Turkishness: A Trauma Narrative

Rastinews — Turkishness is presented as a narrative of confidence, but it is insecurity concealed beneath a cloak of confidence — a trauma narrative. The people who founded this state did not come from a settled, whole, peaceful life. On the contrary, they had endured complex, multi-layered traumas: they had been displaced, defeated, torn apart, forced to flee. What we now call the "founding will" is also the product of a great loss, a collapse and an exile. There was no community here that had arrived through conquest and settled comfortably. What existed instead were migrant masses scattered by the empire's collapse, pouring into Anatolia from the Balkans, the Caucasus and Rumelia. In this sense, the Republic is not the long-term political project of a settled people; it is an emergency survival arrangement for traumatized migrants. This explains a great deal.
Displacement is not merely a geographic loss; it is a loss of identity, belonging and continuity. Migration means the subject leaves behind not just a place but the symbolic universe that carried it. Home, graves, neighbors, language, the familiar order — each of these is not only a physical anchor but a psychological one. When these anchors are lost, the subject loses not only its place but its sense of continuity with itself. When such losses are suppressed instead of mourned, mourning gives way to rigidity, defensiveness and hardened forms of identity. The function of mourning is to acknowledge loss and learn to live with it; but when mourning cannot take place, the loss is denied, and that denial returns in the form of ideological rigidity. Suppressed mourning does not disappear — it returns instead as the hardening of identity and the constant need to defend it.

The formation of Turkish identity, too, took shape largely on such historical and psychological ground. The empire's dissolution, territorial losses, forced migrations and mass displacements produced not only political but also collective psychological ruptures. When these ruptures could not be symbolized through a process of mourning, they gave way to discipline, an emphasis on unity and the idea of a strong state. Unity thus replaced loss, and the idea of a harsh state replaced uncertainty. This is why the identity has been uneasy from the very start. It must constantly be reaffirmed, constantly defended, and it constantly feels under threat — because this identity was not built on secure continuity but on the wreckage of a rupture and a collapse. Trauma that goes unaddressed grows numb; grief that goes unmourned turns into ideological rigidity. In this sense, the Republic is not only a new political regime but also the political organization of trauma. The emphasis on a strong state, the insistence on a homogeneous nation, intolerance toward difference and the extreme sensitivity to objection are not merely political choices — they are also forms of psychological defense. They are collective defenses developed so that the experience of collapse and dissolution is never repeated. But defense is not healing. Suppression is not repair. Suppressed trauma does not disappear; it only changes form. This is why demands for freedom, rights and equality, even when they pose no real threat, are often perceived as existential ones. A structure shaped by traumatic experience struggles to distinguish reality from traumatic association.

This resembles a mechanism psychoanalysis calls "repetition compulsion." In the dynamic Freud described, the subject unknowingly reproduces the conditions of the trauma through the very defenses it builds to avoid reliving it. In other words, the effort to guard against trauma paradoxically lays the ground for new traumas to emerge. A structure built to avoid experiencing trauma sometimes preserves its own integrity by inflicting trauma on others. This mechanism is well known at the individual level. A person who has lived through trauma will often say, with great resolve, while recounting what happened, "never again." Right behind that sentence there is usually another: "No one will ever do this to me again." This statement carries not just resolve but also a powerful defensive reflex — because the person may shift into a psychological position willing to risk anything to avoid reliving the trauma. The determination never to suffer trauma again sometimes carries, unknowingly, the possibility of becoming a perpetrator. In other words, to avoid being a victim of trauma, a person may risk harming others when they feel it necessary. In psychoanalysis, this is linked to the failure to symbolize trauma. When trauma occurs and the experience cannot be made meaningful, when it cannot be mourned or turned into a narrative, the psyche continues to carry it as a tension that keeps circulating. That tension is then, more often than not, projected onto the outside world through defense mechanisms.

This dynamic does not operate only at the individual level; it can emerge in similar form at the collective level too. Cultural memory can transmit even experiences an individual never lived through directly, passing them down as particular emotional patterns and reactive forms. The great ruptures a society suffered in the past can keep producing specific sensitivities and defense patterns in the collective psyche, even without being part of later generations' own experience. The Nazi past is one notable example. The generations living today were not direct witnesses to that period, but the Nazi era produced particular sensitivities, forms of guilt and defense mechanisms in the collective unconscious of German society. This is why the impact of historical events is not confined to the generations that lived through them; it can leave traces in the psychic world of the generations that follow.
Similarly, the traumatic ruptures of the Ottoman Empire's dissolution and the Republic's founding process have also left powerful marks on the collective psyche. The empire's breakup, the wars, the population movements and the great social transformations were not merely political events; they were experiences that shaped the psychic structure of society. This is why even ordinary-seeming demands for rights or criticism can today be perceived as a disproportionate threat. Structures built on trauma are hypersensitive to associations linked to that trauma. The intensity of the reaction usually stems not from the real weight of the present situation but from the psychic weight of a past, unsymbolized loss.

