Coping Mechanisms for Historical Trauma: Main Research Approaches

Abstract

The article analyses the mechanisms for coping with historical trauma. The author demonstrates the possibility of the methodological combination of two main approaches to the study of this phenomenon in social and political science: psychoanalytic and sociological. The article suggests that the mechanism for overcoming a historical trauma includes two stages of traumatic transformation: interpretation and representation, as well as a number of other mechanisms moving from the level of an individual subject to the level of a collective subject. The first phase involves the analysis of the empirical materials containing direct (historical evidence) or indirect (artistic materials) trauma evidence, and their decoding in order to identify the actual trauma origins. The second phase involves the representation of the information about the traumatic event collected from the victim and previously decoded and the implementation of the traumatic construction in the collective identity.

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