National trauma

Short description: None

National trauma is a concept in psychology and social psychology. A national trauma is one in which the effects of a trauma apply generally to the members of a collective group such as a country or other well-defined group of people. Trauma is an injury that has the potential to severely negatively affect an individual, whether physically or psychologically. Psychological trauma is a shattering of the fundamental assumptions that a person has about themselves and the world.[1] An adverse experience that is unexpected, painful, extraordinary, and shocking results in interruptions in ongoing processes or relationships and may also create maladaptive responses.[2] Such experiences can affect not only an individual but can also be collectively experienced by an entire group of people.[2] Tragic experiences can collectively wound or threaten the national identity,[3] that sense of belonging shared by a nation as a whole represented by tradition culture, language, and politics.[4]

In individual psychological trauma, fundamental assumptions about how the individual relates to the world, such as that the world is benevolent and meaningful and that the individual has worth in the world, are overturned by overwhelming life experiences.[1] Similarly, national trauma overturns fundamental assumptions of social identity – something terrible has happened and social life has lost its predictability.[2] The causes of such shatterings of assumptions are diverse and defy neat categorization. For example, wars are not always national traumas; while the Vietnam War is experienced by Americans as a national trauma[5] Winston Churchill famously titled the closing volume of his history of the Second World War Triumph and Tragedy.[6] Similar types of natural disasters can also provoke different responses. The 2016 Fort McMurray Wildfire in Alberta was a collective trauma for not only that local community but also the large Canadian Province of Alberta despite causing no direct deaths[7] yet the much larger Peshtigo Fire responsible for thousands of deaths is largely forgotten.[8]

Responses to national trauma also vary. A nation that experiences clear defeat in war which had mobilized the nation to a high degree will almost inevitably also experience national trauma but the way in which that defeat is felt can change the response.[9] The former peoples of the Confederate South in the American Civil War and the German Empire in World War I both created post-war mythologies (the Lost Cause in the former and the Stab-in-the-back Myth in the latter) of "glorious" defeat in unfair fights.[9] The post-war experience of Germany after World War Two, however, is much more complex and provoked reactions from a sense of German national guilt[10] to collective ignorance.[11] A common national response to these traumas is repeated calls for national unity and moral purification, as in the post-9/11 United States[12] or post-war Japan.[13]

## Examples

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.

* 1973 coup d'état and the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile[14]
* 1979 energy crisis in the United States[3]
* 1985 Mexico City earthquake[15]
* 1999 İzmit earthquake in Turkey[16]
* 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia[17] Sri Lanka, and Thailand[18]
* 2003 invasion in Iraq[19]
* 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan[20]
* 2020 Beirut explosion in Lebanon[21]
* 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake in Turkey[22]
* American Civil War in the American South[9]
* Armenian genocide in Armenia and the Armenian diaspora[23]
* Apartheid in South Africa[24]
* Assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States[2]
* Assassination of Olof Palme in Sweden[25]
* Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel[26]
* Attack on Pearl Harbor in the United States[2]
* Battle of Adwa in Italy[27]
* Battle of Alcácer Quibir in Portugal[28]
* Battle of Annual in Spain[29]
* Battle of the Boyne in Ireland[28]
* Battle of Caporetto in Italy[30]
* Battle of Kosovo in Serbia[28]
* Battle of Mohács in Hungary[28]
* Berlin Wall in Germany[17]
* Bosnian War in Bosnia and Herzegovina[18]
* Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia
* Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine and Belarus[17]
* Century of humiliation in China[31]
* Cuban Missile Crisis in the United States[2]
* Dirty War in Argentina[17]
* Falklands War in Argentina[17]
* Finnish Civil War, Winter War, Continuation War, and Lapland War in Finland[32][33]
* First Nagorno-Karabakh War and Khojaly massacre in Azerbaijan[34]
* Franco-Prussian War in France[9]
* German occupation of Denmark during the Second World War[35]
* Greco-Turkish War, the Greek Genocide and the subsequent Population exchange between Greece and Turkey in Greece[36]
* Great Depression in the United States[2]
* Great Famine in Ireland[37]
* Great Kanto earthquake in Japan[38]
* Greek Civil War in Greece[39]
* Harrying of the North, scorched earth campaign in North England & Yorkshire during the foundation of the British Monarchy[40]
* The Holocaust for European Jewish peoples[17][41]
* Iran hostage crisis in the United States[3]
* Lebanese Civil War in Lebanon[42]
* McCarthyism in the United States[2]
* MH370 and MH17 incidents in Malaysia[43]
* Nepalese royal massacre in Nepal[44]
* Norman conquest in England[45]
* North Sea flood of 1953 in the Netherlands[46]
* Rwandan genocide in Rwanda[47]
* Second Boer War in South Africa[48]
* Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in Armenia[49]
* Second Schleswig War (1864) in Denmark[50]
* September 11 attacks in the United States[51]
* Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Netherlands[52]
* Spanish–American War in Spain[53]
* Spanish Civil War and Francoism in Spain
* Tate–LaBianca murders[54]
* Treaty of Sèvres in Turkey (see Sèvres Syndrome)[55]
* Treaty of Trianon in Hungary (see Trianon Syndrome)[28]
* Vietnam War in the United States[2][5]
* War of the Pacific in Bolivia[56][57][58] and Peru[59]
* Watergate scandal in the United States[2][3]
* World War I in Germany[9]
* World War II in Germany[10] and Japan[13]
* COVID-19 pandemic

