Chapter 12

Silence and silencing of the traumatized

Aleksandar Dimitrijević

Trauma and silence

Silence is rarely as present and prominent as in cases of trauma. All too often, everyone involved, victims as well as perpetrators or witnesses, avoid talking about the experience at all costs. The silence surrounding trauma also leads to silencing insidiously, far more dangerous than explicit prohibitions or punishments. The problem is, however, that these connections are frequently neglected and for manifold reasons:

Out of this range of possible reactions, from benign to violent, this chapter will be focused on the darker end of the spectrum, the one where silencing can lead to the development of mental disorders. The discussion will be organized so that we follow this process in three dimensions: in the cases of attachment trauma, in groups experiencing social trauma, and in patients for whom psychiatric or even psychoanalytic treatments can be re-traumatizing.

Silencing the victims of attachment trauma

One type of trauma has, in recent studies, been emphasized as particularly important, and that is attachment trauma, especially if a child is repeatedly traumatized by a person to whom he/she is attached. Consequences seem to be most disturbing when trauma is inflicted in closest relationships, those from which children expect safety and encouragement for exploration. Children exposed to attachment trauma frequently develop a so-called disorganized attachment pattern, characterized by a complete lack of strategy in close relationships, freezing out of movement and expression, and incomprehensible behavior. About 15 percent of children in non-clinical samples are classified as disorganized (Schuengel, Van Ijzendoorn & Bakermans-Kranenburg, 1997, p. 136), but this number rises to an astonishing 82 percent of maltreated children (Lyons-Ruth & Jacobvitz, 1999, p. 526).

Researchers have found various consequences of childhood trauma (Osofsky, 2011; Read et al., 2004, p. 223; Lieberman, Chu, Van Horn, & Harris, 2011):

Attachment trauma is the most detrimental type of trauma because it occurs inside the most important relationship a child can have: family. Due to this, the person who is the source of comfort and love for the child, maybe even the secure base (Bowlby, 1979), becomes the source of fear and terror as well. The child is thus in an unbearable position of having to reconcile these two opposite images of the parent: the loving one and the abusive one. Because this is impossible to do, the only way out for the child may be to dissociate the two parts of his/her psyche related to the corresponding parental images. Each child depends more on the benevolent parent than on his/her mind, so it is less painful to dissociate the mind in two (or more) and preserve the positive parental image than to admit to oneself: “My dad sometimes doesn't love me.”

Painful though this may be, the presence of only one benevolent and caring adult can be of decisive help. In cases where attachment trauma does occur – and these cases are alarmingly frequent – children's mental health seems to depend on one factor more than anything else: acknowledgment or silence. If, in the family of the child, there is a source of recognition, the traumatic experience may be overcome. This person should no doubt do something – hopefully, report the perpetrator, protect the child, or in some cases, leave the household and relocate. What is, however, of even higher psychological importance is that this person talks to the child, hears everything he/she wants to share, and takes it seriously and responsibly. This will establish the status of trauma as an external, interpersonal event, and this can turn out to be of crucial importance for many reasons. First, the child can talk to other people about the trauma, look for help, and hopefully learn how to use that help. Second, the child can learn what to avoid in order to raise the chances of being protected: persons (usually men), places, times, conditions (e.g., drunk people). Third, this can prevent the development of the irrational belief in the child about her/him being guilty of the traumatic event, which may forever undermine the growing sense of self-respect. Fourth, the child will not lose trust in her/his mind but can use it to fight off the effects of this trauma and possibly future ones.

We now know a bit more about those helpful adults. On the one hand, evidence suggests that mothers of securely attached children do not suffer from unintegrated trauma. Furthermore, they are not particularly helpful in extreme situations, while securely attached mothers who had experienced significant loss(es)2 were able to show the least frequency and intensity of frightening or frightful behavior, and proved to be most helpful to their distressed or traumatized children (Coates, 1998). On the other hand, the majority of psychotherapists come from the third generation of social trauma victims. They are usually resilient and highly mentalizing children of depressed mothers or chronically ill siblings (Dimitrijević, 2018), because in these families “the parent unwittingly and against her conscious will positions her trauma within the child; the child sets out to cure the parent and undo her trauma by placing himself in the parent’s position” (Kaplan, 1996, p. 224).