In other words, the response is often directed not at today's event but at the echo of a past trauma that was never fully processed. This is why even a small criticism or a simple question can be perceived as an existential threat — because that question stirs not only the present but also a repressed past. The intense defensive reflex that emerges in such moments carries, more than today's reality, the psychic weight of a loss that occurred in the past and was never symbolized.

Orders built on trauma do not forget that trauma; they carry it inside their forms of defense. Healing becomes possible only when the repressed loss is recognized and mourned. Otherwise identity stops being a living, transformable structure and hardens into a frozen posture of defense - A small group's demand for rights, or an anti-imperialist slogan chanted in Erzincan, poses no real threat either to imperialism or to the republic's existence. Yet the state's disproportionate severity toward such limited, symbolic demands for rights usually stems not from the objective weight of the present situation, but from the psychological and political echo of historically carried traumatic ruptures. Structures that have experienced trauma can struggle to distinguish between a real threat and a signal that merely evokes the trauma. In that case, the reaction targets not the present event, but the historical loss, dissolution, and fear of disintegration the event unconsciously recalls. An ordinary demand for rights can thus be perceived, at a symbolic level, as a repetition of a past dissolution. This is why the response given is often proportionate not to the actual scope of the present act, but to the psychological intensity of a past trauma that has not yet been fully worked through. The state's severity can be understood not merely as a security reflex, but also as the self-protective effort of a structure that feels its continuity under threat. As the intensity of defense rises, the fragility of the structure being defended becomes visible. A response that looks strong is often a sign not of real strength, but of an underlying insecurity. Secure, internally solid structures do not fear annihilation in the face of difference and objection; they feel no need to suppress it.

The War Generation and the Externalization of Trauma

We are talking about a country founded by soldiers who fought on various fronts. A republic founded by a professional class that had learned war not as an exception but as its basic method of problem-solving. We are talking about people who spent most of their lives at the front, who risked death or survived by killing, building a political order. This generation was not merely traumatized; it socialized within trauma. The world taught them not through negotiation, compromise, or plurality, but through force, discipline, and annihilation. War was not an anomaly for them; it was the norm. The republic, too, was built on that norm. Then the mechanism we know so well took over: the externalization of trauma. Instead of working through their own devastation, mourning it, making sense of it, they sustained that trauma by inflicting it on others. Because for a subject who has suffered trauma, the most unbearable prospect is becoming a victim once again. The antidote to that is "staying strong forever" - or sustaining the fantasy of being strong. The production of perpetrators out of victims is one of the transformations psychoanalysis knows best. Those displaced yesterday displace today. Those denied yesterday deny today. Those who felt threatened yesterday now produce the threat themselves. Because the phrase "never again" is often not an ethical principle, but a justification for a permanent state of attack. For this reason, the Republic cannot be understood merely as a modernization or progress project. It also represents an institutionalized form of unresolved war traumas. The empire's dissolution, the wars, the mass losses and displacements are not merely historical events; they are ruptures that left deep marks on the collective psyche. When these ruptures cannot be symbolized and processed through mourning, political institutions become the carriers of that trauma. In this context, the Village Institutes, often praised as a project of progress and enlightenment, functioned not only as an educational and cultural transformation initiative but also as a project for creating a new national subject. Alongside goals such as Westernization, secularization, and introducing classical music and world literature, the aim was to internalize a shared national identity and establish a homogeneous sense of social belonging. This process involved not only the transmission of knowledge but also the reconstruction of identity. In other words, the Village Institutes were also projects of modernization and Turkification.

The emphasis on a strong state, the insistence on a homogeneous society, intolerance toward difference, and the intense sensitivity shown toward opposition can, in this context, be read not only as political preferences but also as trauma translated into political language. The experience of traumatic dissolution creates a powerful need to preserve continuity; that need often turns into forms of defense that perceive difference as a threat. In short, the Republic is not simply an order founded by traumatized people; it can also be understood as a political and symbolic structure that carries the effects of trauma and tries to protect itself through those effects. Trauma does not disappear until it is recognized, named, and psychologically processed. Repressed trauma does not heal; it merely changes form and is transferred to different subjects, different relationships, and different historical moments. For this reason, every moment of crisis can become a moment in which past unresolved ruptures are reactivated. Trauma can genuinely be overcome not by denying it, but only by recognizing it, symbolizing it, and mourning it. Otherwise, trauma does not become an event left behind by history; it continues to reproduce itself again and again within political and social relations.

