I was invited to talk about Az Theatre's WAR STORIES project at a day conference on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that was a part of the Biennale Festival of Theatre and Psychiatry held in Padua this October.
The conference was for mental health service staff; doctors, nurses and people training in this field. There were approximately 170 people there and as well as papers on the epidemiology, symptoms and treatment there were contributions about a project in Rome which worked through arts and theatre with refugee victims of torture and about a project in Sri Lanka that likewise worked with victims of the tsunami.
The festival and the conference were organised by the Department of Psychiatry at the Padua's University Hospital, Italy's foremost place of learning in this field. This was an adventurous and exciting thing to do for an institution of this kind. I saw only a little of the festival. Many of the participants were mental health sufferers. In this context theatre provided a shared space where the interdependence of the patients and the therapists manifested itself. The inclusive character of this community of suffering, witnessing and curing has a historical, even prehistorical resonance. It felt to me as if the knowing that was created by the interaction between the components of this community had been a perennial source of enrichment for the human spirit and for culture.
At the lunch break I found myself talking to the psychiatrist from Rome about space and distance. In his talk he had spoken about how patients suffering from the 'disorder' had a fragile relationship between physical or 'outer' reality and psychological or 'inner' reality. He was describing the almost complete unpredictability of situations where any event might trigger a reliving of the feelings connected to the traumatic event or events. At any moment the incidental associational contact between an interior life dominated by the trauma and an event in the real world could have shattering effects. Sometimes the less apparent the influence of the trauma over the mental life the more volatile was this relationship. The danger of what was described as re-traumatisation was evident. The strategies employed to bring the trauma towards the light of consciousness had to be subtle. In his theatre and drama work he used mythic stories as an indirect way of allowing the trauma to express itself. These stories are general and towards these knowable forms or shapes, specific stories can be drawn. Within the embrace of a myth an individual story can receive a profound, and perhaps distant, affirmation. Another example of an indirect approach to the trauma had been given by the Sri Lankan company in their description of work with everyday objects. As the imaginative world of the drama workshop participant was activated the object began, through a process of association and projection, to take on a role in the central drama of the sufferers mental life. Finding an outer form of expression for an inchoate feeling, beyond articulation and language, possibly inaccessible to thought, is a first step in creating a less fragile and more creative connection between 'inner' and 'outer' reality. The myth story is like an inner object which has the substance of an outer objectivity. The language we use to describe these processes is mechanistic and sometimes metaphorical. In the case of myths we may have images of submarine objects which through sheer weight and power attract smaller objects and draw them towards the surface. Metaphors can become mixed and images hold up only for an inspiring moment or two.
There seem to be two pathological conditions which at first sight appear to be opposites. One is where any ordinary event could all too quickly and unpredictably associate with a painful and dominant element in the inner life of the sufferer. The other is where this transport is completely blocked. As I talked to the psychiatrist he kept insisting that this internal distance manifested itself in how someone responded to interpersonal space. He demonstrated this by alternately getting very close to me and then pulling away. I realised that he was telling me something significant but the full impact of what he was saying only occurred to me later.
Theatre draws everything towards the human dimension. It can be a transitional space in just the same way as the myths and objects can be transitional objects, ways of re-opening a conduit between the child-like world of the imagination and the adult 'real' world. Perhaps this sounds mournful or clinical. The space between us and how we use it, how it forms us, is deeply connected to the dynamic in us between our physical reality and our psychological reality. Our lives are punctuated, sometimes less gently than at others, by moments of disconnection and imbalance between these elements. At their lightest these moments can be embarrassing; at others more deeply disturbing. They are essentially how we develop and grow. They are connected in a complex way to culture. There is a deep connection between certain specific aspects of our memory and our kinaesthetic sense. Bio-chemistry has established that the same hormonal substances are active in determining these functions. The same parts of the brain are involved. It is these functions which appear to be adversely affected by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Thinking about PTSD one's mind seems to head off in a number of different directions at the same time. The 'disorder' seems to lack clear definition. The impact of my attendance at the day conference in Padua was to vastly increase my sense of how much I knew about the disorder and how much I didn't know.
