How can people be so cruel? The central role of trauma in unconscious malignant processes in large groups
Invitation to a public lecture as part of this year’s DPV Cultural Workshop: How can people be so cruel? The central role of trauma in unconscious malignant processes in large groups
This talk draws upon psychoanalytic theorizing about the impact on human thinking and behaviour of seriously traumatizing events, to throw light on an intriguing question in the context of the extreme violence and apparently endless intractability of such conflict situations as the Middle East and Sudan: how are we to account for the sudden shift of human behaviour, in individuals and in groups, from ordinary civilized interactions and respect for human life to the carrying out and the sanctioning of massive violence against fellow humans? More than a century of psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice has taught us that traumatized communities, just like traumatized individuals, are likely to manifest neurotic (and sometimes destructively psychotic) symptoms and find great difficulty in sustaining meaningful and mutually satisfying relationships. The talk draws upon the writings of Sigmund Freud, Wilfred Bion and Otto Kernberg.
Referent
Bernard Cullen is a Training & Supervising Psychoanalyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and Past President the Northern Ireland Psychoanalytic Society. Bernard is a former Dean of Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University in his native Belfast. He was Vice-President of the Belfast & District Trades Union Council in the 1980s, through the period of the hunger strikes and some of the worst bombings and killings in the Northern Ireland Troubles. He has been President of the Irish Philosophical Society; and Research Professor of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, working with Hans-Georg Gadamer in Heidelberg and Otto Pöggeler at the Hegel-Archiv in Bochum. Through most of the 1990s, he was President of the Irish Association (for Cultural, Economic and Social Relations), an all-Ireland think-tank founded in 1938 “to make reason and goodwill take the place of passion and prejudice in Ireland, North and South”. He used this position as an opportunity to bring paramilitary leaders from opposing sides in Northern Ireland into face-to-face contact with each other, with senior British and Irish politicians, chiefs of police and military and intelligence leaders, civil servants, academics and news editors. This prolonged under-the-radar interpersonal engagement helped to pave the way for the Belfast Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
