Many years ago a psychoanalyst named Trigant Burrow warned that it was useless to try and resolve individual neurosis without addressing our “social neurosis” which he believed existed throughout the species and that what we called “normality” was a serious distortion of our true potential (Burrow, 1984). Throughout the years other voices like Eric Fromm, Jules Henry, George Albee, and Jerome Frank have echoed a similar sentiment, insisting that our individualistic approach to problems cannot work because the problems are social and require social reform.
We are only now beginning to even discuss the possibility that the methods we have so far evolved as a species are inadequate to meet the challenge of our complex problems. When Jerome Frank called for “social reform” in 1976, we were only beginning to recognize that social reform was going to require, not just different legislation, or a retuning of the system, but an entirely different way of thinking, of viewing reality and our place in it. Laing (1967) reminded us that “It is of fundamental importance not to make the positivist mistake of assuming that, because a group are ‘in formation’ this means they are necessarily ‘on course’”.
We are still in a very rudimentary stage of our understanding of how to help traumatized people heal, of how to even describe what the healing process is, or what health looks like. Nonetheless, there are some hints and these suggestions for change refer back to the nine A’s of trauma mentioned above. For healing to occur, our patients require the opportunity to develop a new, enhanced, more self‐confirming network of attachment relationships. They must reconstitute a community of care within which they can safely grow. As a nation, we too need to restore ‐ or perhaps better stated ‐ create from scratch ‐ a sense of caring and safe community. Maybe it won’t be simply a community set in space but one also set in cyberspace as virtual communities are set up around the globe (Rheingold, 1993). In the context of safe relationships, our patients must learn to modulate emotional experience in a way that is tolerable but which unfolds the entire spectrum of emotions.
Emotional literacy programs could be substituted for the bombardment of violent programming that now floods our airwaves and movie screens. Feeling can be fun, but there are other emotions besides fear and rage. Ending the oppressive childrearing of men who are systematically trained not to feel emotions other than anger and the joy of victory over others, could go a long way towards decreasing violence. When our violent patients are encouraged and supported to touch other emotions without ridicule, violence gives way to fear and sadness, and then finally to joy.
Our patients must learn to manage aggression in ways that are enhancing to the self and their relationships with others. This requires them to learn how to adequately protect themselves and those they love from harm and it requires them to restrain themselves from acting aggressively on their impulses. We can teach nonviolence and we can act nonviolently without losing our capacity to self‐protect. Mature adults are able to settle differences through resolving conflict, cooperation, and coalition building, not through bullying or violence. It is time that we set a different national standard for conduct, even in government. If we really want to stop violence then we must confront our own ambivalence about it first.
The authority structure that is favored is a hierarchical one. Hierarchical authority is often necessary in times of emergency. But when hierarchical authority fails to give way to distributed authority when the emergency situation has passed, a situation remains which is a breeding ground for the abuse of power. We need checks and balances to stay on course. Individual patients must learn that they must not let anyone else bully them and that they cannot bully anyone else. A sign of improved national health would be indicated by a shift that truly pairs power with social responsibility and accountability. Today that is rarely the case.
If individual trauma survivors are to heal, they must remember and integrate into full consciousness, accompanied by the appropriate feelings, whatever is split‐off, unacceptable, and painful. As a nation we need to remember and face whatever is painful, dissociated, and denied about our past and present behavior. This is not likely to happen until we relinquish our addictions which help us to not feel, not remember, and not know. As long as a substantial proportion of our population is addicted to guns, we cannot hope to heal. Only in refusing to continue to avoid our painful and sometimes shameful past, can we get a grip on the automatic reenactment behavior that is ripping our national family apart. Although the process is difficult and painful, as any of our patients could attest, the payoff is a sense of reconnection and a loss of alienation, a rewarding sense of rejoining the human community with pride, hope, energy, and self‐ esteem.
These changes can only come about with an emerging sense of group consciousness, a willingness to believe that we can do better, that we can break free of the bonds of the past while retaining what is valuable. What do our patients teach us about the necessary steps to further this change? Safety first ‐ we must do whatever it takes to stop th violence ‐ gun control, employment, antidiscrimination policies, ending child abuse. We must stop the automatic transmission of disruptive attachment by providing good daycare, alternative placements, serious parenting education and parenting assistance. Children need to learn the skills of practicing democracy in the schools ‐ cooperation, conflict resolution, group problem‐solving. We have to find ways together to make money serve us instead of us serving money. We have become trapped in what Ralph Nader has called “malignant capitalism”, the god of profit who must always be fueled regardless of the price. We must find alternatives to our dichotomized, abusive criminal justice system that depends on having always more criminals who can never be redeemed. And we desperately and fundamentally need more of the arts. Our evolutionary, biological heritage demands that we practice integration and the way we are designed to do that is through creative performative acts. Can we create healing rituals that are alive and vital, not dogmatic, rigid and meaningless or vapid? Again, maybe excursions into virtual reality will provide us with new vistas of shared discourse and engagement.
We know a great deal about the dangers of the group unconscious. The Holocaust stands as a monument to the ability of a powerful leader to mobilize the unconscious destructive forces of a group in service of an evil pursuit. At this point in our national history, our group unconscious seems to be bent on regression, punishment, and sacrifice of the weak, as the poor are blamed for poverty, social programs are cut, the health care system is macerated, prisons are seen as the solution to crime, mental hospitals revert to pre‐war standards of care, and profit becomes the only viable goal. But perhaps one of the most important lessons of the last century in which the group unconscious has been exploited to a larger extent than ever before in history, is that where there is an unconscious force there is also the possibility of consciousness. As far back as 1920, McDougall observed that “If there by any truth in it, the ‘collective consciousness’ of even the most highly organized society may be still in a rudimentary stage, and that it may continue to gain in effectiveness and organization with the further evolution of the society in question”. History repeats itself and each time the price is gets higher ‐ that is the essential lesson of traumatic reenactment in the life of an individual or in the life of a group. The antidote is consciousness ‐ for the individual and for the group.
Burrow, T. (1984). In A. Galt (Ed). Trigant Burrow: Toward social sanity and human survival. selections from his writings . New York: Horizon. 1964.
Laing, R.D. (1967). The politics of experience. New York: Ballantine Books.
Rheingold, H. (1993). The virtual community: homesteading on the electronic frontier. Reading, MA: Addison‐Wesley Publishing Company.