TRAUMA AND REPARATION: ELEMENTS FOR A RHETORIC OF MARKS Isabel Piper Shafir

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1 TRAUMA AND REPARATION: ELEMENTS FOR A RHETORIC OF MARKS Isabel Piper Shafir Directora Magíster en Psicología Social Universidad ARCIS (Chile) -Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona Investigadora de ILAS (Instituto Latinoamericano de Salud Mental y derechos humanos) Chile Let us consider the following case: one person has an accident and breaks one of his bones. Because of the pain, this person asks for help to an expert, to repair the damage. In our culture, this expert would be a doctor, a traumatologist, who would probably do the diagnosis of the fracture and would indicate the better procedure to repair it. If the diagnosis and the treatment are correct, the fracture will be cured and the broken bone will return to its normality, that is to say, to the same condition than before suffering the trauma. However, if the injury is too deep, the accident is likely to leave some scars, even marks in the bone, which would allow a careful observer to know that something has happened. Probably, the person would have some difficulties, which is a sign that the bone is not completely normal any more. When the Chileans talk about the military dictatorship of Pinochet, we usually do it by using metaphors which are similar to the one of the fracture. We say, for instance, that it produced a break, a fracture that produced profound transformations in our society, as well as an important damage in the people who suffered its violence. It is common to find narrations according to which the coup d etat interrupted the path followed by the country s and people s history, such that they could never be as before. Discourses about the dictatorship period are constructed as an accident of such magnitude that neither society nor people could never come back to normality. A set of events that left its sign, scar, and mark, that is, that traumatised us. The same way that an accident cannot be reported without referring to the resulting damages, the dictatorship is not described without explaining its effects. The narrations of the past use a similar argumentative logic, in which the dictatorship s violence 1

2 constitute a scar that operates as an origin of what we are as a society, and of the identity of its direct victims. These discourses operate as a rhetoric of marks. The dictatorship has been constructed as a break, crack, leaving social and personal marks, which damaged us as a society and as persons. It is widely accepted the fact that victims lives suffered an important fracture that marked them. Psychology uses the technical expression of trauma to refer to this damage, and has developed theories and intervention techniques according to it. Common sense discourses talk of trauma too, although it does it in a more generic sense. The fundamental idea is that the history of each one of us was constituting us into subjects with a relatively stable and definitive personality, which was likely to be maintained. We were subjects that were constituted or were in the process of being. Nevertheless, the experience of the dictatorship broke this stability, that is, traumatised us. The metaphor of the fracture is used in order to explain the social and personal/individual effects of the dictatorship. Additionally, it has been used as a theory and a technique of trauma. On the whole, it has an argumentative nature instead of a descriptive one. The Chilean society finds in its past an important fracture, and when it contemplates itself in the present what it finds are the scars that the fracture left on its members and institutions. The description and analysis of what we are as a society and as individuals, is directly and in a causal way linked to the dictatorship discourses, with the injuries it left on us. In its marks it is possible to see the collective and individual origin of our mayor pains. Theoretical issues The victims asked psychologists for help. Nevertheless, in their attempts to provide a response, psychologists found that neither their tools nor the now-how were of any use to them. Therefore, they had to develop concepts and implement practices in order to deal with the link between the individual suffering and the political environment, and to assist the pain. Reflecting upon the relationship between personal suffering and 2

