Revisiting a Dream

Currently trauma is defined less in terms of the personal (the individual) and more in terms of the collective (the social-political) with its potentially insidious soul-destroying qualities. This is Maria Root's concept of everyday or “insidious trauma.” Root here is referring to the “traumatogenic effects of oppression,” racism, marginalization, and hegemony. These are the psychological assaults (micro- and macro-abrasions) which “are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily well-being at a given moment, but rather do violence to the soul and spirit.”1

Presently, psychoanalysts recognize the resulting condition of psychic paralysis that exists in an individual exposed to collective psychic trauma. Such individuals are said to have a psyche colonized by collective and colonial imperatives, including the internalized attitudes of cultural inferiority.2 This internalization often entails “the loss of an unnamable domain…which one might… mistake for constitutional exile.”3

Constitutional exile (the feeling of being set adrift, disoriented, and disconnected from oneself) produces one of the most damaging aspects of psychic trauma. This is the loss of a connection to one's interiority and access to a creative unconscious that can provide the psychic space for the reparation and reconstitution of internal processes impacted by trauma. The result is a devastating inhibition in the growth of awareness of the extent of the psychic injury and, above all, a loss of a linking to one's autonomy and agency that could provide the psychic space for repair.

In addition to advocating for social change, many schools of psychoanalysis emphasize the power of the unconscious in the healing of a socially traumatized psyche. Some point to dreams for bringing a more detailed map of the psychic territory impacted by the trauma and exposing the linkages to other vulnerable places within the individual. In this context, Jung offers what he terms “the Spirit of the Depths,”4 an as