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1Journal of Sociology: Bulletin of Yerevan University 2024, Vol. 15, No. 1(39), June, 5-14 https://doi.org/10.46991/BYSU:F/2024.15.1.005
SOCIOPSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF WAR AND THEIR TRANSGENERATIONAL DIMENSION*
Kalina Yordanova ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5001-1512
PHD, psychotherapist, Council of Refugee Women in Bulgaria. Email: [email protected]
Abstract. This paper explores the psychological effects of war. By combining the explanatory potential of psychoanalysis and anthropology, it argues that victims of armed conflict, particularly prolonged conflicts, construct a melancholic response (Yordanova, 2018). Often, people on the move are met with hostility by host countries or find themselves on the social periphery. This fosters ambivalence toward the new environment as an expression of their vulnerabilities. The paper also suggests an intergenerational aspect to this dynamic. Children exposed to violence lack the emotional and cognitive maturity to understand their experiences. Overwhelmed by their own feelings of loss, their parents fail to help them process the trauma. As a result, children identify with their parents' complicated grief and develop an idealized view of the pre-war past versus the bleak future opportunities. Finally, the paper examines the intersections between individual war trauma, cultural memory, and power dynamics in post-conflict societies. Drawing on my fieldwork in Sarajevo (2012, 2018), I argue that war survivors avoid constructing a consistent first-person war narrative because they need the state-recognized version of history to be rewritten (Yordanova, 2015). The ambiguity of their war experiences, the inadequacy of language to convey horror, and the clash between private memories and official discourse drive them to alternative forms of expression. Survivors and their children use art, humor, tattoos, scarring, and the landscape to explain the war and connect with each other. In the post-war environment, the narrative of veterans most exposed to warfare becomes muted to avoid challenging the political status quo.
Key words: trauma, transgenerational transmission, transgenerational dimension, war, horror
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Received: 07.05.2024 Revised: 27.05.2024 Accepted: 02.07.2024 © The Author(s) 2024
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СОЦИОПСИХОЛОГИЧЕСКИЕ АСПЕКТЫ ВОЙНЫ И ИХ ТРАНСГЕНЕРАЦИОННОЕ ИЗМЕРЕНИЕ
Калина Йорданова ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5001-1512
кандидат медицинских наук, психотерапевт Совет женщин-беженцев, Болгария.
Email: [email protected]
Аннотация. В данной статье исследуются психологические последствия войны. Объединив объяснительный потенциал психоанализа и антропологии, автор утверждает, что жертвы вооруженных конфликтов, особенно затяжных, конструируют меланхолическую реакцию (Yordanova, 2018). Часто переезжающие люди встречают враждебность в принимающих странах или оказываются на социальной периферии. Это порождает двойственное отношение к новой среде как выражение их уязвимости. В статье также предлагается межпоколен-ческий аспект этой динамики. Детям, подвергшимся насилию, не хватает эмоциональной и когнитивной зрелости, чтобы осмыслить свой опыт. Подавленные собственным чувством утраты, их родители не могут помочь им справиться с травмой. В результате дети идентифицируют себя со сложным горем своих родителей и развивают идеализированный взгляд на довоенное прошлое в противовес мрачным будущим перспективам. Наконец, в статье исследуются взаимосвязи между индивидуальной военной травмой, культурной памятью и динамикой власти в постконфликтных обществах. Опираясь на свои полевые исследования в Сараево (2012, 2018), автор утверждает, что выжившие в войне избегают построения последовательного повествования о войне от первого лица, потому что для этого необходимо переписать официальную версию истории (Yordanova, 2015). Неоднозначность их военного опыта, неадекватность языка для передачи ужаса и столкновение между частными воспоминаниями и официальным дискурсом вынуждают их обращаться к альтернативным формам выражения. Выжившие и их дети используют искусство, юмор, татуировки, шрамы и пейзажи, чтобы объяснить войну и наладить связь друг с другом. В послевоенной обстановке рассказы о ветеранах, наиболее подверженных войне, становятся приглушенными, чтобы не бросать вызов политическому статус-кво.