3 political processes required being critical about traditional psychology. And understanding that psychological symptoms were the product of violent social relations and not of internal problems. Seeking strategies for intervention that would go beyond clinical work, tackling social and political spaces that had caused the problem, meant distancing oneself from the habitual processes that centered on the individual and developing forms of action that were at the same time psychological, social and political. Nonetheless, the re-thinking of a discipline in order to answer to a situation of social and political violence, has not only been a particularity of Chilean society but also of other societies that has suffered from this kind violence. The majority of academics from diverse disciplines and theoretical backgrounds, assume that violence deeply hurts those that experience it, and that those wounds are difficult to heal. These effects have been called trauma. Particularly, when these refer to a political conflict are termed political trauma. The group of authors that have referred to these effects draw upon the psychoanalytical concept of trauma in order to explain them. Freud explains war trauma as caused by external circumstances that due to their intensity and quality, the individual is not able to elaborate satisfactorily, thus affecting his/her psychic functioning. The idea that psychic suffering is not necessarily originated inside people enables on to understand state violence as the cause of the trauma. This idea is fundamental for the understanding of political trauma and it leads to defining the origins of trauma. That is, it enables to differentiate it from other types of trauma. Hence, a trauma caused by a natural disaster would not have the same effects as a one provoked by political repression. I believe that Freud moves beyond the distinction between the external and the internal. He brings the framework to think about trauma as part of the process of the 3

4 social construction of subjectivity, yet, he does not use these terms. Theories of trauma have no been able to overcome this distinction. Eventhough these theories have good intentions, for instance they re-define what traditional psychology understood as an intra-psychic problem, and regard it as a social process, they still have a causal perspective of the problem. At the same time, they consider the social context as a an external factor that affects the individual, thus often restricting social relations to a secondary level of specification. Additionally, the do not consider the historic nature of such dichotomy. The logic of the different versions of political trauma is certainly clear: there are subjects (individuals and groups) that are exposed to violent social conditions that hurt them differently to the way other type of events would affect them. Such harm, wound or trauma leaves intra-psychic signs that remain even after the social event that provoked them has finished. When reflecting upon the armed conflict in El Salvador Ignacio Martin Baro (1990) formulates the notion of psychosocial trauma. Eventhough he attempts to overcome the causality and individualism of traditional notions of political trauma, he still reproduces the same logic. He describes a process in which a political traumatizing context can be identified. This violence infiltrated in the social relationships damaging relational processes. Martin Baro also emphasizes that the harm cause by a political violence needs to be differentiated from the harm originated by other type of events such as illnesses and natural disasters. Martin Baro was not able to fully develop his ideas because he was assassinated. Different latinoamerican authors have drawn upon his theory therefore assuming a dialectical conceptualization of damage in order to overcome traditional dichotomies of political trauma. At that time is was theoretically and politically important to insist and develop the issue of political trauma because it meant the recontextualisation of a topic that belonged to individualistic psychology. However, the 4

5 problematisation of the idea of trauma has showed me the unwanted and negative effects of that notion and of the rhetoric that has been constructed around it. There are at least two problems. The first is related to the notion of trauma and the second with its political surname. Do you remember about the metaphor of the accident and of the fracture of a bone used to speak about the dictatorship? The notion of political trauma has the same logic. It could not indeed be another way since the same idea of trauma and its metaphors refer to the same fact. Certainly the meaning of a word depends on the way it is used. However, the word trauma and the medical expertise around it, is used in such dominating and generalizing ways, that the attempts to redefine trauma have impeded the critical potential of resistance practices that draw upon it. The first problem around the notion of trauma is that it assumes the existence of and integrated subject that is broken by the impact of an event. Nevertheless talking about the normality and the integrity of a bone is different to assuming that societies and people are integrated fixed entities. The notion of trauma implies the existence of a fixed and already developed person that is split. Considering that identities are social constructions that depending on the dominating political interests would be either supported or constrained, it is thus possible to argue that discourses of trauma are constructing notions of the individual and of society that contribute to the reproduction of the same social order that they seek to contest. The second problem is the fact that psychologists working in the area of human rights affirm the political nature of their work, arguing the political origins of the trauma experienced. Use of this type of argument has gradually given rise to a rhetoric that has contributed to the psychologisation and depoliticizing of other processes, to the extent that it is forced to differentiate itself from other practices which, though centered around 5