## See also

* Collective memory

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie (1992). Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0029160152. https://books.google.com/books?id=J7OVCUpFiLgC. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 Neal, Arthur G. (2005). National Trauma and Collective Memory: Extraordinary Events in the American Experience. Armonk, NY: Sharpe. ISBN 978-0765615817. https://books.google.com/books?id=irs2272ORb4C. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Elovitz, Paul H. (Summer 2008). "Presidential Responses to National Trauma: Case Studies of G.W. Bush, Carter, and Nixon". The Journal of Psychohistory 36 (1): 36–58. PMID 19043998.
4. ↑ "Definition of National Identity in English". Archived from the original on 2015-11-17. https://web.archive.org/web/20151117063449/http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/national-identity.
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Kiernan, David (10 October 2017). "Why Americans still can't move past Vietnam". Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/10/10/why-americans-still-cant-move-past-vietnam/. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
6. ↑ Churchill, Winston; Keegan, John (1954). Triumph and Tragedy: The Second World War, Volume 6. London: Cassell. ISBN 978-0304929733. https://books.google.com/books?id=VArC_rYqimoC. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
7. ↑ Koziol, Carol A.. Individual and Collective Trauma: The Fort McMurray Fire. Academia. https://www.academia.edu/30682848. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
8. ↑ Hipke, Deana C.. "The Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871". http://www.peshtigofire.info/. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang (2004). The culture of defeat : on national trauma, mourning, and recovery. New York: Picador. ISBN 978-0312423193. https://books.google.com/books?id=VcUTAAAAQBAJ. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Davis, Mark (5 May 2015). "How World War II shaped modern Germany". euronews. http://www.euronews.com/2015/05/05/how-world-war-ii-shaped-modern-germany. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
11. ↑ Bowie, Laura (2012). "The Impact of World War Two on the Individual and Collective Memory of Germany and its Citizens". Newcastle University. https://www.societies.ncl.ac.uk/pgfnewcastle/files/2015/05/Bowie-The-Impact-of-World-War-Two.pdf. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
12. ↑ Janoff-Bulman, Ronnie; Sana, Sheikh (1 December 2006). "From national trauma to moralizing nation." Basic and Applied Social Psychology". Basic and Applied Social Psychology 28 (4): 325–332. doi:10.1207/s15324834basp2804_5.
13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Hashimoto, Akiko (2015). The long defeat : cultural trauma, memory, and identity in Japan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780190239152. https://books.google.com/books?id=SXMRDAAAQBAJ. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
14. ↑ Wirshing, Irene (2009). National trauma in postdictatorship Latin American literature: Chile and Argentina. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 9781433105555. https://books.google.com/books?id=6mB1tP-gOtsC. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
15. ↑ Amaya Trujillo, Janny (2018). "Dinámicas transmediales de construcción de la memoria cultural: Un análisis en torno a la memoria del terremoto de 1985 en México". Mediaciones 13 (19): 48–64. doi:10.26620/uniminuto.mediaciones.13.19.2017.48-64. https://revistas.uniminuto.edu/index.php/med/article/view/1563. Retrieved 10 December 2022.
16. ↑ "Turkey's Interior Minister is 'expecting a 7.5-magnitude Istanbul quake'". Duvarenglish.com. 2020-01-27. https://www.duvarenglish.com/amp/turkeys-interior-minister-is-expecting-a-75-magnitude-istanbul-quake-news-11374.
17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 17.4 17.5 Kellerman, Peter Felix (2007). Sociodrama and Collective Trauma. London, Philadelphia: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. ISBN 9781843104469. https://books.google.com/books?id=r_MPBQAAQBAJ. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Shamai, Michal (2016). Systemic Interventions for Collective and National Trauma: Theory, Practice. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN 9781315709154. https://books.google.com/books?id=UDqDCgAAQBAJ. Retrieved 30 December 2017.