Ключевые слова: травма, трансгенерационная передача, трансгенерационное измерение, война, ужас
Melancholia and Contemporary Warfare
As previously argued by Yordanova (Yordanova, 2018), the experience of the war generation becomes the organizing axis of their identity and that of their children. Survivor parents communicate their experience of loss through gesture, act, landscape, and object rather than through a coherent first-person narrative. As a result, their children use metaphoric and metonymic readings of their parents' everyday behavior to understand and connect with them. The identity constructed through this dynamic is characterized by ambivalence toward the self and others, melancholic longing for an idealized pre-war past, and the impossibility of letting it go.
To explain the construction of the melancholic response, I will first demonstrate the link between war and mental illness. This allows us to understand why a specific state of mind takes precedence. Many of the war refugees I met in my clinical work spoke about direct exposure to violence through fighting, internment, and displacement. About one-third of them exhibited symptoms of depression, yet a specific type. Apart from the
typical symptoms of depression—loss of interest or pleasure in daily activities, sleeping problems, difficulties in concentration—many experienced feelings of guilt and worthlessness, driving them into despair. From a psychoanalytic point of view, some depressiveness is known to us since infancy. Babies go through a so-called depressive position crucial to the capacity to mourn a loss (Klein, 1940). This capacity, fundamental to mourning, involves the successful integration of the experience of loss and separation. Mourning allows for a gradual detachment from the lost object (person, culture, homeland) and subsequent reinvestment in the new environment.
For many war refugees, the process of mourning is complicated. Contemporary war feels omnipresent and impairs the integration of loss for various reasons. Modern wars are characterized by large-scale destruction, fragmentation, and increased insecurity and competition over resources vital to larger populations. The alleged precision of modern warfare increases civilian deaths and the scale of destruction. Drone images from Grozny, Aleppo, Kharkiv, and Gaza illustrate the extent of this destruction for civilians. Consequently, meaning-making and representation are dramatically challenged. Contemporary war reveals a world of terror and fragmentation where there is no clear boundary between friends and enemies: old enemies may become friends, old friends could become enemies, and there are enemies within (Segal, 2007: 43). Such an environment feeds persecutory anxieties in those immediately affected. Contemporary war is often fought by oligarchic states over the exclusive control of economic resources and their distribution (Kapferer, 2005; Nordstrom, 2004). It is based on a dialectic of competition, control, and deterritorialization, increasing insecurity in ethnically heterogeneous territories. Artsakh (the Armenian name of Nagorno-Karabakh, see Atanesyan, A. V., Reynolds, B. M., & Mkrtichyan, A. E. (2023) is a prime example. Bearing this in mind, I argue that while the normal process of integrating loss allows for the creation of symbolic representations and meaning, and thus working through the loss (Klein, 1930: 30), contemporary war results in the breakdown of the symbolic function.
Finally, the work of mourning is obstructed by the solitude of refugees and migrants in transit countries. It would be unfair not to acknowledge that the recent refugee influx has indeed evoked a xenophobic response in Western societies. In far-right political discourses, hate is used as a defense mechanism to create distance or hostility towards the perceived threat (in hate speech), while the projection of fears, insecurities, or negative qualities onto the newcomers (in fear speech) deepens the divide between "us" and "others," domestic and foreign.
A Transgenerational Dimension
As Yordanova previously argued, war survivors rarely verbalize their experiences (Yordanova, 2015, 2012). The ambiguity of their war experiences, the lack of language to describe situations felt to be 'surreal,' and the clash of private memories with the official war narrative result in parents preferring alternative channels of communication. War-related songs by popular rock bands, jokes, tattoos, scarring, films, and landscape are used by both parents and children to explain the war and connect with each other. Consequently, the image of the past in the second generation is formed in the absence of a coherent war narrative and within the context of an idealized pre-war past. To reflect the complexity of human experience of war, I use the Bosnian example to illustrate how private discourses that conflict with the dominant version of the recent past challenge the status quo.
The topic of transgenerational transmission was researched in 2012 using qualitative methods to answer two questions: 1) How do survivors remember and recount the war past in the presence of their children? 2) How do children understand what is being communicated by their parents, and how do they reconstruct it? The research relied on semi-structured interviews with 30 families from Bosnia and Herzegovina (Sarajevo, Tuzla, and Prjedor), participant observation, and children's drawings. The follow-up in 2015 aimed to investigate the social situation of war veterans and consisted of online semi-structured interviews with a dozen veterans and their children from the initial sample.