Human beings have suffered catastrophes that must have caused traumas throughout our existence. There were precursors of PTSD during the American Civil War during the first world war and more recently there has been a good deal of work produced about the traumatic effect of the ethnic cleansing and extermination programme carried out by the National Socialist regime in Germany. However it was really the Vietnam War veterans who were the first substantial group to be classified as sufferers. What was specific about the conditions in this instance that gave rise to the disorder? Was it the level of technology involved or was it the radical contrast between the combat zone and the life back home that the soldiers were expected to re-join?
Human beings have always faced natural disasters like the tsunami. However when the Sri Lankan group talked not about the traumatic impact of the tidal wave but of the recovery operation the modern nature of the disorder came into sharper focus. The aetiology of the disorder is indefinite. However we have become more used to the idea that illnesses have histories and are up to a point culturally, economically and politically determined. In the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis the focus of interest has shifted from hysteria to neurosis to psychosis and now to trauma.
The arrival of a new disease is a complex process. Like many modern disorders PTSD is a group of associated conditions. The epidemiology of the disease is also complex. Exactly who can be accounted a sufferer is open to question. There is an extremely high incidence in excombatants from the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. Also research shows that approximately half the male citizens of the USA feel that they have suffered some kind of trauma. In the period following the events of September 2001 a dial up psychotherapeutic service called Project Liberty was set up. By March 2003 643,000 people in the New York State area had used it.
Also the disorder manifests itself in such a diverse range of symptoms. Depression figures very highly but it is dissimilar endocrinologically from other forms of depression. Substance abuse and alcoholism are major factors. Breakdown in close personal and family relations compatible with the insights from the conversation with the Roman psychiatrist is significant. Flashbacks and delusional behaviour happen in many cases. It can take the form of asthma, skin disorders etc.
It is significant that all the the symptoms are individually capable of being treated but no cure is sustained without dealing with what appears to be the root cause of the problem. This appears to simplify matters but at the same time makes them more complicated. The precept that for any individual sufferer the disorder has a definite cause or origin - the traumatic event - is the lynch pin which holds together our view of it. But what is the nature of this event? Is it fixed and singular? How much is it a part of a process? Of what process can it be said to be a part? Why is it that an event can impact variously on people? Why does one person suffer PTSD and another doesn't?
The assumption that had the 'event' not happened the sufferer would be 'normal' is not necessarily true. A psychiatrist in Kosovo told me that he had a strong impression that many people who believed they had been traumatised by the war were deluded and in fact the origin of their disorder pre-dated the war. The war provided them with a pretext to admit their problem and seek help. There is clearly an extremely complex interaction between an individual's inclinations and the immediate environment. In Freud's work on trauma the 'event' remains concealed, subject to repression and is classically located in early infantile experience. The trauma in this scenario takes on other deceptive forms and is revealed only through persistent personal archeological work. The traumatic event which may have appeared to have triggered the disorder may have opened up an already existing fissure within the personality. The trauma of being born and the incidental nature of our early upbringing mean that human beings cannot be psychologically perfectly formed. It takes only a certain event that, as it were, resounds a certain note that will crack open the fault line in our being. Out floods all our uncertainties about our existence until we have the strength to stem the flow. These images are approximate. As are ones which are taken more directly from medicine such as the idea of opening up old wounds or of the incomplete healing that is described by damage to the scar tissue in the event of an external wound.
What is it about our lives which makes the line between sufferers of the disorder and their contemporaries difficult to draw clearly? Why do so many of the symptoms seems so familiar? What makes this such a characteristically modern disorder? If the most intense forms of the disorder are associated with war (with its accompanying activity, torture) what can this tell us about the complex impact of war in our society? How does this disease spread?
I remember meeting a man in the early 1970s in Northern Ireland who had been subjected to sensory deprivation torture by the British Army. He couldn't stop shaking. He told me that he was only aware of humiliating and terrifying experiences which included being in a dark cell with very loud noise for a very long time. He couldn't believe that this had damaged him. He hadn't suffered any physical torture and therefore, it seemed to him, that he couldn't explain his condition. Meeting this man was like meeting a harbinger.
