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Volume 9, Number 2
July-December 2005

Traumatic social violence: challenging our unconscious adaptation.
Silvia Amati Sas

SUMMARY

Traumatic social violence provokes adaptive transubjective phenomena of banalisation, familiarity and obviousness, which can be understood as a "defence through ambiguity" that leads to an "adaptation to whatsoever". In a state of ambiguity there is numbing of critical thinking and of the alarm mechanisms. During the psychoanalytic process with survivors of social violence (torture, etc.) we can find a secret refusal of the external alienating situation in the intrapsychic representation of an "object to be saved", an object of concern. In this paper, Ferenczi's concept of "identification with the aggressor" (introjection of the culpability of the abuser on the child's subjectivity) is compared with clinical experience. We try to understand and challenge through comprehension and insight the subjective consequences of traumatic violence, in the three spaces of subjectivity (intra-inter-trans) considering psychic dynamics in relation to reality contexts.