In post-war environments and places of protracted armed conflict (such as Gaza), parents' war experiences are crucial to their children's identities. First, as part of family history, the parents' war past is linked to questions like "Where do I come from?" and "What was the world like before I was born?" Second, apart from playing a significant role in constructing family history, the transmission of parents' war experiences offers emotional bonds between family members by fostering understanding, sympathy, and belonging.
Yet, parents are reluctant to talk about the war, explaining this with difficulties in finding adequate language to describe their experiences. Consequently, the transmission of war experience rarely occurs through a consistent narrative but rather through bodily symptoms, jokes, art, and landscape.
My overall impression is that while the war narrative can be constructed, it is both consciously and unconsciously avoided for three main reasons: the ambiguity of parents' experiences, the clash between their intimate accounts and the official version of history, and the feeling of having faced a surreal realm whose description will be met with mistrust.
Ambiguity
Before engaging with the topic of ambiguity, I need to acknowledge my respondents, who generously shared the most intimate and difficult parts of their biographies with me. When addressing the issue of blurred boundaries between perpetrator and victim, I do so with the greatest sympathy, understanding that evoking the most terrifying and basic drives in people is one of war's most traumatizing qualities.
The ambiguity of experience relates to the shifting positions one occupies during the war. Very rarely do people experience only one perspective from the spectrum of possible wartime roles: victim, perpetrator, rescuer, observer, deserter, etc. This shift is particularly pronounced in war veterans' accounts, as they were most exposed to killing and had an active role in it. In the Bosnian case, many voluntarily joined the army aiming to preserve life, but often ended up 'cleansing the terrain' and witnessing destruction, thus tightly linking the heroic to the horrific experience of war.
Participation in war is described as an extreme experience that often involves transgression. It offers the temptation of experimenting with violence, power, relationships, sexuality, substances, the body, and the law. Transgressive practices provided pleasure in departing from cultural norms and allowed exploration of the culturally prohibited. While overtly practiced in combat zones, these transgressions also appeared in subtler forms in civilian life, such as smuggling, betrayal, and fraud. This particular aspect of the war experience makes constructing a clear-cut first-person narrative particularly difficult.
As children are exposed to their parents' ambiguous reactions to the war through unexpected silences, disproportionate emotional reactions, and morally questionable
accounts, they sense that something forbidden is kept secret. They are curious to learn the truth but also afraid to discover it. This uncertainty is most tangible in families of war veterans, where suspicions relate to the father's possible degradation during wartime; in families of sexually abused women, with anxieties linked to war rape; and in families with numerous deaths, where children feel robbed of the chance to have an intact and supportive immediate environment.
The Clash of Narratives
The second reason for avoiding the war narrative is the mismatch between the private and official versions of the past. This conflict is especially pronounced in soldiers' accounts of their post-war marginalization, the ruralization of Sarajevo and other cities, religious radicalization, wartime in-group betrayal and inter-ethnic support, forced military recruitment, financial links between political parties and military units, and moral degradation. The following quotation by a 47-year-old man from Sarajevo gives insight into his disappointment with military morale:
"State protected criminals they were: the local militia and the para-units. Caco was one of them, or Musan Topalovic as his real name was. He could come anytime to a café with his gangsters and take whoever was in the café directly to the front. No equipment, no training, no safety. (...) Another one - Juka, his unit broke into my flat to steal."
The inability of post-war society to produce a narrative reflecting the complexity of people's war experiences obstructs understanding and explaining the past and creates pockets of 'private knowledge' and distrusted or banal common truths.