The knowledge of how human beings can be traumatised has generalised itself into military strategy. The relationship between torture and the conduct of war has been reorganised. The strategy of inducing 'shock and awe' which was advertised at the beginning of the recent invasion of Iraq and was, at least, the clear and stated intention of the Israeli state in its attempt to terrify the population of Lebanon into withdrawing support from Hisbollah has now become the model for modern war. This idea may well be said to have penetrated every element of our society. In the 'terror' war the deliberate traumatisation of key groups of people goes hand in hand with surgical bombing.
In Sri Lanka the initial disaster of the tsunami was followed by the disaster of the recovery effort. This exacerbated the breakdown of traditional support structures and in the social chaos that ensued violent crime, rape, alcoholism and substance abuse had become widespread. The processes of disintegration, associated with globalisation, may already have been happening prior to the Tsunami. The great wave merely flung open an already insecure door. The interventions of the state and the international relief efforts simply exacerbated the growing inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor and the failing collective structures. This reduction of a population to a condition of endangered survival while at the same time disordering communal relations brings to mind New Orleans, on the one hand, and Iraq, on the other.
The disorder may have a number of conjunctural causes but it feels as of the prevalence of the disorder is connected to deep instabilities and insecurities in human society as we become predominantly city dwellers, as we move away from the land and the extended family. We have yet to construct for ourselves new forms of collectivity that will cope with our changing needs. On the whole the nation state after a period of democratic development can only offer a limited protection against the impact of the changes we are undergoing as a species. In many instances states are equivalent to illegal armed gangs. In the vacancy caused by these changes primordial and regressive forms of organisation have a temporary renaissance.
By trying to contextualise the growth of the disorder I don't mean to diminish the actual pain suffered by people or the importance of the work to alleviate that suffering.
It feels important to connect things up. In the case of the returning soldier and possibly the victim of torture once they have gained a safe haven, the dreadful suffering produced by violence is transformed by the attempt to deny it which is a function of survival. Moving into an environment which increases that sense of denial, in which the experiences become incommunicable must create the tension associated with the idea of stress. Something dreadful has happened but now it appears as if it hasn't happened. Everything is encouraging the sufferer to forget and live a normal life. Sometimes even the physical scars have disappeared. For the returning soldier there is the added conundrum of the fact that they are now asked to live the 'way of life' which they have been told was the object of their martial endeavours. The radical disconnection between the two realities, the 'war zone' and the 'way of life' zone must have been a feature of all wars but it is much more emphatically the case in the new technologised 'distant' war.
The situation for the returning warrior in the 'war producing' countries and the general malaise of those societies is difficult to connect with what is taking place, for example, in Iraq. The complete and deliberate destruction of social order in Iraq amounts to a collective trauma rarely suffered nor witnessed in human history. It is in a way simpler to understand what the impact of this has been on the Iraqis than the effect on the societies which are the source of this violence, mainly the USA and the UK.
All the unsettling circumstances of a population who have been atomised and urbanised are current in the West. Dispossession, privatisation and the disappearance of the 'common' wealth are well advanced. For the established ruling elite and for those rich enough to buy their way into it, life demonstrates an amazing monarchical continuity. For the majority of people change, insecurity and instability have accompanied the deliberate inculcation of fear and a regime of denial, mendacity and inversion. In the 'war producing' countries the pain of the 'war receiving' countries is experienced as numbness. The deliberate imposition of the rule of brutal violent force creating a situation where the capacity to kill and destroy human beings becomes the key instrument of all social control and individual power has led to a wholesale descent into violence at every level social life. What is the impact of this spectacle on the societies which are either consciously or unconsciously responsible. The violence there is experienced as fear and the fear is immobilising. In addition there is a culture of lies and denial amongst the ruling circles. The lies about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is one example. The recent statement by Bush that "We don't do torture" is another. Men who are responsible for killing and torture have a logic of their own. Similarly you do not contradict someone who is holding a gun to your head. White becomes black and black white. If you constantly repeat a lie often enough and forcefully enough then it may gain acceptance. It is well known that the world of the torturer and the killer is full of these inversions. This sense of being able to determine ones own truth is at the centre of an intense ethnocentricity. It is impossible to determine how far these factors lay the ground for the kind of insecurity which might make the 'disorder' prevalent. The belief of the man in Northern Ireland that he hadn't been tortured and therefore had no explanation for his state can be related to the stress disorder arising from the trauma of witnessing an act of violence to someone close to you and this can be related to the collective trauma caused by our relationship to what is being carried out with our complicity elsewhere. Of course in all these instances denial can play a strong and dynamic part in the underlying stress. There is bound to be a fear of reprisal which can be cultivated by operators in the political structure intent on justifying the violence. The ease with which the terror threat can be summoned is connected to our sense of relief at the spectacle of violence 'over there'.
