Collective Trauma, Race, and UFO Abduction – The Work of Barbara Cerminara

(This is the second part of a two-part post.  For part 1, click here.)

Barbara Cerminara is a psychotherapist in Norwich, England.  Her perspective is heavily Jungian.  She’s Jewish and Italian, and her family bears the collective tragedy of  twentieth-century European Jewry: in 1944, her grandfather was deported from Florence with his brother and their aged mother.  All three perished in Auschwitz.

Cerminara’s article “The Jewish Complex, Whose Complex Is It? A Relational Perspective” appeared in the latest issue of the International Journal of Jungian Studies, which found its way into my (postal) mailbox at precisely the same time that I was learning what I could from the web about African-American scholar Joy DeGruy and her proposed “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome.”  An example of what some Jungians, at least, would call “synchronicity”?  I’m not sure.

PTSS, in DeGruy’s words, is “a theory that explains the etiology of many of the adaptive survival behaviors in African American communities … as a consequence of multigenerational oppression of Africans and their descendants resulting from centuries of chattel slavery.”  Which puts DeGruy’s “syndrome,” it seems to me, in the category of what Cerminara would call a “cultural complex,” and allows us to bounce the idea of these two thinkers off one another.

We might also try applying both to the UFO abduction experience, in ways that I’ve sketched in the first part of this post and will return to toward the end of this one.

What exactly is a “complex”?  The online APA Dictionary of Psychology defines it as “a group or system of related ideas or impulses that have a common emotional tone and exert a strong but usually unconscious influence on the individual’s attitudes and behavior,” and notes that the term is mostly associated with the psychoanalytic schools of Freud and Jung.  We might add that the ideas involved in a complex are logically interconnected.  For example, in the complex most familiar to most people, the “Oedipus complex,” the little boy’s rage at his father is a natural corollary to his desire for his mother.

People often speak somewhat disparagingly of a person’s “having” a complex, as though it were a kind of disease.  But I don’t think the Freudian school, at least, uses it in this way.  Rather, for Freud, the Oedipus complex is an inevitable part of childhood experience (in boys, and presumably also in girls, although Freud tended to retreat into vagueness on this point).  The question is not whether or not you “have” it–you’re bound to–but how successfully you manage to resolve it in the process of maturation.

There’s an implication, though, that the complex, and the process of working your way through it, tend to have disagreeable consequences.  Cerminara quotes Jung as saying that a complex is “an agglomeration of associations […] sometimes of traumatic character, sometimes simply of a painful and highly toned character.”

The APA definition lays stress on the complex’s belonging to “the individual,” and here Jung’s followers and Freud’s as well–possibly under Jung’s influence–go farther.  A group, it would seem, can experience a complex no less than a person.  In this context the word does seem to take on pathological overtones, and to become specific to one ethnicity (say) or religion, rather than universal.

“Expanding on Jung’s work, Henderson (1990) put forth the idea that there exists ‘an area of historical memory that lies between the collective unconscious and the manifest pattern of the culture’ (103).  A region ‘neither personal nor archetypal’ … , Singer and Kimbles envision the cultural unconscious as an ‘inner sociology’ shaped by cultural complexes generally originating in traumatic events that occurred ‘sometimes centuries, even millennia, ago.'”  With this, we’re in DeGruy’s territory; and Singer and Kimbles propose a definition of “cultural complexes” that plainly stands in the Jungian tradition: “emotionally charged aggregate[s] of ideas and images that cluster around an archetypal core.” 

Which are, it would seem, not the greatest things to have.

So what is the “Jewish complex”?  As far as I can gather, it is what Jung in the 1930s called the “Christ complex,” with which Jews are afflicted by virtue of their having rejected Christ.  This has very ugly overtones of Christian brickbats hurled at Jews through the centuries, often with murderous consequences.  Jung, whose stance toward the burgeoning Nazi movement and its ideology wasn’t exactly something to be proud of, should have known better than to use the language he did.

But at its core there’s a legitimate idea.  Assume, as Jung did, that the figure of Christ and all it implies are a vital component of the human (or at least the Western) unconscious–which seems to me at least a thinkable proposition–and Judaism’s repudiation of that figure is bound to have psychological consequences.  For Jews as individuals and also, it would seem, as a collectivity.

In 1934, Jung wrote to a Jewish colleague (who’d fled Germany for Palestine after the rise of Hitler) that the effect of this “complex” is a “pathological” sensitivity to anti-Semitism, “a somewhat hystericized general mental attitude.”  Given the historical context–1934!!!–this must rank as one of the most agonizingly obtuse judgments ever to issue from the pen of any human being.  Yet is there no truth buried within it?

