Shattered Worlds: Political Trauma Amongst Young Activists in Post-Revolutionary Egypt

Based on qualitative testimonial research with Egyptian youth activists, this article argues that Egypt’s post-revolutionary aftermath has been profoundly traumatic. Trauma shatters one’s assumptive world as it confronts one with the fragility of existence and the possibility of immediate death. Activists experienced automatic psychological coping mechanisms of intrusion (e.g. dreams and nightmares) and numbing, but Egypt’s post-revolutionary social and political context inhibited the operationalisation of non-automatic, socially embedded, coping mechanisms of reintegration and reinterpretation. The former entails the reintegration of one’s experiences into an adjusted assumptive world through a shared holding space and the latter the reinterpretation of the suffered traumas through a positive outcome. In the absence of socially embedded coping mechanisms, due to political polarisation and a lack of positive revolutionary outcomes, Egypt’s social trauma deepened as is illustrated by the depoliticisation of activists as they tried to mend their shattered assumptive worlds

Towards a Critical Trauma Studies: A Response to Felix Lang

In this response, I agree with Felix Lang about the need to problematize trauma studies’ prevalent underlying assumptions. However, I suggest that we should go a step further, namely towards a phenomenological account of trauma rooted in Frankfurt School critical theory. Such an approach enables us to pay attention to the political power dynamics within which trauma studies is enmeshed, and argue against the reification and objectification of trauma. It also allows for an intersubjective (re)interpretation of trauma that explicitly grounds the experiences of trauma in social and political contexts