The Demand for Freedom = The Equation of Division

There is one more matter here, and it forms one of the Republic's deepest and most automatic defense mechanisms. The Republic has internalized - indeed reduced to reflex - a founding narrative: in the late Ottoman period, a significant portion of the communities demanding freedom, independence, and equality ultimately succeeded in establishing their own political sovereignty. The empire's dissolution was experienced not merely as a military defeat, but as the experience of demands turning into states. This experience left a deep mark on the collective psyche. This historical rupture produced an equation that operates less at the level of political consciousness than at the level of the collective unconscious: the demand for freedom became identified with division, the demand for equality with dissolution, and the demand for self-determination with the end of the state's existence. Thus a demand for rights became prone to being perceived not as a legitimate form of political expression, but as an existential threat - This is linked to the fact that the traumatic experience could not be symbolized or processed through mourning. When trauma is not worked through, it does not remain in the past; it becomes a perceptual filter that structures the present. For this reason, concepts such as freedom, equality, or the right to self-determination are perceived not only through their political content but also through the historical experience of dissolution they unconsciously evoke. In this context, the state's reaction is often shaped independently of the actual content of the demand at hand. The reaction is directed not at the demand itself, but at the possible scenario of dissolution it unconsciously represents. For this reason, suppression, criminalization, and the discourse of external threat can be understood not merely as period-specific political choices, but also as political forms of defense rooted in a founding trauma. This is also why the reflex appears closed to discussion: it is not a conscious decision, but an automatized form of defense. Traumatic experience does not produce a flexible capacity for thought that weighs future possibilities; instead, it creates a rigid defensive order focused on preventing the repetition of a past dissolution.

This defensive order is also reproduced through historical narratives and collective mythologies. The ruptures of the late Ottoman period have often been made sense of not as historical and political processes, but within narratives of betrayal. Metaphors such as being "stabbed in the back" function not only to explain the past but also to structure present-day political perception. These narratives serve both as a way of making sense of loss and as a defense mechanism aimed at preventing the repetition of that same loss. The Republic, in this sense, internalized the Ottoman collapse not merely as a historical transformation but as an existential threat scenario requiring permanent vigilance. For this reason, demands for freedom are often perceived not as negotiable political demands, but as a potential risk to the state's continuity.

This dynamic is bound up with the temporal structure of trauma. Trauma does not stay in the past; unless it is symbolized, it goes on living in the present. And every new demand, every new assertion of difference, can be experienced as an echo of a dissolution suffered long ago. The reaction is thus shaped less by the reality of the current situation than by the psychic reality of a past loss. What matters here, in the end, is not the demand itself but what the demand represents at an unconscious level. A demand is never only a claim to rights; it also becomes a sign that recalls the possibility of a past dissolution. And until the trauma is worked through, that sign keeps triggering the same defense mechanisms, every time.

What stands out here is that the separations of Bulgarians or certain other peoples can be read as relatively neutral, even at times as a historical inevitability, while Arab independence has been turned into an intense narrative of injury. A mindset that defends independent Turkey tooth and nail can code that same demand for independence as betrayal when it comes to those separating from the Turks. This shows how complicated and contradictory Turkishness's relationship to freedom and independence really is. At the core of that contradiction sits this: the grey wolf was elevated at the founding of the identity as a symbol of independence, honor and freedom, while the freedom struggles of other ethnic groups - especially those aimed at independence from the Turks - were devalued. Turks glorify their own War of Independence through a mythologized narrative, yet toward those who sought liberation from the Turks, they prefer to belittle that effort rather than question their own problematic share in it. In this sense Turkishness is, more often than not, built solely on the assumption that being Turkish is good, righteous and legitimate. There is no shared, egalitarian conception of identity. What results is a conflicted, fragile, ambivalent identity. This fragility leaves the Turk feeling a constant need to prove his Turkishness. The heavy saturation of public and private space with symbols of Turkishness - flags, emblems, grey wolf figures, the three crescents, posters of Türkeş, "authentically Turkish" names - can be read as expressions of that same, constant need for proof.

The Kurds' struggle to protect and sustain their own identity can make this already complicated identity structure even more defensive, and at times even more aggressive and offensive. The Sunni Turks of a village in Yozgat feeling a constant need to prove their Turkishness, hanging flags on their homes, having their towns decked out with busts of Atatürk, or getting national symbols tattooed on their bodies - none of this can be read as simple individual preference; it can equally be seen as a sign of a collective unease. Flags raised in front of state institutions, posters of Atatürk hung up, busts installed; the constant, repeated visibility and reaffirmation of Sunni Turkishness in a Turkish-Sunni village - these too point to a need to feel certain of one's identity, and to keep reconfirming that certainty to oneself.

This is why, on certain issues, people can react far more sensitively and far more automatically than the situation calls for. I connect the strangeness in these automatic, exaggerated and at times bizarre reactions to a feeling of not being fully certain of one's national identity. The real problem is that, over time, this abnormality comes to be seen as normal within the culture.