The Belgo-Belgian Conflict in Individual Narratives: Psychodynamics of Trauma in the History of Belgium

On the basis of interviews, we highlight important historical elements with potential traumatic implications in order to understand some of the psychological roots of the current conflict-ridden relationship between French-speaking and Flemish Belgian citizens. We suggest that this conflict has a complex psychodynamic structure. Due to former experiences of shame, humiliation, disdain and contempt, two concomitant but asymmetrical defensive processes can be observed: repression in the French-language group, dissociation or rejection in the Flemish group. In particular, we hypothesize that the war experiences traumatized the Flemish identity in a complex way, generating an internal defensive pressure characterized by dissociation. The impact of these psychological processes on the current political situation is explored.http://mss.sagepub.com/content/early/2011/11/10/1750698011424032SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

The destiny of an unacknowledged trauma : the deferred retroactive effect of apres-coup in the hidden Jewish children of wartime Belgium

For almost 45 years, the experience of Jewish children who were hidden during World War II was considered to be of little importance, particularly with respect to what had taken place in the concentration camps. Their very history was ignored in the many accounts of the Holocaust. It was only at the end of the 1980s that their experience began to be thought of as potentially traumatic. In this paper, the authors report on their psychoanalytical research project concerning the psychological outcomes of those experiences that had remained concealed for such an extraordinarily long latency period. The results are based on the analysis of 60 accounts and on psychoanalytically-oriented group work. The authors show that the trauma experienced by those hidden children was triggered by the retroactive effect of a deferred action [apres-coup]