Different Types of Traumatization - Inner Pressure, Affect Regulation, Interpersonal and Social Consequences: Implications of Psychoanalytic Theory on the Understanding of Individual, Social and Cultural Phenomena

摘要

The paper is concerned with illustrating the importance of psychoanalytic models and theories for the understanding of the psychic dynamics in individuals who are dealing with extreme situations. Social development depends on the individuum, the mental, intrapsychic and interpersonal capacity of one's own and of a group, one's own bodily conditions, embodied emotions, resilience factors, as well as socialization factors also depending on the current spirit of the time. In the last decades financial burden emerged due to global financial system crisis, fragmentation of the health care system followed, a gap emerges between rich and poor also in industrialized countries, these slowly developing micro traumatization besides terroristic attacks and wars, effects a broad range of people, their psychic functioning and psychosocial development. The first part covers psychoanalytic perspectives on the individuum, on coping strategies, affect regulation and resilience factors, intrapsychic an interpersonal functioning in different types of traumatization. The second part of the paper focuses on implications of psychoanalytic theories on the functioning of the mind in situations of extreme internal pressure for the understanding of social and cultural phenomena. We discuss how people can make use of culture and society groups to cope with unbearable internal situations, and how in turn, groups dynamics are shaped and guided by extreme modes of psychic functioning. Specifically, the phenomenon of collective religious worldviews and other ideas shared in groups will be examined. With Freud, Klein, Bion and others, psychoanalysis has brought forth a multitude of concepts forming a model of the mind, which is able to explain mental functioning on various different levels of chaos and orderliness. Applied to contemporary dynamics of social, political and cultural change as well as the emergence of countless new, hybrid worldviews and belief systems, these psychoanalytic concepts aid in conceptualizing these processes on many levels.