19. ↑ "After 20 years of trauma, Iraq is struggling to recover". The Economist. 28 April 2023. https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2023/03/23/after-20-years-of-trauma-iraq-is-struggling-to-recover.
20. ↑ Sung, Yoo Kyung; Sakoi, Junko (21 December 2015). "Japanese National Trauma: Changing Trends in Japanese Picture Books Since the Tohoku Earthquake". University of Arizona. https://wowlit.org/blog/2015/12/21/japanese-national-trauma-changing-trends-in-japanese-picture-books-since-the-tohoku-earthquake/. Retrieved 21 December 2019.
21. ↑ Sabaghi, Dario (27 September 2020). "Invisible wounds: Beirut witnesses mental-health crisis after blast". Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/lebanon-beirut-explosion-mental-health-trauma-ptsd-crisis.
22. ↑ Kadir Üstün (2023-02-20). "Turkey will take years to recover from the earthquake. The world must help". Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/turkey-earthquake-recovery-years-world-must-help.
23. ↑ Dabashi, Hamid (18 September 2014). "Turkish 'genocide' film: An epic too late?". Al Jazeera. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/09/turkish-genocide-film-an-epic-to-20149188328656238.html.
24. ↑ Abdullah, Somaya (January 2013). "Multicultural social work and national trauma: Lessons from South Africa". International Social Work 58 (1): 43–54. doi:10.1177/0020872812461019.
25. ↑ Reeves, Richard (1 March 1987). "The Palme Obsession; The Murder Sweden Can't Forget – Or Solve". New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/01/magazine/the-palme-obsession-the-murder-sweden-can-t-forget-or-solve.html?pagewanted=all. Retrieved 30 December 2017.
26. ↑ Raviv, Amiram; Sadeh, Avi; Raviv, Alona; Silberstein, Ora; Diver, Oma (June 2000). "Young Israelis' Reactions to National Trauma: The Rabin Assassination and Terror Attacks". Political Psychology 21 (2): 299–322. doi:10.1111/0162-895x.00189.
27. ↑ Levine, David (3 March 2009). "The Battle of Adwa as a "Historic" Event". Ethiopian Review. http://ethiopianreview.com/content/2006. Retrieved 30 December 2017.
28. ↑ 28.0 28.1 28.2 28.3 28.4 Pick, T.M. (2001). "The myth of the trauma/the trauma of the myth: Myths as mediators of some long-term effects of war trauma". Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 7 (3): 201–226. doi:10.1207/s15327949pac0703b_2.
29. ↑ José Díaz-Fernández (2016). The Blockhouse: El Blocao. Liverpool Univ Pr. p. 133. ISBN 9781910572283. https://books.google.com/books?id=qiwDEAAAQBAJ&pg=PA133.
30. ↑ Wilcox, Vanda (2008). "From Heroic Defeat to Mutilated Victory: The Myth of Caporetto in Fascist Italy". in Mcleod, Jenny. Defeat and Memory Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. pp. 46–61. doi:10.1057/9780230582798_4. ISBN 978-0-230-58279-8.
31. ↑ Levine, Paul (May 2013). "Never Forget National Humiliation". http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2013/0105/bk/book05_levine_never.html. "The Chinese master narrative of the century of humiliation defines the national trauma China uses to identify itself."
32. ↑ Upton, Anthony F. (1981). Vallankumous Suomessa 1917-1918.. Kirjayhtymä. ISBN 951-26-1828-1. OCLC 916637014.
33. ↑ Aunesluoma, J. (2021). Finland in World War II: Tragedy, Survival, and Good Wars. In M. T. Stecher-Hansen (Ed.), Nordic War Stories: World War II as History, Fiction, Media, and Memory (pp. 21-34). Berghahn books.
34. ↑ Sabina Jahanli (2019). "Victimized identity construction: Azerbaijan in the Post-soviet transition". Central European University. pp. 69. https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/jahanli_sabina.pdf.
35. ↑ Erik Bjergager (9 April 2015). "Aldrig mere 9. April". Kristeligt Dagblad. https://www.kristeligt-dagblad.dk/leder/aldrig-mere-en-9.-april.
36. ↑ Memory and Postcolonial Studies. 11 June 2019. https://www.peterlang.com/document/1057126.
37. ↑ Cormac Ó Gráda (2001). "Famine, Trauma and Memory". Bealoideas. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/238601086.
38. ↑ Weisenfeld, Gennifer (2012). Imaging Disaster: Tokyo and the Visual Culture of Japan's Great Earthquake of 1923. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-27195-1.
39. ↑ Vasileios Dalkavoukis (2013). "Civil War: cultural trauma". Democritus University of Thrace. https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/historein/article/viewFile/2344/2147.pdf.
40. ↑ "The Harrying of the North | History Today". https://www.historytoday.com/history-matters/harrying-north.
