The Trauma Narrative of Turkishness, Part 2

Rastinews — Turkish identity is a traumatic identity. How else could it be this cruel?

Not only the republic but the origin myths of peoples and religions share a common, striking structure: beginnings are told through a traumatic rupture. The start is not a natural, peaceful continuation of what came before; it is founded after a break, a loss, a moment of crisis. Existence, in this sense, is often a response to trauma.

René Girard's scapegoat theory, which I have cited in earlier columns, points to exactly this. For Girard, the origin of social order usually lies in an act of collective violence. The community concentrates its internal tensions on a victim, and eliminating that victim produces a temporary sense of order and unity. The act of violence is later transformed into a mythological narrative and made sacred. The traumatic beginning is thus not forgotten; on the contrary, it is preserved symbolically and becomes the foundation of the community's existence.

Freud's myth of the founding father in Totem and Taboo describes a similar structure. For Freud, social order was established after a traumatic event — the killing of the primal father. The act is repressed but never fully disappears; it settles into the foundation of culture as guilt, mourning and prohibition. Trauma thus becomes not an exception outside culture, but culture's founding moment.

A traumatic identity perceives the world not as it is, but as it once was. Even after a past threat has vanished, the psyche does not leave it in the past. Trauma has no tense: though it belongs to the past, it is an experience that goes on living in the present. This is why a traumatic identity feels itself under constant threat even when it faces no objective one. It is one of the psychological explanations for why those demanding freedom, justice and equality are branded "terrorists" or "traitors to the nation": a traumatic identity experiences change not simply as change but as the danger of dissolution and annihilation. What is new is felt not as an opportunity, but as a threat.

A traumatic identity carries the fear that the dissolution once experienced in the past will happen again. Historic collapse, loss and fragmentation survive at the unconscious level not merely as memory but as a standing possibility of repetition. Trauma is therefore not an event left behind; it turns into an expectation that organizes the present. The psyche does not live what happened, but what might happen again. The fear of a repeat, of a new rupture — this expectation is lived as though it were reality itself. Every demand for freedom and equality is thus experienced not merely as a rights claim, but as the herald of a possible dissolution. Freedom is perceived not as expansion but as fragmentation. Equality is felt not as justice but as the weakening of order. Every rights claim is therefore coded, at the unconscious level, as the return of fragmentation and loss. But what operates here is not only a psychological mechanism — a political organization is also at work.

Traumatic fear does not simply persist as a residue of the psyche; it becomes an emotion that the state keeps alive and continually reproduces. Fear, after all, is a manageable emotion. Fear can be directed. Fear can be organized. The state functions here as a kind of manager of fear — those in power act almost as fear brokers. Past traumas are kept in circulation, endlessly recalled and symbolically restaged, so the collective psyche stays on permanent alert. Even after the threat is gone, the sense of threat is sustained — because that sense of threat guarantees the continuity of power.

Racism and hostility, in this context, are not merely spontaneous emotions; they are psychic energies that are organized, directed and controlled. By keeping alive the fear of fragmentation carried by the traumatic identity, the state keeps society in a permanent reflex of self-protection. Individuals then turn not toward liberation but toward self-defense; they focus not on demanding rights but on avoiding threat. Here lies the paradox: the traumatic identity binds itself to power out of a need for protection, while power needs that need for protection never to disappear if it is to endure. Where fear disappears, questioning begins. And where questioning begins, absolute power loses its footing. Trauma is therefore not merely a remnant of the past; it becomes one of the load-bearing columns of today's political order.

Resolving the trauma is not only a matter of individual healing — it also carries the possibility of political dissolution. This is why a traumatic identity perceives reality not as it is, but as its need for protection dictates. Perception is shaped not by truth but by anxiety. A demand for freedom is therefore never heard simply as a demand for freedom. It activates the fear, recorded in the traumatic memory, of an "internal collapse."

Those who demand freedom often unconsciously revive the mythology of being "stabbed in the back." In this framing, the other is no longer simply someone who thinks differently — he becomes the enemy within, the hidden agent, the figure of betrayal. The "stab in the back" narrative is one of the most powerful defensive myths of a traumatic identity, because it externalizes responsibility for loss, defeat and failure. My colleague Esther Schulz-Goldstein, who lives in Berlin and has published a comprehensive two-volume study of the Dersim massacre, writes in Die Sonne blieb stehen (The Sun Stood Still, Vols. I-II, 2013) that Turks constructed a myth of having been "stabbed in the back," and that this myth became one of the chief pillars of racism.

In this account, loss is explained not by inadequacy, political blindness or historical reality, but as the result of betrayal. Identity is thus spared from confronting its own fragility, its deficiencies, its internal contradictions. The fault always belongs to the other. The myth of "betrayal" is therefore not merely a narrative explaining the past; it is a defense of identity that covers over the narcissistic wound, externalizes guilt, and cannot survive without producing an enemy. This mythology also secures the continuity of the traumatic identity, because identity sustains itself by feeling perpetually under threat. If the threat disappears, so does the defense. And once the defense disappears, identity is left facing the question of what it is organized around. Even though I have been speaking of a traumatic identity throughout, what I am really describing is an identity that has turned from victim into perpetrator. This is why, for a traumatic identity, the enemy is not merely a reality — it is a necessity.