For many children, however, benevolent, emotionally available, and mentalizing adults are not present in their social world, and preventive programs have not reached many others. Ferenczi claimed that traumatized children additionally suffer from the lack of empathic understanding by other adults: “Usually the relation to a second adult […] is not intimate enough for the child to find help there, timid attempts towards this end are refused by her as nonsensical” (1933/1949, p. 163). It is highly likely, as we have seen above, that they will develop one or several forms of somatic illnesses, deviant behaviors, or mental disorders.

Mental disorders are not inevitable and direct consequences of traumatic experiences. A traumatized child will develop symptoms or disorders only if his/her experience is denied and remains isolated in silence. If this is what the child encounters in the family environment, he/she is left with little or no choice. Small children, especially preschoolers, usually perceive adults as benevolent, all-knowing giants. Not only can the adults read and know many facts, but they have social skills and can perform such complicated tasks as tying shoe-laces, brushing teeth, or buttoning a shirt. With such striking disproportion between them, the child naturally trusts the mind of the parent more than his/her own. Therefore, if the parent says that something has never happened, the child will inevitably start believing that the traumatic event has indeed never happened. Consequently, the recollection of the traumatic event will have to be either repressed or split off, and in the future, much energy will have to be invested in maintaining repression instead of developing or being creative. There is, unfortunately, more.3

When the child accepts the denying words of the other caregiver(s) (“that is impossible,” “he never would have done that,” “what else did you expect”, and the like) as true, and represses the memories, he/she must also accept that something is fundamentally wrong with his/her mind. The image of both parents is again positive, possibly totally positive, and the child feels equivalent to what adults would phrase as: “I must be awfully evil to spread such horrible lies about the nicest person in the world” or “I must be completely crazy to hallucinate such horrible things involving the nicest person in the world.” As a direct consequence of this, the child becomes afraid of his/her mind and may lose curiosity about it altogether. That is the beginning of the possibly life-long superficiality in introspection and emotion recognition. The child becomes internally silent about what parents wanted him/her to be silent externally.

These children may split their memory, cognition, and emotions in order to separate two types of experiences with the parent: loving father from abusive father. There is, then, one part of themselves they do not dare admit even to themselves, one part they believe is too horrible to face. The traumatized child first defensively inhibits his/her capacity to think about the inner states of others and her/himself, trying to avoid the insight that the parent may wish to hurt her. Consequently, trauma impedes deeper processing of emotional experiences and interferes with the (further) development of mentalizing capacity or can even destroy it (Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist, & Target, 2002).

This experience may generalize, and the child then feels that “looking inside” is dangerous under any circumstances. Being unaware of inner psychological processes means, of course, that one cannot control or regulate them.

Precisely this is considered to lead not only to disorganized attachment but to some form of mental disorder as well.

The message from both parents can, thus, be that of silencing. The perpetrator, usually the father, demands of the child not to reveal his criminal behavior. This silencing is most usually followed by threats, bribes, or lies. The other parent, usually the mother, silences for different reasons and with the use of other methods. The reason for the parent who is not the perpetrator to silence the child can vary widely:

These findings led many authors to come up with a new etiological hypothesis, which claims that the cause of many mental disorders is a combination of (a) severe and repeated childhood trauma, and (b) lack of a person who could provide the interpersonal foundation for mentalizing (Fonagy et al., 2002; Levine, 2014). Trauma, thus, does not have to lead to a mental disorder and will not do so in cases when there are adults ready to face and recognize a child’s traumatic experience and offer help in thinking about and overcoming it. However, it will very probably turn into a mental disorder if it is followed by silence and silencing.

Social trauma and the conspiracy of silence

A process analogous to the attachment trauma exists in the social sphere as well. It happens as a rule that incidents of social trauma are followed by long-term denial and silence. Several elements distinguish social trauma (see Dimitrijević & Hamburger, in press):

  1. 1) it is organized perpetration by one social group (for example, a nation);
  2. 2) against another social group, and not an individual;
  3. 3) it always includes the element of intentionality, which is not present in traumatic events caused by, for instance, natural elements.