41. ↑ De Haan, Ido (1998). "The construction of a national trauma the memory of the persecution of the Jews in The Netherlands". The Netherlands Journal of Social Sciences 34 (2): 196–217.
42. ↑ Fordham, Alice (11 April 2009). "Lebanon's movement to remember". The National. https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/lebanon-s-movement-to-remember-1.596981?outputType=amp.
43. ↑ Sadiq, Jahabar (22 June 2014). "'Shock and horror' in Malaysia after MH17 Ukraine crash". Deutsche Welle. https://www.dw.com/en/shock-and-horror-in-malaysia-after-mh17-ukraine-crash/a-17799896.
44. ↑ Dee, Liz (8 July 2019). "Death, Love and Conspiracy: The Nepalese Royal Massacre of 2001 (Durbar Hatyakanda)". https://adst.org/2019/07/death-love-and-conspiracy-the-nepalese-royal-massacre-of-2001/. Retrieved 6 November 2020.
45. ↑ Wood, Michael (18 September 2014). "The Norman Yoke: Symbol or Reality?" (in en-uk). https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/conquest/after_norman/norman_yoke_03.shtml.
46. ↑ Wiering, Mark; Green, Colin; van Rijswick, Marleen; Priest, Sally; Keessen, Andrea (2015). "The rationales of resilience in English and Dutch flood risk policies". Journal of Water and Climate Change 6 (1): 34–54. doi:10.2166/wcc.2014.017. https://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/14710/1/Post_print_Wiering et al Rationales_of_resilience_JWC-D-14-00017.pdf.
47. ↑ Neugebauer, Richard et al. (1 August 2009). "Post-traumatic stress reactions among Rwandan children and adolescents in the early aftermath of genocide". International Journal of Epidemiology 38 (4): 1033–1045. doi:10.1093/ije/dyn375. PMID 19204009. https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/38/4/1033/849053. Retrieved 30 December 2017.
48. ↑ Daly, Nicholas (2004). Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000. New York: Cambridge University Press. p. 60. ISBN 978-0521833929. https://books.google.com/books?id=lfwq0dZbCAAC. Retrieved 30 December 2017.
49. ↑ Maria Mané Akopyan (2021-03-14). "Armenia's Post-War Depression". The Organization for World Peace. https://theowp.org/reports/armenias-post-war-depression/.
50. ↑ Lotte Thorsen (10 June 2010). "DR er lun på 1864-nederlaget". Politiken. http://politiken.dk/kultur/tvogradio/ECE999334/dr-er-lun-paa-1864-nederlaget/.
51. ↑ Silver, Roxane Cohen (2005). "Exploring the myths of coping with a national trauma: A longitudinal study of responses to the September 11th terrorist attacks.". Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 9 (1–2): 129–141. doi:10.1300/j146v09n01_16. https://escholarship.org/content/qt9w64q1r1/qt9w64q1r1.pdf?t=ooem4r.
52. ↑ van de Bildt, Joyce (March 2015). "Srebrenica: A Dutch national trauma". Journal of Peace, Conflict & Development (21). ISSN 1742-0601. http://www.bradford.ac.uk/social-sciences/peace-conflict-and-development/issue-21/Srebrenica
a-dutch-national-trauma.pdf#page=27. Retrieved 30 December 2017.
53. ↑ Home, John (2008). "Defeat and Memory in Modern History". in Mcleod, Jenny. Defeat and Memory Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. pp. 11–29. doi:10.1057/9780230582798_2. ISBN 978-0-230-58279-8.
54. ↑ Romano, Aja (August 7, 2019). "The Manson Family murders, and their complicated legacy, explained". https://www.vox.com/2019/8/7/20695284/charles-manson-family-what-is-helter-skelter-explained.
55. ↑ Sena Şahin (July 2021). "The Sèvres Trauma and the Construction of an Exclusionary National Identity". Sabancı University. https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/42454/1/10337691.pdf.
56. ↑ Lagos Erazo, Jaime (22 October 2012). Morandé Lavín, José; Sprovera Ahumada, Andrea. eds. "Las aspiraciones marítimas de Bolivia: Antes y después de Cochabamba" (in es) (PDF). Estudios Internacionales (Santiago, Chile: Instituto de Estudios Internacionales de la Universidad de Chile) 44 (172): 131–134. doi:10.5354/0719-3769.2012.23621. ISSN 0719-3769. https://revistaei.uchile.cl/index.php/REI/article/view/23621/29106. Retrieved 25 August 2021.
57. ↑ Lagos Carmona 1981, p. 127, Capítulo II: La mediterraneidad de Bolivia.
58. ↑ Rodríguez Elizondo 2009, p. 21-32, I. Cuando el mar no era un problema.
59. ↑ Ugarte Díaz, Emilio José (2014-08-19). "La Guerra del Pacífico como referente nacional y punto condicionante de las relaciones chileno-peruanas" (in Spanish). Revista de Estudios Transfronterizos XIV (2): 159–185.

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