I cannot argue that we, in the west, are suffering the same trauma as people living in Iraq. I am saying that these events have a different but related impact on us. It reminds me of what Marx said about the relation between Britain and Ireland when he pointed out that a nation which enchains another nation cannot itself be free.
The organisers in Padua point out in their description of the conference that PTSD is not yet sufficiently known about in Italy. Just as avian flu was coming from the east so the 'disorder' was coming from the west.
Jonathan Chadwick
THINKING ABOUT POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER: RESPONDING TO THE CONFERENCE IN PADUA
Submitted by aztheatre on Wed, 17/01/2007 - 2:11pm.I was invited to talk about Az Theatre's WAR STORIES project at a day conference on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that was a part of the Biennale Festival of Theatre and Psychiatry held in Padua this October.
The conference was for mental health service staff; doctors, nurses and people training in this field. There were approximately 170 people there and as well as papers on the epidemiology, symptoms and treatment there were contributions about a project in Rome which worked through arts and theatre with refugee victims of torture and about a project in Sri Lanka that likewise worked with victims of the tsunami.
The festival and the conference were organised by the Department of Psychiatry at the Padua's University Hospital, Italy's foremost place of learning in this field. This was an adventurous and exciting thing to do for an institution of this kind. I saw only a little of the festival. Many of the participants were mental health sufferers. In this context theatre provided a shared space where the interdependence of the patients and the therapists manifested itself. The inclusive character of this community of suffering, witnessing and curing has a historical, even prehistorical resonance. It felt to me as if the knowing that was created by the interaction between the components of this community had been a perennial source of enrichment for the human spirit and for culture.
At the lunch break I found myself talking to the psychiatrist from Rome about space and distance. In his talk he had spoken about how patients suffering from the 'disorder' had a fragile relationship between physical or 'outer' reality and psychological or 'inner' reality. He was describing the almost complete unpredictability of situations where any event might trigger a reliving of the feelings connected to the traumatic event or events. At any moment the incidental associational contact between an interior life dominated by the trauma and an event in the real world could have shattering effects. Sometimes the less apparent the influence of the trauma over the mental life the more volatile was this relationship. The danger of what was described as re-traumatisation was evident. The strategies employed to bring the trauma towards the light of consciousness had to be subtle. In his theatre and drama work he used mythic stories as an indirect way of allowing the trauma to express itself. These stories are general and towards these knowable forms or shapes, specific stories can be drawn. Within the embrace of a myth an individual story can receive a profound, and perhaps distant, affirmation. Another example of an indirect approach to the trauma had been given by the Sri Lankan company in their description of work with everyday objects. As the imaginative world of the drama workshop participant was activated the object began, through a process of association and projection, to take on a role in the central drama of the sufferers mental life. Finding an outer form of expression for an inchoate feeling, beyond articulation and language, possibly inaccessible to thought, is a first step in creating a less fragile and more creative connection between 'inner' and 'outer' reality. The myth story is like an inner object which has the substance of an outer objectivity. The language we use to describe these processes is mechanistic and sometimes metaphorical. In the case of myths we may have images of submarine objects which through sheer weight and power attract smaller objects and draw them towards the surface. Metaphors can become mixed and images hold up only for an inspiring moment or two.
There seem to be two pathological conditions which at first sight appear to be opposites. One is where any ordinary event could all too quickly and unpredictably associate with a painful and dominant element in the inner life of the sufferer. The other is where this transport is completely blocked. As I talked to the psychiatrist he kept insisting that this internal distance manifested itself in how someone responded to interpersonal space. He demonstrated this by alternately getting very close to me and then pulling away. I realised that he was telling me something significant but the full impact of what he was saying only occurred to me later.