Cerminara is inclined to grant that there is, but also to flag the asymmetry in Jung’s presentation of the collective Jewish complex.  Is there no corresponding Christian complex answering to the Jews’ “Christ complex,” which we might call–I don’t know what–perhaps Christian civilization’s “Jew complex”?

Which has been known to provoke horrendous, indeed genocidal, efforts at its resolution.

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This brings us to the crux of Cerminara’s paper: the Holocaust, and the two groups most intimately involved in it, the Jews and the Germans.

(Though she’s careful to note, from her own family history, that the Italians also had no small involvement, generally overlooked in the process of casting all blame on the Germans–the ones who’ve had the courage and honesty to face up to what they’ve done.)

“The Jewish complex,” says Cerminara, “needs to be understood relationally,” and she proceeds by citing earlier researchers who’ve proposed just that.  “The crucial question Wilke is posing is ‘whether a perpetrator society, like Germany [or white America!], can be regarded as traumatised’ (61).  Wilke’s argument is that it can.  ‘Many perpetrators,’ the author writes, ‘were, for very different reasons, traumatised and ended up treating some of their children as depositories for their split off and projected pain, guilt, shame, and rage’ (79).

“Volkan (2006) terms this process ‘depositing’, a form of transgenerational transmission whereby children function as reservoir for the encapsulated emotions of their parents (159).”

Her conclusion: “The Jewish complex … is an affectively charged shared mental representation of a traumatic history whose denouement is the Shoah  [Holocaust] that affects us all, albeit in different measures and with different responsibilities. … Though undoubtedly difficult, it is in consciously electing to disengage from the psychological trap of the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamic, acknowledging instead our mutual dependence and common humanity, that cultural complexes such as the Jewish complex may eventually loosen their grip.”

A ray of hope for a society still bedeviled–nearly 60 years after the civil rights movement seemed to promise a new dawn–by racial hatred and fear?  What are the chances that, as a nation, we will make that “conscious election”?  The current omens do not seem encouraging.

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Now back to UFO abductions.

When I wrote a blog post setting forth my view that the Black historical trauma of being abducted into slavery had resurfaced, through the channel of Barney Hill, in the abduction experiences of thousands of late twentieth-century Americans–overwhelmingly white–I noted two difficulties for this theory.  One, the long time gap between the trauma and its re-emergence, seemed to me “deeply mysterious … but not insoluble.”  It was the other problem that really troubled me.

“Why is it the offspring of the perpetrators (or beneficiaries) of African slavery who’ve re-enacted, with ever-growing accumulation of bizarre and often blatantly sexual detail, a pain neither they nor their forerunners ever endured?”

“Is it possible,” I asked, “that in a great historic crime–like the Holocaust, like slavery–the deep psyches of perpetrator and victim become entwined, enmeshed, bonded?”  I offered, in support of this tentative conjecture, my experience in a workshop at the Hellinger Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, which has brought Bert Hellinger’s “Family Constellations” therapy to bear on the joint healing of survivors’ children and the children of former Nazis.  The work of DeGruy and Cerminara, taken together, points to new ways in which the conjecture can be made less tentative.

And in which the seemingly peripheral issue of alien abductions–which, in objective reality, never happened–can shed its own light on the vast and sorrowful panorama of pain and blindness that these two scholars have begun to explore.

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On the evening of October 11, 1973, two white Mississippi shipyard workers experienced themselves as having been abducted into a 30-foot-long hovering UFO, from a dock in the Pascagoula River where they’d been fishing.  It was the first abduction after the Hills’ to receive nationwide notoriety; and perhaps the two balance and complement each other.

There’s little doubt that Mississipians’ experience, like the Hills’, corresponded to nothing in the external world.  But, again like the Hills, they didn’t just make it up, either.

In words captured on a hidden tape recorder some hours after their “abduction,” the two men babbled to each other about what sounds like a genuine, truly harrowing event–and if it happened only in their psyches, as I think, that doesn’t make it any less real.  “Hell, I know,” the older man told the younger.  “It’s something you can’t get over in a lifetime, see.  Jesus Christ. … I thought I had been through enough of hell on this earth and now I have to go through something like this, see.  But they could’ve–well I guess they could have, well they could have owned us son, they had us.  They could’ve done anything to us, they even hurt me!”

They could have owned us–spoken by one white man to another, in a part of the country where human beings did own other human beings, which ten years before had been turned into a terrifying battleground as the slaves’ descendants struggled for equal rights with the slaveowners’.  Now the wheel of karma had come full circle, the masters’ children paid back measure for measure.

Not a coincidence that, as the men described it, the UFO had fishlike characteristics.  Going forth to catch fish, they underwent a traumatic vision–I don’t know what else to call it–of being themselves fished for, by entities alien and inscrutable.  It’s something you can’t get over in a lifetime, see.

Or, perhaps, many lifetimes.