The enemy protects the boundaries of identity. The enemy prevents identity from disintegrating. The enemy grants identity an illusion of wholeness. But this wholeness is not real wholeness — it is a fragile balance organized around trauma. And to sustain that balance, the traumatic identity must continually carry the ghosts of the past into the present. This is why a traumatic identity does not live in the present. It tries to prevent the repetition of the past. And sometimes, in trying to prevent that repetition, it reproduces it instead. This mode of perception makes it difficult to see the other as a subject. The other is no longer someone making a rights claim; he becomes the bearer of a potential catastrophe. Political or social demands are thus transformed, at the psychic level, into existential threats. One of the mechanisms at work here is projection.

Traumatic identity externalizes its own fragility and its fear of dissolution. The threat sits outside, not within. Danger lives in the other's existence, not inside the self. Inner anxiety is thus regulated through an external enemy figure. That is why traumatic identity often turns aggressive while believing it is defending itself. What it experiences is not attack but protection. Yet this logic of protection keeps generating new threat figures. Trauma survives not merely as a past event but as a psychic reality organizing the present. For traumatic identity, the real issue is not living the present but preventing the repetition of the past. And so the deepest struggle is sometimes fought not against real dangers outside, but against a past still alive within. Constant threat perception is the founding principle of traumatic identity. Trauma is not just a painful memory; it also produces a constitutive belief that the world is dangerous. The world is no longer neutral. It becomes a field of potential attack. The other is not simply another person but a possible threat. That is why traumatic identity experiences its own aggression not as an assault but as a form of protection.

What looks like an attack from outside is, from within, a defense. For traumatic identity the real concern is not causing harm but avoiding harm. The paradox emerges precisely here: the constant need for protection keeps producing constant aggression. This aggression is often not a conscious choice. It results from a deeper psychic logic.

Trauma keeps the subject in a state of hypervigilance. The self stays in permanent alarm. This alarm state makes the subject perceive the world not as it is but through the lens of possible dangers. Aggression thus stops being a response to a real threat; it becomes an attempt to neutralize a potential threat in advance. Psychoanalytically, this can be called "preemptive aggression," a defensive structure. Waiting, for traumatic identity, means remaining defenseless. Striking first is insurance against the possibility of being victimized again. This is the logic of fragility, not of strength.

For traumatic identity, the world is not a place to be trusted. It is experienced not as a neutral reality but as a field of potential threats. This is a paranoid construction of the world. Here the paranoid structure functions not as pathology but as a perception pattern made permanent by traumatic experience. Trauma has damaged the sense of trust. As a result, the need for control grows. Anything that cannot be controlled is perceived as a potential threat. What is different, foreign, incomprehensible, and unpredictable is experienced as an element threatening the self's integrity. That is why every form of expression that cannot be supervised produces anxiety. Language, music, ritual, gathering — each of these is not merely a cultural expression but also, for traumatic identity, a domain that is unpredictable and therefore threatening. A state's perception of an uncontrollable language, folk song, wedding, or public gathering as a threat is the political reflection of this psychic logic. Anything that cannot be supervised represents a loss of control. And in traumatic memory, loss of control is equivalent to dissolution, disintegration, and loss.

Similarly, a subject who encounters a language they do not understand experiences not only a communication barrier but potentially a symbolic sense of exclusion. Being left outside meaning means being left outside control. This activates the fear of exclusion and fragmentation that traumatic identity carries at the unconscious level. This fear is usually not consciously recognized; instead, it surfaces as aggression. Aggression is one of the most primitive and fastest ways to regulate the anxiety felt in the face of the unknown. The aggression that emerges here is therefore not only hostility directed at the other; it is also a defense the self mounts against its own fear of dissolution. When the other is silenced, the self temporarily feels whole again. When the other is eliminated, the anxiety temporarily subsides.

But this relief is not lasting. Because the threat does not come from outside but from within. Trauma persists not in the outside world but within the psychic structure. That is why, even when traumatic identity eliminates the enemy, the sense of threat does not disappear. It simply turns to a new object — that is, it produces a new "enemy." And so aggression stops being a means of protection; it becomes a structure that sustains the continuity of identity. At this point, aggression is not only an act directed at the other; it is also an attempt to prevent the self from disintegrating. Because for traumatic identity, the real threat is not the other outside but the renewed feeling of the fragility within. Aggression directed at the other is, in fact, a defense the self mounts against its own fragility.

This is why traumatic identity constantly feels itself under threat. And as long as this perception of threat does not disappear, neither does the aggression.

Because aggression is one of the ways traumatic identity sustains its own existence. Perhaps this is why the deepest peace processes become possible not merely through the elimination of external enemies, but through the resolution of the persistent sense of inner threat. Because a person can only stop attacking once they feel they are no longer under threat.