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A Century of Silence

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The American Journal of Psychoanalysis Aims and scope

Abstract

This paper addresses how crimes of genocide go beyond a need for naked power, economic aggrandizement, or territorial conquest. Such crimes involve psychogenic and psychodynamic underpinnings that can be terrifying to contemplate. Yet their psychological study is essential. The Armenian genocide has been taken as a point of reference. Because the Armenian genocide has resulted in nearly a century-long effort of perpetrator denial, it can provide an important case study of how long-standing trauma and denial reinforce each other and illuminate each other. As a result, this genocide has aptly been called the “secret genocide,” the “unremembered genocide,” and a “crime without a name.” The author holds that genocidal trauma (and trauma in general) is contagious and the contagion is likely to be insidious. All who come in contact with it can come away marked, including victim, victim families and progeny, observers, advocates, researchers, and yes, perpetrators.

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Notes

  1. Hitler early in his career alluded to the Armenians as victims of their lack of courage for combativeness. The “solution of the Jewish question” he added, requires therefore a “bloody clash.” Otherwise “the German people will end up becoming just like the Armenians” (Dadrian, 1995, p. 402).

  2. In a sensitive and beautifully written reflection on an Armenian woman's personal therapy related to growing up in a survivor family, see Topalian (2000).

  3. Increasingly in Armenian families in the diaspora, the act of witnessing takes place intergenerationally and exists on an ongoing basis. Moral witnessing offers psychological validation to the victim; at the same time the act itself deepens and cleanses those who undertake to witness. As a teenager in 1915, my father-in-law was exposed to crimes of mind-altering cruelty in his ancestral village of Keghi, Kharpert. Among other crimes, he was forced to watch Turks killing the son of an Armenian villager, cutting out the boy's organs, and making the father eat his son's liver. The forced complicity of being made to watch the unwatchable caused my father-in-law to re-live this particularly horrifying scene for his entire life, the hidden terror episodically erupting in nightmares and visual memories.

  4. In the Unknown Black Book, a study of the Holocaust in German-occupied Soviet territories, Rubenstein (2008) reports that “faced with the trauma of their own men, German commanders decided to find a way of murdering women and children that spared the soldiers emotional suffering” (p. 10).

  5. Paying homage to the burning deserts of Der Zor where deported Armenian women and children perished en masse, Balakian is stunned to find in the area piles of human bones (Bones, New York Times Magazine, 12/7/08).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. 13 Gill Street, Exeter, 03833, NH

    Jack Danielian

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  1. Jack Danielian
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Correspondence to Jack Danielian.

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1PhD, Dean, American Institute for Psychoanalysis of the Karen Horney Psychoanalytic Center. Training and Supervising Analyst, American Institute for Psychoanalysis. Editorial Board, American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

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Danielian, J. A Century of Silence. Am J Psychoanal 70, 245–264 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/ajp.2010.12

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