Trauma Revisited: Culture, Mourning, and the Unconscious in the Oklahoma City Bombing1

In this paper, I focus phenomenologically on the unconscious response to and elaboration of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing: a trauma, an assault and an insult that violated many peoples' “stimulus barrier” (K. Erikson, Loss; Rangell, Discussion) and symbolic boundary of safety. All terrible events unmask earlier losses, rages, fantasies. But such unmasking does not discount the unconscious significance also of the event itself (Oliner, External).

Trauma—together with the helplessness, the rage, the guilt, the wish to master and to make repair, that is unleashed by trauma—becomes an internal representation, an internal object, which in turn condenses with and receives the additional burden of displacement from other, often far earlier, traumas and the fantasies, feelings, and defenses that arose in their wake. A trauma such as the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City can be understood as a public self- and object-representation that condenses with and reawakens the more individual, idiosyncratic, personal ones that have a “perceptual identity” with it (Freud, Dreams).2

This paper contributes to the understanding of the relation between trauma as event, trauma as concept, trauma as experience, trauma as unconscious self- and object-representation, what people bring to trauma, the vicissitudes of the affects following trauma, and how people elaborate disaster narratives after trauma has occurred. Like Volkan (Volkan, Enemies), I argue that losses over symbolic objects such as national territory or corporate leadership in a particular market can feel like real deaths to those who experience them, since they can entail loss of idealized self, loss of idealized self-object fusion, and loss of sense of safety. Similarly, they can be followed by the same “complicated mourning” as the aborted grief of individuals over the loss by death of ambivalently loved ones (Volkan, Cyprus; Linking, Enemies). I wish to avoid the facile id