A Surreal Realm
The perception of war as a fantastic realm gives rise to the suspicion that war accounts will not be taken seriously, as they seem to border on the supernatural. The surreal dimension predominantly relates to the beginning of the war, its most violent moments, and survival. Labelled 'unexplainable,' 'chaotic,' 'unbelievable,' and 'as if in a film,' these experiences are shaped by constant mental dissociation and repression of death-related anxieties and thoughts in the face of the extreme. This leads to splitting off and detaching from the affective component of memory. The related sense of watching from aside has fed into the perception of the war as the domain of the surreal, as revealed by quotations from a 43-year-old woman from Visegrad and a 54-year-old veteran from Tuzla:
"(...) and we are running through fields and forests, fields mined - we did not know this! - you see the mines exploding, one meter above the ground, you hear the shooting; if you survive, good for you; if not - as good as it gets; as if I was watching a film... "
"When the offensive starts, there is no fear; you act mechanically; there is no time to think. You run back and forth wounded, you think later, later you shiver; at first, I did not know whether I was alive or dead and what was going on."
An extreme example of war as a surreal realm concerns war prison camps, where detainees were reduced to their basic needs and primitive fears. This situation is described by survivors as 'living in dying,' as they were reduced to animalistic instincts and survival-related anxieties. Lack of daylight and information added to the surreal experience, making time seem elastic. Interviewees talk about the days in prison camps as endless. Additionally, the physical and mental mobilization required for survival offered unfamiliar sensations and mental processes, such as starvation-induced
hallucinations, adrenaline rushes, alertness, suicidal thoughts, and dissociation of thought.
Private Histories
Veterans of War
As a result of memory transmission that does not take place through a consistent firstperson narrative but is displaced onto gestures, objects, and silence, the second generation pieces together bits of history with their own imagination to create a coherent version of the past and answer questions of identity. Often, children are confronted with ambiguous information about their parents' past, as guilt, shame, fragmented memories, and severe mental conditions prevent the construction of a clear-cut story. In the Bosnian case, in addition to these very private explanations for the parents' difficulty in communicating their war experiences, there is an environmental factor as well. Narratives that feel at odds with the official discourse of the war are suppressed by the parents themselves, as there is no safe space to speak out. This section discusses the tension between private and official discourses on the Yugoslav wars, with special attention to the position of war veterans. This aspect of my research sheds light on the second generation's understanding of war crimes as opposed to the official discourse of martyrdom.
In 2018, I became interested in how war veterans' situations developed after the wars of the 1990s. I contacted seven of my respondents for a follow-up interview, and they presented me with a rather discouraging account. In March and April 2018, protests were organized by war veterans' organizations across Bosnia and Herzegovina, with three main demands: 1) the government should stop financing the myriad of existing war veterans' organizations and create one representative organization for all veterans; 2) the government should publish the list of war veterans' names (public veterans' registry); and 3) war veterans should receive financial support regardless of employment status. Initially, I was confused about why my respondents wanted to abolish the variety of organizations and have only one, as I thought variety indicated pluralism. However, when my respondents presented me with the downside of diversity, I understood how misused and disparaged they might feel. According to their accounts, by the end of the war in Bosnia, there were 250,000 war veterans. By 2018, their number had officially reached 530,000. My respondents saw this as sheer speculation, where people close to the political establishment were gaining the status of war veteran to be entitled to run non-governmental organizations, extort the state through governmental funding, and keep certain people in power by voting for the same political elites. If a protest was organized, government supporters would join and engage in hooliganism or make false statements on behalf of the veterans to foster a negative image of veterans in society. This would shape negative public opinion about former soldiers and ultimately discourage them from defending their rights. Since this interpretation was presented independently by seven people, I consider it credible enough to help us grasp the current context surrounding war veterans in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Based on my observations and my respondents' accounts, I suggest that the political establishment has no interest in allowing veterans to speak out. First and foremost, their requests might challenge the status quo because they unite around non-ethnic issues. For example, in the 2018 protests, Bosnian and Croatian veterans demonstrated together.
Second, by portraying war veterans as marginalized and disabled people who must be pitied but not taken seriously, the government is warding off wider public support for their requests and creating a new cleavage: this time between 'normal citizens' and 'antisocial pathological cases.' Finally, by replacing genuine veterans' activities with puppet organizations, the government is clearly silencing those whose war experiences might differ from the official narrative.
