“All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” The story reveals the meaning of what otherwise would remain an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings. –Hannah Arendt, “Isak Dinesen”

If psychic trauma is understood as an inability to stop reliving the same set of experiences, that is, an inability to leave the past behind, then whistleblowers are among the most traumatized people I have ever met. Most don’t experience flashbacks, and other dramatic symptoms. Instead, they remain stuck in static time, “the turbulence of stagnant motion,” as one whistleblower put it.

I was introduced to whistleblowing through my observation of a whistleblowers support group organized by the Government Accountability Project in Washington, D. C. Over a period just short of a year I spent almost one hundred hours with the support group. At first I assumed that the whistleblowers, mostly middle-aged men and women, were talking about recent experiences: blowing the whistle, experiencing retaliation, getting fired. Only after a couple of months did I realize that most were talking about events five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty years ago. Their narratives seemed so fresh, their pain still so sharp, it was hard to believe they were talking about ancient history, or at least so it seemed to me.

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Projective identification plays several different roles in trauma. It is the way trauma is transmitted, particularly from parents to child. It is the way in which trauma is cured, though this belongs to the realm of theory, not practice. I will explain.

Projective identification is most closely associated with the work of Melanie Klein, though there remains considerable debate over whether projective identification always involves an actual relationship, or whether it can take place entirely within a person’s imagination, between a self and its ideas of others (internal objects as they are called). Kleinians hold the latter view (Spillius and O’Shaughnessy, 2011). I am going to follow Thomas Ogden and argue that projective identification always involves interpersonal pressure. Projective identification has three steps:

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One doesn’t ordinarily think of trauma as evil. We may think about people who inflict trauma as evil, but not the experience of trauma itself. I think it’s useful to see trauma as evil.

Evil was not always what bad people do. Today the Holocaust is the leading image of evil. It comes as a surprise that for over a century the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was the paradigm of evil. Tens of thousands perished, and Voltaire wrote Candide, a satire about this best of all possible worlds. Theodicy, or the justice of God, was debated as never before. Consider how differently evil must have been understood then: not what humans do, but what humans suffer.

This view of evil is ancient, going back to what the Hebrew Scriptures called rac. Evil is anything that is bad or harmful to humans (Isa. 45.7; Jer.4.6; Amos 3.6; Mic. 2.3; Eccles. 1.13; Job 2.10). It’s an ancient way of thinking about evil, but it has its advantages, particularly if we think about what trauma does. Trauma unmakes the victim’s world, to use Elaine Scarry’s phrase. And trauma makes it almost impossible for the victim to put his or her world back together again.

What does this mean? For some it means that the victim is unable to testify to his or her own experience. This is an influential view held by Cathy Caruth, Dori Laub, and Soshana Felman, among others. It does not seem to be literally true. The testimony of thousands of victims of the Holocaust provides the counter evidence.

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Consider the following odd exchange between parent and child.

There were two sides to my father. I called them Daddy Mad Face and Daddy Angel Face.

We had a game we played when we were quite young. When Dad arrived home late on a cold, dark night, we’d make him go out again, first turning up his collar and mussing up his hair. Cast by us as some poor, homeless wanderer he’d knock at the door and we’d bring him into the warmth, take his coat and lead him to the table. It was a strangely satisfying ritual that I wanted to repeat over and over again.

Dad escaped from a train bound for Auschwitz, leaving behind his mother, his brothers and sister – Lawrence, Henry, Fela, Tola – their husbands, their wives and their children. And, as I found out only a few years ago, his first wife.

Sometimes we’d ask questions that must have caused him a lot of pain. How could you leave your mother on the train? “They would shoot you.” Why didn’t you fight? “They would shoot you.” Why didn’t you all just run away? “They would shoot you.” How can you be sure they are all really dead? “I went back.”

He firmly banned us from having toy guns, until we nagged for long enough. Once, looking down the sights of a toy rifle he got for my brother, he remarked almost casually, “I saw them shoot the breasts off a woman.”

 

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