Selected trauma and its intergenerational transmission
A chosen trauma (Volkan, 1987, 2004, 2006) is the collective mental representation of an event in the history of a large group in which the group experienced catastrophic loss, humiliation, and despair at the hands of their enemies. When members of a victim group are unable to mourn such losses and reverse their humiliation and helplessness, they pass on images of their hurt selves and psychological tasks that need to be completed to their offspring. This process is known as “transgenerational transmission of trauma” (Volkan, Ast, & Greer, 2001). All such images and tasks conveyed contain references to the same historical event, and over the decades the mental representation of this event connects all individuals in the larger group. Thus, the mental representation of the event emerges as an important marker of large group identity.
A chosen trauma reflects the “contamination” of a large group’s grieving process, and its reactivation serves to bind members of a large group together. This kind of reactivation can be used by political leadership to spur new mass social movements, some of which are deadly and malignant.
In the field of social neuroscience, in social psychology, brain studies with fMRI in recent years express in-group behaviors from a cerebral perspective. In these studies, the mirror neuron system in the brain is activated while imitating the behaviors of others. The fact that the mirror neuron system also works together with the emotion system and executive memory gives the subject of what or whom we should imitate the individual in the group to the management of these systems. The states and behaviors that will occur on a certain situation, on a case, pass through the process with a logical approach. However, if these systems establish a connection between the event that occurred and some negative events experienced in the past that triggered the perception of danger, then that person or that group approaches the events that supposedly should have the same objectivity and ethics for everyone from different ethical and perception perspectives. These groups can be international, ethnic, religious, national or political groups. In summary, it was stated that the important thing would be the meaning of an event for different groups (Elster, 1993).
