trauma and civilization

6,000 years ago, there were less options for people facing crises. If a major drought occurred, many people would have died from famine; and many more would have been forced to flee their homelands in search for food, water, and safety. Children would have suffered famine-induced disease and many would have died.

Surviving children will not recover to full physical or emotional vigor once food supply is restored, and will suffer lifelong physical and emotional effects….As adults, these individuals who have suffered through severe famine during childhood will raise their own children differently from prior generations, even during times of plenty….This persistence of culture-shock takes place by virtue of altered behavior and altered social institutions, which adjust to the new drought-famine-starvation conditions….Under such conditions, many people die, family ties are shattered, and mass migrations take place. With so much death and displacement, family life is gradually or even radically diverted away from prior emotionally-rich and pleasure-oriented patterns; new patterns emerge, focused on basic survival, and with little or no emphasis upon pleasurable emotional bonding or social living. (DeMeo, 1998, pp. 6-7)

This major trauma of drought-induced famine might have been the impetus for civilization as we now know it. Sigmund Freud (1961) noted that civilization “must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species….And we may probably add more precisely, a struggle for life in the shape it was bound to assume after a certain event which still remains to be discovered” (p. 82). Freud did not accept his society’s confidence in civilization as representing “civil behavior and peaceful social conduct” (DeMeo, 1998, p. 14). He experienced life during two major world wars, countless other social disturbances, and got close to thousands of individuals’ internal agony. Freud thus considered civilization to be an expression of a post-traumatic struggle between the life force and the death instinct. However, I would restate this as a struggle between the trust in life and the fear of life. Trust, which is our birthright, has been challenged by a post-traumatic state which produces a basic anxiety about being a living organism.

The terror and helplessness associated with sudden famine and its aftereffects can cause a serious disruption in the internal systems of a human being. Moreover, as the human organism adapts to such a disruption, old relationships to life change into new patterns, based on fear for survival. In a haunting study of the Ik people in northeastern Africa, Colin Turnbull (1972) documented the devastating consequences when an entire group of people are ravaged by drought, famine, aggression, and forced displacement. “Under the stress to which this society was subject, all the trimmings were shed, everything that was not directly functional to the problem of survival was abandoned” (Turnbull, 1972, p. 178). This meant that even the most basic relationships between friends, family, husband and wife, and even mother and child, were shed, and the only bond which remained was based on the terror of not having enough nourishment to survive the day. This obligatory bond, ‘nyot’ in the Ik language, signified not friendship or mutual aid, but basic exchange. Thus, this society was held together by a collective anxiety for survival. Human values such as trust, cooperation, commitment, affection, and empathy were no longer ‘functional to the problem of survival’ and were thus discarded in favor of a hyperindividualism that spelled the end to their traditional tribal ways (DeMeo, 1998; Turnbull, 1972). Turnbull reflects that this hyperindividualism, as graphic and disturbing as it was for him, a westerner, to observe, reminded him of our civilization....

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