Social trauma can have devastating consequences because it destroys societal and cultural foundations whose support and comfort we are otherwise used to having at our disposal and taking for granted: home, language, shared memories, as well as hospitals, counseling and psychotherapy services, or the legal system. While we may hope that a victim of individual trauma, even a child, can find some support and comfort in the immediate environment or from professionals, in the cases of social trauma the individual additionally suffers from the feeling of isolation, because everyone around him/her is equally traumatized, and, in cases of war trauma, everything around him/her can be destroyed (Dimitrijević, 2019).

There can be no doubt that events like wars, persecutions, or the Holocaust leave horrible consequences on their own, but the problem gets much more prominent if they are veiled by silence. It is a phenomenon recorded in various societies around the globe that both victims and perpetrators end up unable and/or unwilling to talk and listen about traumatic experiences.4 Listening to the memories of trauma, especially in the case of such massive social trauma like the Holocaust, can cause disbelief in the listener, and later in the victim as well.5 In the words of one survivor:

(E. Rappaport, quoted in Mucci, 2013, p. 141)

Again, the possible reasons are manifold:

Closely connected to this is also the phenomenon known as the transgenerational transmission of trauma. It undoubtedly has several components, but the most prominent among them seems to be the incapacity of the generation of the victims of social trauma to clearly think about anything related to their traumatic experience, and consequently, to talk about it. Trauma, thus, becomes inextricable from silence: “Survivors often claim that they experience the feeling of belonging to ‘a secret order’ that is sworn to silence. […] They have become ‘the bearers of a secret’” (Laub, 1992, p. 83).

Because of this, they are both unable to share the experience with their children, and later grandchildren, and, as was mentioned earlier, also believe that they will protect the young by not exposing them to details. However, as one title eloquently says, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent (Davoine & Gaudillière, 2004).

Small children learn least from direct instruction.7 They observe faces, listen to the tone of voice, even to silences, they see in the eyes of adults which topics inspire and which frighten them. Few things can be more potent than “knowing what you are not supposed to know and feeling what you are not supposed to feel” (Bowlby, 1979). It is in this way that silence of one generation, often planned as protection, becomes a prohibition to another, and often a silent, unrecognizable burden as well.8

The person or a group which tries to talk about crimes openly and admit in-group crimes, usually is treated as malevolent and as a traitor. After World War II, a new term was introduced in German: Nestbeschmutzer, “the one who makes the nest dirty.” It labeled and put pressure on those who would not be silent, but also to implicitly claim that the nest (i.e., the home country and individual family homes) were actually clean (i.e., without guilt).

The silence usually comes to an end with the arrival of the next generation and their questions, usually about 20 years after the atrocities were enacted. It is not incidental that the first psychoanalytic study of the Holocaust was published in 1968 (Krystal’s Massive Psychic Trauma). Even then, however, the dialogue comes slowly and much remains obscure forever. This prolonged societal silence makes the importance of audacious artists more evident than anything else. Their works provide what society dearly needs. Such is the case of containment for the pain of the suffering group (like Goya’s paintings May 2nd and May 3rd), denouncement of the criminals at the moment when the majority claims disinterest or ignorance (like Thomas Mann’s radio broadcast speeches “German listeners!”), uplifting the almost broken spirit (like Shostakovich 7), or opening discussion on a censored theme (like Eugene O'Neill’s play All God's Chillun Got Wings). It is the art that can provide a safe space for feeling, thinking, and speaking about the unbearable pain or guilt of a large group, when it is still too early for the more rational work of psychoanalysis, sociology, and philosophy.

A precious example of the pioneering fight against the conspiracy of silence in the field of mental health comes from the work of Amra Delic, Bosnian psychiatrist and psychotherapist. After the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Dr. Delic encountered, among other groups of the victims of war, a large number of victims of systematic war rape (Delić & Avdibegović, 2015). Although political structures on all sides recognized the existence of this crime, none recognized individual victims or, subsequently, their associations. Ironically, in the deeply divided country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, even though one would expect this would have given them political “points,” no institution of the two entities that were in a war against one another would grant their citizens this status or offer any form of support or psychotherapy.