Theatre draws everything towards the human dimension. It can be a transitional space in just the same way as the myths and objects can be transitional objects, ways of re-opening a conduit between the child-like world of the imagination and the adult 'real' world. Perhaps this sounds mournful or clinical. The space between us and how we use it, how it forms us, is deeply connected to the dynamic in us between our physical reality and our psychological reality. Our lives are punctuated, sometimes less gently than at others, by moments of disconnection and imbalance between these elements. At their lightest these moments can be embarrassing; at others more deeply disturbing. They are essentially how we develop and grow. They are connected in a complex way to culture. There is a deep connection between certain specific aspects of our memory and our kinaesthetic sense. Bio-chemistry has established that the same hormonal substances are active in determining these functions. The same parts of the brain are involved. It is these functions which appear to be adversely affected by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Thinking about PTSD one's mind seems to head off in a number of different directions at the same time. The 'disorder' seems to lack clear definition. The impact of my attendance at the day conference in Padua was to vastly increase my sense of how much I knew about the disorder and how much I didn't know.
Human beings have suffered catastrophes that must have caused traumas throughout our existence. There were precursors of PTSD during the American Civil War during the first world war and more recently there has been a good deal of work produced about the traumatic effect of the ethnic cleansing and extermination programme carried out by the National Socialist regime in Germany. However it was really the Vietnam War veterans who were the first substantial group to be classified as sufferers. What was specific about the conditions in this instance that gave rise to the disorder? Was it the level of technology involved or was it the radical contrast between the combat zone and the life back home that the soldiers were expected to re-join?
Human beings have always faced natural disasters like the tsunami. However when the Sri Lankan group talked not about the traumatic impact of the tidal wave but of the recovery operation the modern nature of the disorder came into sharper focus. The aetiology of the disorder is indefinite. However we have become more used to the idea that illnesses have histories and are up to a point culturally, economically and politically determined. In the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis the focus of interest has shifted from hysteria to neurosis to psychosis and now to trauma.
The arrival of a new disease is a complex process. Like many modern disorders PTSD is a group of associated conditions. The epidemiology of the disease is also complex. Exactly who can be accounted a sufferer is open to question. There is an extremely high incidence in excombatants from the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. Also research shows that approximately half the male citizens of the USA feel that they have suffered some kind of trauma. In the period following the events of September 2001 a dial up psychotherapeutic service called Project Liberty was set up. By March 2003 643,000 people in the New York State area had used it.
Also the disorder manifests itself in such a diverse range of symptoms. Depression figures very highly but it is dissimilar endocrinologically from other forms of depression. Substance abuse and alcoholism are major factors. Breakdown in close personal and family relations compatible with the insights from the conversation with the Roman psychiatrist is significant. Flashbacks and delusional behaviour happen in many cases. It can take the form of asthma, skin disorders etc.
It is significant that all the the symptoms are individually capable of being treated but no cure is sustained without dealing with what appears to be the root cause of the problem. This appears to simplify matters but at the same time makes them more complicated. The precept that for any individual sufferer the disorder has a definite cause or origin - the traumatic event - is the lynch pin which holds together our view of it. But what is the nature of this event? Is it fixed and singular? How much is it a part of a process? Of what process can it be said to be a part? Why is it that an event can impact variously on people? Why does one person suffer PTSD and another doesn't?
The assumption that had the 'event' not happened the sufferer would be 'normal' is not necessarily true. A psychiatrist in Kosovo told me that he had a strong impression that many people who believed they had been traumatised by the war were deluded and in fact the origin of their disorder pre-dated the war. The war provided them with a pretext to admit their problem and seek help. There is clearly an extremely complex interaction between an individual's inclinations and the immediate environment. In Freud's work on trauma the 'event' remains concealed, subject to repression and is classically located in early infantile experience. The trauma in this scenario takes on other deceptive forms and is revealed only through persistent personal archeological work. The traumatic event which may have appeared to have triggered the disorder may have opened up an already existing fissure within the personality. The trauma of being born and the incidental nature of our early upbringing mean that human beings cannot be psychologically perfectly formed. It takes only a certain event that, as it were, resounds a certain note that will crack open the fault line in our being. Out floods all our uncertainties about our existence until we have the strength to stem the flow. These images are approximate. As are ones which are taken more directly from medicine such as the idea of opening up old wounds or of the incomplete healing that is described by damage to the scar tissue in the event of an external wound.
