I was struck by Bessel van der Kolk’s comment that traumatic memory has no social purpose: according to him, what traumatized bodies repeat does not fulfill a “useful purpose” in interacting with other people and, on the contrary, is alienating. Therefore, for van de Kolk, the recovery of the traumatized person involves a reconnection “with our fellow human beings.” Judith Herman makes the same point: if trauma “shames and isolates,” recovery “cannot be simply a private, individual matter.”

This is why I was interested in van der Kolk’s comparison of the feeling of a traumatized person with being a “some body else” or a “no body”. According to him, psychological help should help you “to get back in touch with your body, with your Self,” that is, with being a “some body” (Italics in the original). This caught my attention because, although trauma is experienced individually, its recovery, as the authors state, can only be effective in reconnection with other people. In other words, the body that the traumatized person loses is not only their own but, and who knows if above all, the body that connects them with other people, a body that we could call for the moment “communal.” The patients recovery, in Herman’s words, implies a “renewed sense of community.” While both authors are clear that the first step is an affirmation of the individual self, which empowers it and makes it feel secure, the ultimate goal of this affirmation is to be able to return to being a social being. And that makes me wonder: how many people fit into van der Kolk’s “some body”? For if the end is that “renewed sense of community,” what would the patient recover, instead of the feeling of a “some(one)body,” would not be something like a “some(more-than-one)body”? The individual body, these authors seem to want to say without saying it, is, above all, a social, a communal one.