Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

92 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
growing aggression. You should not smack a toddler running towards
an oncoming car - even though body language is what a toddler
understands, and it relieves the tension that has built up in you too. It
is as though the clear division between body language and brutality
were missing.
Where that inner border is absent, what can emerge is an
almost neurotic fear of one’s own aggression, nurtured by unresolved
guilt (or even fantasies about one’s guilt). It is because the social
unconscious has absorbed the traces and effects of events that
happened to the relevant human group (family, nation) in the recent
and not so recent past.
Traumas leave a powerful trail if they are not
processed at a conscious level
Traumas, if they are not acted on, if they are not worked on, they
remain unmourned, unforgiven – and are afterwards pushed into the
subconscious, often forcibly. No matter how traumatic the original
story, it can be suppressed, be forgotten, often deliberately; after the
trail of the story is lost, all that remains is what moves through the
story – that is, energy: unprocessed, unreconciled, unlamented,
unforgiven emotions. Through suppression, they lose their real name
and content. That which remains is simply instinctive energy, now
often without words, without story, but on the other hand with a latent
power. Very often these emotions suppressed for generations later
destroy the bodies of their last bearers through their mute unconscious
power; therapists identify frequent psychosomatic disturbances in the
descendants of those who survived the holocaust and who (for the sake
of their children and of peace) wanted to suppress every memory into
the unconscious.
Suppressed trauma destroys not only the body but especially
the soul, through a cycle of feelings linked with guilt. An important
concept has to be mentioned: identification with the aggressor. This
labelling was originally ascribed to patients who in childhood were
strongly traumatised by mistreatment, by abuse. Such a small child
experiences a painful inner conflict; on the one hand, it longs to cling
to the adult with whom it is; on the other, it was from them that it
experienced abuse and injustice. The child would rather accept the
idea of its own guilt (“I’m naughty, and the pain and humiliation, that
is my punishment”), than accuse the adult and thus surrender its basic
need – that is, the need to see the world as meaningful.
As an adult, the person who was originally abused can see
that particular aggressor critically. He/she however usually does not