The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

trauma is, as one American theorist has phrased it, "a historical experience of survival exceeding the grasp of the person who survives."⁶ It is the experience of having come into contact with a danger so great that it, and the fact of having escaped it, refuse to fit in one's mind. Freud first wrote about trauma in the context of survivors of the First World War and then again as he struggled to understand the Nazi persecution of Jews. In his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle,

Freud introduced the idea of a death drive, a destructive force fueled by trauma, which has made survival intolerable. The death drive compelled repetition, an endless return to loss. Many of Freud's followers later rejected the idea of the death drive, and Freud himself, in his later work, broadened the concept to include outwardly directed aggression. But some later scholars focusing on trauma linked the idea of the death drive to the high rate of suicide among survivors of concentration camps or the Vietnam War.⁷

After the Second World War, American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, who had also trained in psychoanalysis, studied survivors of Chinese internment camps, survivors of the atomic bomb explosion in Hiroshima, and the doctors who became killers in Nazi concentration camps. His aim was to "identify psychological experiences of people caught up in historical storms," he wrote.⁸

He spent a lifetime developing clinical and theoretical approaches to trauma. He described phenomena specific to survivors. He called one "psychic numbing"—a sort of emotional shutdown in response to unconscionable events.⁹ In his study of Nazi doctors, he identified a psychological principle he called "doubling," defined as "the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self."— He described what he believed to be a specifically twentieth-century experience: that of "lifelong immersion in death."¹¹

Lifton's work began a conversation about trauma experienced not only by individuals but by groups, including entire societies, which in some cases passed their experience of surviving the unimaginable from generation to generation. Like people, societies could fragment in response to trauma, could go numb, perhaps, as Nicholas Eberstadt suggested when he looked for an explanation for Russia's excessive death rates—an entire society could become depressed. If Eberstadt had been trained as a psychoanalyst rather than an economist, he might even have considered that an entire society could be seized by the death drive.

Traumatic experiences that affect entire societies could include natural disasters, catastrophic wars, genocide, revolution, and lives spent in a situation of chronic oppression. In cases where the trauma was extended in time—as with ongoing oppression or state terror— change, even apparently positive change, wrought further trauma. When familiar social structures stopped functioning, it could be as traumatic as when physical structures collapsed in the case of a natural disaster. Strategies of adaptation that worked under the old order were no longer useful. Therapists working in Kosovo in 2000, for example, discovered that people who had for years been victimized by being told what to do now longed to be told what to do. Liberian refugees in the United States, encouraged by well-meaning American therapists to seek support in their own community, re­created patterns of corruption and exploitation: becoming victims of familiar abuse was indeed comforting.¹²

Arutyunyan's mentors had frowned on the word "trauma"—too much of a wastebasket. The word would make it seem as if people were passive recipients of whatever happened to them, and as if terrible things on the outside produced predictably terrible results on the inside. This sort of thinking was antithetical to psychoanalysis, which Arutyunyan had, after all, chosen because it saw the many and varied conflicts that raged inside a person's psyche all on their own. Arutyunyan had met psychoanalysts who really believed that all of a person's fears and anxieties were always projections, that nothing was external. She wished she could think that way herself.

A British analyst once said that he preferred depression brought on by big bad events to depression that was apparently spontaneous: tragedy increased the chances of recovery. Too bad this logic held only in cases when you could expect the big and bad to end.