6 similar subjects, are not so political. Violence of military dictatorship is set against other forms of violence (though not always explicitly), such as violence within families, which originates in the private not the political arena, and this in turn helps to legitimize the category of private problem as a counterpart to the political or public problem, a paradoxical effect if one considers the criticisms of positivist dichotomies and the attempts to integrate the sociological with the psychological (Piper, 1996). Dictatorship subjects The idea that the victims of the political repression were damaged and that the Chilean society was marked by such experience circulates within discourses of dictatorship. When we look at the present what we see is the residue of that event, the scars of the wounds. The violence of the dictatorship is constructed as a place of argumentation and justification of the origin of what we are and what we experience as an individual, a group and/or a society. This violence functions as a constitutive event of our identity. Being a victim of a political repression is signified as a determinant of life and defines subjectivity. Thus, differentiating who are the victims and who are not, and producing the social category of victims of political violence. Discourses around political trauma are essentialist since they assumed that victims have a self of which they would need to be conscious about in order to be able to elaborate the pain. That is, for a reparation chilean society has to recognize the existence of a new social subject and assume it as a sign of the dictatorship. The reparation of trauma. The same way that medicine speaks about the fixing of a bone in order for it to go back to normality, there is a need to restore a broken society. Social trauma would need to be repaired, this means erasing the signs so that society can go back to normality. The fact that our society is damaged and needs to be healed, that is broken and should be rearmed, is the fundamental idea around which discourses of trauma circulate. 6

7 How would this be done? The psychology of Human Rights answered this question drawing upon the notion of reparation. This notion refers to the process of restoration of the damaged, and to an intervention that would involve the whole society. Trauma and reparation are the central ideas of the rhetoric of the mark. According to this rhetoric, the wounds left by the violence need to be healed and their scars erased, in order to secure a peaceful coexistence. The rhetoric of the mark is the articulating center of the theories of political trauma and of the memories of the dictatorship. It constructs political trauma as an argumentative arena that operates as the cause of our current problems and of our way of being. This statement has various elements that need to be analysed. First, history is understood as a set of positive facts. Memories of the dictatorship construct it as a positive fact of the past. And as such, it can not be modified. At the same time, it is constituted as an argumentative arena to which we draw upon to justify the causes of what we are and what we do. Due to the fact that dictatorship is a cause located in a positive past, it is outside the realm of our social practices. Therefore are impossible to change. The rhetoric of the mark attributes the causes of what we are to a realm outside our own agency. And in doing so, it restricts the possibility of a social change to a mere reparation of the effects of violence. In establishing a causal relationship between the positive events of the past and the problems of the present, blurs the current social and political practices. Discourses construct a subject that is originated from traumatic experiences, whose present would be constituted by the legacy of the past. The rhetoric of the mark does not enable to think about the transformation of that subject. According to this rhetoric 7

8 the only modifiable thing are the marks. If there were truth, justice and reparation, the marks could be erased. Nevertheless the world of human rights is pessimistic and is convinced that the wound is so deep that its signs can not disappear. Conclusions: If we understand social subjects as an enduring product of our social relationships, then they we neglect the importance of the past signs. And instead we give more importance to current practices of domination. The rhetoric of the mark invites us to focus on the past and to construct the past as a determinant cause of the present. This rhetoric constructs the notion that there are personal and social essences that have been fractured by the dictatorship violence, which in turn neglects current relations of domination. I believe that these effects contradict the political will of those that practice this rhetoric. Nonetheless, they are not the intentions but the historical practices the ones that construct reality. Therefore these are the ones we need to focus on. I propose a problematisation of the existence of a central nucleus that constitutes the essence of the identity of the victim. Instead, I believe that we need to focus on the political practices that constitute the victim. This would enable us to understand the exercising of violence as the producer of the different positions of the subject. It is not about rejecting the existence of the victim, but about recognizing its historical nature and understanding its fixations as the result of hegemonic and perpetuating effects of power. BIBLIOGRAFÍA Bettelheim, B. (1981) Sobrevivir: El Holocausto Una Generación Después. 8

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