Culturally Imposed Trauma: The Sleeping Dog Has Awakened. Will Psychoanalysis Take Heed?

Abstract

This paper considers the scant attention psychoanalysis gives to cultural trauma. Three contributions to this deficiency are considered: (a) the continuing identification with our psychoanalytic forefathers’ silence regarding cultural trauma, (b) the authoritarian practices in psychoanalytic institutions that keep us overly focused on standard intrapsychic formulations to the near exclusion of cultural trauma, and (c) the fact that work with cultural trauma is difficult. To do this work requires us to “buck the system.” If we do so, we expose ourselves to toxic phenomena in a world still rife with cultural trauma. This paper, which includes clinical vignettes, is an invitation to do so.

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Notes on contributors

Dorothy Evans Holmes

Dorothy Evans Holmes, Ph.D., is Teaching, Training, and Supervising Psychoanalyst at the Psychoanalytic Education Center of the Carolinas. Also, she is Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychology at George Washington University, where she was Program Director and Director of Clinical Training in the Center for Professional Psychology from 2005 to 2011. She is also a Teaching, Training, and Supervising Analyst Emeritus at the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis. Dr. Holmes has written extensively on intrapsychic influences of race, gender, and their impact on psychoanalytic treatment process. She has served on the Ethics Committees of APsaA and the American Psychological Association, and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Presently, she is in private practice in Bluffton, SC.