Collective Trauma and Splitting

During the pandemic, my teenage daughter became a fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In the spirit of camaraderie, I watched many Marvel movies with her. While the numerous characters and the plot lines of the movies are all a blur now, I still remember clearly the broadly sweeping theme characterizing them all - the triumph of good over evil. This division of the fantasy universe into good vs. evil would be less troubling if it did not reflect a real life division in our society and in our psychoanalytic organizations. Each side carries conviction that it is aligned with the good and that the other side is evil. It is easy to see the good vs. evil split in movies as simplistic; it is harder to discern that we are mired in this splitting ourselves.

An example is my reaction to the racism debate raging within psychoanalysis. I feel, within me, an impulse to vilify the other side: As a Korean American, I feel incensed by the old guard voices upholding a white-centric worldview. I feel disgust at them - greedy, self-serving people who are too cowardly to face up to the way structural racism benefits them. My contempt is even more pronounced toward Donald Trump and his supporters. In Donald Trump’s profoundly destructive sociopathy, I find justification for vilifying him and his supporters.

I might be smug with my own splitting, if it were not for one major complication - its consequence can be deadly. In graduate school I watched a short film about the human toll caused by the atomic bombs dropped in Japan during WWII. I felt curiously unmoved. I had a similar reaction some years later when the movie Hiroshima, mon amour was screened at a local analytic institute. I felt little empathy toward the destruction the bomb wrought to Hiroshima or its citizens. In both situations, I was surprised by my reaction, because I had a love of Japanese culture and cherished the experience of living in Japan as a college exchange student.

Over the years I thought about my reaction. Th