As the only theory able to trace the effects of unconscious experience, psychoanalysis is invaluable in any attempt to face the ghosts of a past one has never lived, or lived only via the detours of its narrative and psychic transmission across generations. (184)
This dynamic also underlies, I believe, the psychological deformations of perpetrator cultures more generally. One of the most common deformations is the internalization and hence internal repetition of patterns of violence in the perpetrator culture. (188)
To account for this psychological deformation of perpetrators and their children, it is necessary to expand Abraham and Torok’s notion of the ‘crypt’ to include cultural or national crypts. Abraham and Torok define encryptment as a psychic response to trauma in which an intolerable experience becomes walled in, silenced and removed from consciousness and the public sphere. Such intolerable experiences can occur on the side of victims who cannot face unbearable loss, humiliation, destruction, torture or genocide. They can also occur on the side of perpetrators who cannot face their own violence, guilt or shame. Just like intrapsychic crypts, cultural and national crypts harbor the repressed or denied memories of violence. Once the latter are walled off from a conscious politics of remembrance and public debate, they can no longer be worked through and transformed into a politics of redress. Collectively established crypts become the sources of a cultural and national haunting that cannot be addressed unless the crypt is opened and the silence broken.
Perhaps it is important to stress here that silence need not be complete in order for this dynamic to operate. There may even be—as there was in Germany after the war—an open politics of acknowledgment of war crimes, including the Nuremberg trials and the process of ‘de-Nazification’ as well as the monumentalization of victimage and official politics of reparation. But unless these acts include a psychosocial politics that addresses the responsibility, complicity, guilt, shame and psychosocial deformation of the culture at large, it in fact only helps to perpetuate a politics of silencing and denial. In the worst case, historical monumentalization may even aggravate such politics by providing a safely contained outlet to alleviate unconscious feelings of guilt and shame. (189)
--> what is harm if to cause harm or be complicit is also harmful?