The Second Generation's Take
I met N. when he was 15. Like other teenagers his age, he was conscious of what war might look like and concerned about its impact on survivors. In contrast, younger children paid more attention to action and used the war as a screen onto which current family relations were projected. The interview took place at N.'s home, arranged with his mother by phone. During the interview, he emphasized his mother's victimhood (a divorced war rape survivor) and provided an ethnic-based explanation of the war, reflecting the media discourse in the country. Later, N. contacted me for an additional meeting, explaining that he 'had forgotten to say some other things.' We met in a café in the city center, as he suggested. He specifically asked me not to inform his mother about his phone call, as he did not want to 'bother her unnecessarily.' As we sat, N. opened the conversation:
"There is something I'd like to know and I even asked my father once, but he responded with 'I'll tell you when you are old enough to know.' I am afraid that he might have killed someone during the war. I imagine this is possible because my dad was probably more nervous during the war than he is now. (...) Soldiers then were well trained; not like now. I often go with my friends to play in the trenches and we pretend we are real soldiers."
I found this account fascinating. It was so honest and rich in information. I felt the boy was asking me the most logical and at the same time the most intimate questions regarding his father. It was a question about origins, about what existed before he came into the world and what he was 'made of.' Ultimately, this was a question about his own internal landscape: what relational dynamics he had internalized and what internal objects populated his psychic space. By trying to establish a link with his father, by trying to walk in his shoes as much as he could, the boy was seeking the answer to a question that had been so vaguely answered before. The heroic component of 'soldiers were well trained then' went hand in hand with the suspicion of the unavoidable transgressions one had to endure during military service. At the end of the day, if no father had killed, where did all these victims come from? If others were capable of killings, how were our soldiers different? Playing in the trenches provided the transgenerational link that was missing, particularly after the divorce of N.'s parents. It also served as a test for the limitations one experienced when trying to understand what it might feel like to be shot at and to shoot at the same time. In other words, playing in the trenches 'like real soldiers' could provide the boy with some close-to-reality experience but never true knowledge about the war. Finally, this part of the story could only emerge in a follow-up interview, outside the home where N. felt loyal to his mother (and her discourse on the war about our martyrs and their rapists) and only in a few sentences. I read N.'s request for an additional meeting as an appeal for help in making sense of his family's past by acknowledging ambivalence. Informed by indirect signs such as marital problems, self-mutilation practices of former soldiers masked by tattoos, addiction, etc., many young people felt
that some part of the narrative was missing. I shall introduce this part by presenting the case of S. and her friend I never met. Let us see why.
Who Wants to Know What: School Curricula as a State Mechanism to Avoid Complexity of Experience
Having come across silenced private narratives about the recent past and young people's tacit interest in them, I decided to examine the school curricula and ask my young respondents about their perception of how history was taught in schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina and whether anything was missing. In 2018, all the children I interviewed in 2012 were either in secondary school or at universities. Before I present their answers along with data from history textbooks, I need to clarify that there are several versions of history textbooks in Bosnia and Herzegovina. They are used according to the ethnic composition of the respective region. For example, in 2015-2016, for the 6th grade of primary school, there were six history textbooks; for the 8th grade, five, etc. However, each textbook promotes a single perspective. This means that the members of one ethnic group are glorified while others are mentioned in passing, if not ignored. According to a study done in 2015-2016 by a Sarajevo-based research institute, the emphasis on the number of victims or highlighting the role of the victim reproduces victimization and justifies events that instigated conflict. The nation is presented as the eternal victim of another nation's hegemony. Sadly, critical thinking is not encouraged, and theoretical analysis is omitted in the textbooks.
Conclusions
In this paper, I demonstrated the construction of a melancholic response to loss in war-affected populations. I have used my work with Syrian war refugees and my research in Bosnia and Herzegovina to shed light on the events and circumstances that contribute to the melancholic response. Furthermore, I have outlined the process of intergenerational transmission of war experiences. Finally, I have described how memory can be used for political purposes at a given historical moment. By using the example of Bosnian war veterans and the state response to the complexity of human experience in war, I have shown that the political use of the past is based on the interpretation of selected facts and aims at reconstructing the past in accordance with the needs of the dominant ideological discourse. Since the tension between private and official discourses is often resolved by promoting certain memories at the expense of others through selective remembering, in reference to current political pressures, silenced narratives are transmitted across generations in the private environment of the home to be preserved until resolution becomes possible.
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Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
Ethical Standards
The author affirms this research did not involve human subjects.
