instinct derivatives permeate cultural responses (or failures to respond) to trauma. Because trauma causes a profound destructuring and decathexis, it is concluded that the concept of the death instinct is a clinical and theoretical necessity.

Silence as the Voice of Trauma

“…In the face of trauma, the cessation of speech as dead-like is contrasted by disintegration of language into sounds such as screams and sighs. Laub and Lee (2003) discuss the important link between massive psychic trauma and the cessation of the inner dialogue when they refer to Freud's concept of the death instinct as a process that leads to a failure of the empathic connection at the time of the traumatization.…”

Massive Trauma in A Community Exposed to Asbestos: Thinking and Dissociation among the Inhabitants of Casale Monferrato

“…Such an attitude also shows the narcissistic and destructive aspects that usually characterize suffering communities and institutions (Bohleber, 2010;Kaes et al, 1988;Krystal, 1968;Laub & Lee, 2003). Only after long and strenuous battles were fought by the Association of Families and Victims of Asbestos (AFeVA) were the residents made aware 2 of the dangers of Eternit, in that it affected not only their physical health but also their psychological health.…”

Face to Face

“…It is the inexplicable, unnamable, unassimilable aspect of genocide that obliterates knowing and remembering leaving emptiness, absence, an erasure in its place. The psychic landscape becomes desolate (Laub & Auerhahn, 1993;Laub & Lee, 2001), an area of deadness (Grand, 2000). That which cannot be known weaves its way into the body and the psyche shaping the unconscious psychic representations for generations to come.…”

“…This collapse of the knowable becomes the organizing principle, the genetic inheritance of those who follow. For Laub and Lee (2001) it is the death instinct itself released in the survivor that is transmitted across the generations. It is the death instinct as the destruction of the perceiving self and of that which is to be perceived.…”

“…In the words of Davoine and Gaudilliere (2004) what gets transmitted are "pieces of frozen time." The impenetrability of psychic death may take decades, evolving and altering the landscape of people on its way, being relived over and over in many generations before knowing may even be approached (Laub & Lee, 2001). "The long shadow of history and historic trauma works itself deeply into psyches" (Harris, 2007, p. 664).…”