A particular case in this painful situation is the existence of not only camps where both women and men were repeatedly raped, but also a large number of children born out of these rapes. The very existence of these children was long denied by almost everyone, so that their exact number is now impossible to discover. Many mothers were not capable of overcoming the ambivalence they felt toward their children who were fathered by those who had tortured them in the cruelest of ways. The rejection of their husbands and parents to accept children conceived in this way (many thought this was the ultimate family disgrace) made things even worse. When children remained with their mothers, their origin was, in most cases, never spoken of either in private or in the public sphere.

In these circumstances, Dr. Delic founded and coordinated an association where both female and male victims of war rape could meet and share their memories and emotions, which was the earliest forum that made it possible to break the conspiracy of silence against war rape in their country. No wonder the association was named “Our Voice.”

The exceptional importance of this achievement can better be appreciated if it is contrasted with the time official policies require to achieve the same effectiveness. A very positive initiative of opening a memorial for the psychiatric patients murdered in the Third Reich, at the very place in Berlin where the plan for the “final solution” had been made, was realized in September 2019 – more than 74 years after the end of the war. That is probably the exact measure of how difficult it is to undo the conspiracy of silence.

Silence in the psychoanalytic treatment as a form of silencing and re-traumatization

One might say that, implicitly, psychoanalysis was created to break this silencing and help the victims articulate their voices. I believe that is what the author of the earliest psychoanalytic papers about silence meant when he wrote that “the patient himself comes into the psychoanalytic situation, which is unique in our civilization, out of silence” (Reik, 1948, p. 125). It can (and should) be called “talking cure” not because of its technical properties as much as because it allowed the traumatized persons an opportunity to finally, sometimes after years of solitude, leave the hypocrisy behind and genuinely start talking about themselves and what really matters. Psychoanalytic listening can, in a nutshell, be described as openness to hear and acknowledge stories about traumatic experiences and silences related to them. It is precisely this form of listening that made psychoanalysis important and helpful: many victims could not find such an opportunity for a dialogue anywhere else. It is also precisely this form of listening that has special importance for the listener, as a source of both privilege and exhaustion.

This may even have been the revolutionary ethos of early psychoanalysis, as well as the reason for resistances against it: the awareness that the fight against silencing has to be political (Herman, 1992, p. 9ff.). Freud challenged the hypocrisy of Catholic Vienna; Reich did the same so passionately that he was repeatedly exiled and ultimately incarcerated; Ferenczi described psychoanalysis as a “science that is austerely honest and wages war on all hypocrisy” (1926, p. 11); Fromm and the members of the Frankfurt School persisted the longest.

However, this spirit seems to have disappeared at a particular moment, and psychoanalysis is not the societal force it once used to be (except possibly in France or Argentina). It is difficult to tell what exactly led to this. Some of the factors that first come to mind include: that “Freud glimpsed th(e) truth (about the subjugation of women) and retreated in horror” (Herman, 1992, p. 28); the once subversive discipline became well established, bringing high income and reputation; many psychoanalysts became immigrants and were not willing to risk their precarious existence or had language problems to express their political positions; psychoanalysis became a profession for people older than 50, sometimes active in their nineties, not exactly the ages passionate for revolution.

That the focus on opposing silencing is lost in psychoanalysis will here be discussed on two levels: first, when it comes to psychoanalytic treatments, and second, related to psychoanalytic institutions and education.

The clinical fight against trauma is undoubtedly demanding and requires experience and stamina from a psychoanalyst. As was mentioned in the previous section of this chapter, listening about traumatic experiences can “arouse defensive repudiation and avoidance not only in the traumatized person but also in the analyst, so that in many cases traumatic experiences in the treatments do not receive the therapeutic status that is actually their due” (Bohleber, 2007, p. 347). This alone could be enough of a reason for losing the battle against the silence that surrounds trauma.

Is it also possible that there is something rotten in the very state of psychoanalytic clinical work? The first discussion of the hypocritical elements of psychoanalytic treatments can be found in Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary (1988). Indeed, its first note, the one of January 7, 1932, opens with the following thoughts:

The basic idea here is that many patients come to treatment because they were, as children or adolescents, exposed to the malignant combination of (attachment) trauma and silencing and that psychoanalysis needed alternative techniques for working with them. Namely, Ferenczi believed that the silence of the classical analyst could be experienced by the traumatized patient as the repetition of his/her initial experience, in a way as re-traumatizing, and psychoanalysts not as allies in the battle against traumatic pain but as identical to the silent parent/environment of the past.9

The same idea was also present in the work of Heinz Kohut (1959), who claimed that the attitude of anonymity, neutrality, and abstinence not only was not helpful for patients who had developed narcissistic transference but could even be harmful to them. Kohut, thus, introduced empathy as the most critical developmental and clinical concept, and in his clinical work was far more open and personal. This, later on, had a profound influence on the schools of self-psychology, American intersubjectivity, and relational psychoanalysis, where analysts disclose much more about their own experiences and emotions.

