Reading Freud, I started thinking about how his theory of repressed memories can be transferred from the experience of an individual trauma to a collective trauma. Instead of being remembered, these memories become bodily acts that patients repeat and thus become “pieces” of their personality (152). Thus, I think of societies considered violent because they have suffered for years from civil wars or military occupations. According to Freud, the repetition is born from the resistance to remember the repressed memory. Therefore, the psychoanalyst’s job is to “uncover” the patient’s resistance in order to “overcome” the memories (155).

But what happens to people in societies where the traumatic event does not end and, on the contrary, is continued and reproduced? Does the memory keep repressing, and the bodies just keep “acting out” those memories?

In those circumstances, and now reading Cathy Caruth, maybe the collective trauma can’t settle down because, according to the author, it requires a “temporary delay” “beyond the shock of the first moment” (10). If, for Caruth, trauma “is a repeated suffering of the event, but it is also a continual leaving of the site,” in these cases, people may see before them a repetition of the event but have no way of leaving the site (10). And yet there is trauma: there is the forgetting of which both authors speak, for people sometimes have to forget that they are at war in order to attend to their ordinary lives, and they also comply with the survivor’s crisis: if there is trauma, it is because they have not yet been killed (9). What they do not have is the time or space to process what is happening to them: it is difficult to distinguish if people are refusing or if it is still just impossible to understand the trauma (155). Can the civil war or occupation be seen as well as a continuing act of a lasting trauma (trauma is a “symptom of history,” according to Caruth, 5) for the victims who become perpetrators and for the perpetrators who believe themselves to be victims?