What is it about our lives which makes the line between sufferers of the disorder and their contemporaries difficult to draw clearly? Why do so many of the symptoms seems so familiar? What makes this such a characteristically modern disorder? If the most intense forms of the disorder are associated with war (with its accompanying activity, torture) what can this tell us about the complex impact of war in our society? How does this disease spread?
I remember meeting a man in the early 1970s in Northern Ireland who had been subjected to sensory deprivation torture by the British Army. He couldn't stop shaking. He told me that he was only aware of humiliating and terrifying experiences which included being in a dark cell with very loud noise for a very long time. He couldn't believe that this had damaged him. He hadn't suffered any physical torture and therefore, it seemed to him, that he couldn't explain his condition. Meeting this man was like meeting a harbinger.
The knowledge of how human beings can be traumatised has generalised itself into military strategy. The relationship between torture and the conduct of war has been reorganised. The strategy of inducing 'shock and awe' which was advertised at the beginning of the recent invasion of Iraq and was, at least, the clear and stated intention of the Israeli state in its attempt to terrify the population of Lebanon into withdrawing support from Hisbollah has now become the model for modern war. This idea may well be said to have penetrated every element of our society. In the 'terror' war the deliberate traumatisation of key groups of people goes hand in hand with surgical bombing.
In Sri Lanka the initial disaster of the tsunami was followed by the disaster of the recovery effort. This exacerbated the breakdown of traditional support structures and in the social chaos that ensued violent crime, rape, alcoholism and substance abuse had become widespread. The processes of disintegration, associated with globalisation, may already have been happening prior to the Tsunami. The great wave merely flung open an already insecure door. The interventions of the state and the international relief efforts simply exacerbated the growing inequality, the gap between the rich and the poor and the failing collective structures. This reduction of a population to a condition of endangered survival while at the same time disordering communal relations brings to mind New Orleans, on the one hand, and Iraq, on the other.
The disorder may have a number of conjunctural causes but it feels as of the prevalence of the disorder is connected to deep instabilities and insecurities in human society as we become predominantly city dwellers, as we move away from the land and the extended family. We have yet to construct for ourselves new forms of collectivity that will cope with our changing needs. On the whole the nation state after a period of democratic development can only offer a limited protection against the impact of the changes we are undergoing as a species. In many instances states are equivalent to illegal armed gangs. In the vacancy caused by these changes primordial and regressive forms of organisation have a temporary renaissance.
By trying to contextualise the growth of the disorder I don't mean to diminish the actual pain suffered by people or the importance of the work to alleviate that suffering.
It feels important to connect things up. In the case of the returning soldier and possibly the victim of torture once they have gained a safe haven, the dreadful suffering produced by violence is transformed by the attempt to deny it which is a function of survival. Moving into an environment which increases that sense of denial, in which the experiences become incommunicable must create the tension associated with the idea of stress. Something dreadful has happened but now it appears as if it hasn't happened. Everything is encouraging the sufferer to forget and live a normal life. Sometimes even the physical scars have disappeared. For the returning soldier there is the added conundrum of the fact that they are now asked to live the 'way of life' which they have been told was the object of their martial endeavours. The radical disconnection between the two realities, the 'war zone' and the 'way of life' zone must have been a feature of all wars but it is much more emphatically the case in the new technologised 'distant' war.
The situation for the returning warrior in the 'war producing' countries and the general malaise of those societies is difficult to connect with what is taking place, for example, in Iraq. The complete and deliberate destruction of social order in Iraq amounts to a collective trauma rarely suffered nor witnessed in human history. It is in a way simpler to understand what the impact of this has been on the Iraqis than the effect on the societies which are the source of this violence, mainly the USA and the UK.