We must also not forget the problem of silencing in psychoanalytic institutions. Candidates in training all too often encounter demands related to loyalty and uncritical acquisition of knowledge, while methods of testing and criticizing it (or appreciating wisdom coming from other psychoanalytic traditions or psychotherapy schools) are almost never taught. The situation is so critical that one former president of the International Psychoanalytic Association wrote about the systematic destruction of creativity of candidates and about the suicidal crisis of psychoanalysis (Kernberg, 1992, 1996). Indeed, persons at the beginning of their careers certainly become aware of:

  1. 1) the strange, church-like hierarchy in the institutions devoted to liberation, the constant listing of status in the association, the strange power of training-analysts;
  2. 2) very often non-transparent criteria for being accepted into the training and for advancement, which I find closely connected to the mystifying language of psychoanalytic theory: where Freud had used everyday German terms, his translators often used Latin, and his followers developed a set of terms no one else understands: projective identification, transmuting internalization, l'objet petit a, etc.10;
  3. 3) decades-long lack of a dialogue with other disciplines, arrogance toward other psychotherapy schools, sentiment of being attacked from the outside (first described by Freud himself), refusal to use scientific methodology, all of which have only partly been remedied in recent times;
  4. 4) a prominent tendency toward ostracism of those who challenge the dogma, or toward Totschweigen, death by silencing (Rachman, 2018), which happened to the dissidents of Freud (like Adler, Steckel, Jung, Ferenczi,11 Rank) and of Melanie Klein (like Bowlby and, to a certain extent, Winnicott).

The most significant problem throughout the history of psychoanalysis is the attempt to silence creativity in its ranks. For more than half a century, almost all other psychotherapy schools were founded by disappointed or exorcized psychoanalysts: Otto Rank, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Aron Beck, Eric Bern, Alexander Lowen, and probably many more. Many authors’ papers get rejected by journals, many books never enter training curricula, and some colleagues, like Frieda Fromm-Reichman and Ann-Louise Silver, are derisively asked: “What right do you have to call yourself a psychoanalyst?” (Silver, 2018). We would have been able to achieve so much, had we only been capable of containing, fostering, and utilizing their creativity for the cause of revising and improving the clinical and theoretical aspects of psychoanalysis, when it comes to the treatment of trauma, silencing, and many other aspects.

Conclusion

Trauma is not only widespread and ubiquitous but possibly also inevitable. Heavenly life, devoid of any frustration and trauma, exists only in religious and artistic fantasy, and is unattainable in the everyday life of nature or societies. It turns out, however, that trauma is not so malignant in itself and can be overcome with the help of a psychologically minded other, a group, or a service.

The silence that follows trauma is never natural, but it can only be a consequence of an action – silencing. Those – perpetrators, victims, or witnesses – who find talking about trauma too discomforting may – consciously or unconsciously – strive to make articulating the narrative about trauma impossible. There are various methods for this: from denial, minimizing, threats, begging, bribes, to propaganda, dehumanization and reducing one to a number without a personal name, social pressure, marginalization, ostracism, and censorship. The outcome is, however, always the same: the traumatized person or group will take the blame and start splitting, a child with the wish to preserve the image of the parent untarnished, and a group with the effort to reduce uncertainty.

Psychoanalysis started, probably more incidentally than deliberately, as a healing process focused on talking about what was heretofore blanketed by silence, on the articulation of traumatic experiences. Listening to those is, however, probably too demanding, so much so that psychoanalysis has mostly lost its early revolutionary character. It must, therefore, at every step, be reminded that both its training institutions and its treatments require genuineness and open-heartedness to meet the most sensitive and least familiar silences in the patient.

Notes

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