Models of dealing with historical traumas

The article analyses the mechanisms of dealing with collective traumatic memory as a source of similar patterns of identification in a stable community. Collective historical traumas are a problem of dissonance between the collective experience of a historical event and its consequences, on the one hand, and the constructed representation of this experience, which arose as a result of either the absence of conditions for its articulation, or incorrect decoding (interpretation) of this experience, on the other. Overcoming collective historical traumas is one of the objectives of memory politics, including the state memory politics. At the same time, the formation of cultural models for working with traumatic experience cannot be successful without a thorough theoretical study of the types of traumatic reactions, the mechanisms of awareness and overcoming of historical traumas. The analysis is based on the methodological synthesis of the main approaches to the understanding of historical trauma (psychoanalytical and sociological), the author explores the mechanisms of detraumatisation using a historical retrospective approach and discourse analysis. Through the analysis of the fundamental studies of the phenomenon of the traumatic past (Z. Freud, С. Caruth, F.R. Ankersmit, D. LaCapra, J. Alexander, A. Assmann, et al.), several levels of work with collective traumatic memory are distinguished: models of forgetting history, models of quasi-representations, models of detraumatisation. The author infers that the reaction to collective trauma is determined not only by psychological mechanisms (repression, oblivion, self-justification), but also by planned strategies and directives (on the one hand, these models could be constructive: a model of intellectual historicisation, models of compromise and dialogic memory; on the other hand, they could be aimed at suppressing analytical impulses and building quasi-representations: models of falsification, mutual offset of guilt, externalisation). The advocates of psychoanalysis claim that the articulation of traumatic experience is one of the main mechanisms for overcoming a historical trauma. At the same time, the orderly organization of memory of the past, which includes the techniques of spatial and temporal localisation, is a condition for successful detraumatisation. For successful canalisation, a certain social significance must be attributed to a traumatic event, expressed in fixing it in normatively significant texts, and strengthened with the help of the performative potential of art. The intellectual historicization model corresponds to these goals. One of the most important contemporary memory trends is the shift from the monologue nature of group memory (as well as from the compromise memory model based on shared narratives) to shareable narratives of individual communities (the dialogic memory model).

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