All the unsettling circumstances of a population who have been atomised and urbanised are current in the West. Dispossession, privatisation and the disappearance of the 'common' wealth are well advanced. For the established ruling elite and for those rich enough to buy their way into it, life demonstrates an amazing monarchical continuity. For the majority of people change, insecurity and instability have accompanied the deliberate inculcation of fear and a regime of denial, mendacity and inversion. In the 'war producing' countries the pain of the 'war receiving' countries is experienced as numbness. The deliberate imposition of the rule of brutal violent force creating a situation where the capacity to kill and destroy human beings becomes the key instrument of all social control and individual power has led to a wholesale descent into violence at every level social life. What is the impact of this spectacle on the societies which are either consciously or unconsciously responsible. The violence there is experienced as fear and the fear is immobilising. In addition there is a culture of lies and denial amongst the ruling circles. The lies about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is one example. The recent statement by Bush that "We don't do torture" is another. Men who are responsible for killing and torture have a logic of their own. Similarly you do not contradict someone who is holding a gun to your head. White becomes black and black white. If you constantly repeat a lie often enough and forcefully enough then it may gain acceptance. It is well known that the world of the torturer and the killer is full of these inversions. This sense of being able to determine ones own truth is at the centre of an intense ethnocentricity. It is impossible to determine how far these factors lay the ground for the kind of insecurity which might make the 'disorder' prevalent. The belief of the man in Northern Ireland that he hadn't been tortured and therefore had no explanation for his state can be related to the stress disorder arising from the trauma of witnessing an act of violence to someone close to you and this can be related to the collective trauma caused by our relationship to what is being carried out with our complicity elsewhere. Of course in all these instances denial can play a strong and dynamic part in the underlying stress. There is bound to be a fear of reprisal which can be cultivated by operators in the political structure intent on justifying the violence. The ease with which the terror threat can be summoned is connected to our sense of relief at the spectacle of violence 'over there'.
I cannot argue that we, in the west, are suffering the same trauma as people living in Iraq. I am saying that these events have a different but related impact on us. It reminds me of what Marx said about the relation between Britain and Ireland when he pointed out that a nation which enchains another nation cannot itself be free.
The organisers in Padua point out in their description of the conference that PTSD is not yet sufficiently known about in Italy. Just as avian flu was coming from the east so the 'disorder' was coming from the west.
Jonathan Chadwick
FEEDBACK FROM IL TORCHIO (ITALIAN)
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 16/11/2006 - 6:33pm.Che e il impatto del lavoro noi abbiamo fatto tra 16 Ottobre e 20 Ottobre? Che
sono i risultati?
E' stato un buon impatto il lavoro del laboratorio. Abbiamo deciso di
proseguire il lavoro su Alcesti, il primo incontro è previsto per il 16
novembre, giovedì. E' una felice coincidenza che è partito un lavoro sulla
pace per il 7 dicembre. Aspettiamo tue indicazioni per sapere come e se il
lavoro andrà avanti.
Tra i risultati buoni c'è una maggiore conoscenza tra i partecipanti e una
curiosità nata in chi ha sentito parlare del laboratorio.
Che erano le reazione dei particpanti? Che idee del futuro del proggetto sono presentato?
Alcuni dei partecipanti si incontrano per lavorare e allenarsi teatralmente.
Come ti dicevo vogliamo studiare meglio la figura di alcesti in tutte le sue
metamorfosi , in tutti gli autori che l'hanno trattata.
Era il lavoro come si a aspettato?
Noi eravamo molto aperti, non ci aspettavamo cose precise. Siamo stati bene
sorpresi . Chissà se è un lavoro da aprire al pubblico. Non so se il
pubblico può capire il percorso fatto durante il laboratorio.
Non so se tu hai mandato queste domande anche agli altri, o se vuoi che io
le estenda anche a loro.
Che cosa volete a succedere dopo adesso?
Vorremmo continuare il lavoro magari con scambi più diretti con gli altri
partecipanti al progetto , e sapere cosa si può fare per essere efficaci sul
problema della pace.
Fabio, Il Torchio, Napoli