The Trauma Narrative of Turkishness: Part 3

Rastinews — Religious narratives, too, often begin with trauma. Moses's story opens with slavery and exile, Jesus's with crucifixion and sacrifice, Muhammad's with exclusion, threat and migration. In each case, trauma is not simply suffering. It marks the birth of a new symbolic order and a new community.

National origin myths follow the same pattern. The Ergenekon legend is a mythological account of escape from defeat and encirclement. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the founding of the Republic were not merely political transformations either — at the collective level, they were experienced as a traumatic rupture followed by reconstruction. Such traumatic beginnings do not stay confined to history; they become part of a people's collective psyche. Left unsymbolized and unprocessed, trauma persists as a frozen core within collective memory. In moments of crisis, that core reactivates, and defenses built up in the past resurface. The transmission is not biological but symbolic and psychological. Trauma passes from generation to generation not through genes but through narratives, myths, education, language and collective memory. Ruptures suffered in the past can go on shaping how later generations perceive the world and read threats. Trauma, in this sense, is not only something that happened once — it can become a psychological reality that structures the present. Communities can go on, unknowingly, maintaining the very defenses that once helped them survive. Those defenses may have served a protective function at first, but over time they can erode flexibility and make it harder to engage with new realities. Trauma that goes unrecognized and unsymbolized does not disappear — it merely changes shape. And the liberation of a people or a society is rarely just a matter of political change; it also depends on the capacity to confront one's own traumatic origin story.

A traumatic identity is one built not on meaning, continuity and belonging, but on injury, loss and unmourned grief. Here identity stops being a stable ground and becomes instead a defense system on permanent alert. It is no longer something a person simply is — it turns into a fragile structure that must constantly be proven, protected and defended against threats. At the center of such identities usually sits a loss that was never mourned. The breakup of empires, the collapse of narratives of historical supremacy, the fracturing of a sense of continuity, and an unanswered question — “who are we?” — open a deep void in the collective psyche. When that void cannot be processed symbolically, when the loss is never mourned, it is not forgotten. It is repeated through reaction instead. Identity stops functioning as a narrative and becomes a reflexive response system. Traumatic identities, as a result, do not relate to the past — they are governed by it.

The issue, then, is not really what others demand. It is what those demands bring back. For a traumatic identity, a call for equality, freedom or autonomy is never just a political request — it strikes at the founding wound. It signals that the existing order is not natural, inevitable or innocent. And that signal summons buried guilt, the fear of losing control, and historical responsibility. The response comes instantly, unthinking, automatic, and often disproportionate. Its intensity has less to do with the content of the demand than with the traumatic memory it stirs up.

One of the clearest marks of a traumatic identity is that it runs on double standards. It cannot rest on universal principles, because universality dissolves the self-narrative it depends on. The same act means different things depending on who commits it. “Our freedom is sacred,” “our independence is legitimate” — yet the same demand for freedom or independence, voiced by someone else, is branded betrayal, separatism or enmity. This is not a logical error. It is the logic of trauma. A traumatic identity places itself at the center and reorders the moral world around that center.

This fragility places an extraordinary burden on symbols. As flags, myths, hero figures, claims of purity and talk of the “authentic” multiply, identity looks stronger. In fact, that symbolic overload signals anxiety, not strength. A symbol is an attempt to hold an inner void together from the outside. The places where an identity is displayed most loudly are usually the places where it feels most threatened. Turkishness carved into mountains and rocks. Turkishness in tattoos on the body, in flags and banners hung from cars and houses. An identity that must be made visible at every turn is one that cannot be carried from within. A traumatic identity cannot tolerate criticism, because criticism means contact with what has been repressed. So its defense usually takes the form of attack. Those who make demands are turned into enemies, critics are criminalized, difference is read as threat. The reactions are disproportionate, poorly timed, cut off from context. Yet the more this excess repeats within a culture, the more ordinary it becomes. What is pathological gets accepted as normal — even presented as a virtue.

In the end, a traumatic identity speaks loudly not out of confidence but out of an inability to bear itself. It constantly demands proof, because it has never reached inner acceptance. It shouts to calm itself, clings to symbols, and suppresses the other. The deeper problem is that this pattern does not stay confined to individual psychology. It gets legitimized culturally, fed by historical narratives, and passed down through generations. Trauma, then, does not heal because it goes unremembered — it endures because it gets normalized.

The Traumatized Becomes the Perpetrator

At this point, the harder a traumatic identity finds it to carry its own fragility and founding injury, the more it evolves into a traumatic perpetrator identity. The trauma once denied or repressed now registers as a weakness that must not be remembered, and narratives of agency, strength and control take its place. The perpetrator position is not simply a will to harm others. It is also a psychological stance chosen to avoid contact with one's own victimhood. A traumatic perpetrator identity covers over the injury that was actually suffered — it acts in order not to remember, it attacks in order not to think. The trauma does not heal, because it is never confronted. Instead, it is reproduced through the perpetrator role and rendered invisible. Trauma no longer circulates as pain but as a source of justification and legitimacy. Through this transformation, identity serves not to repair the wound but to erase its trace — even to recreate it in others.

Ethnic and Social Unconscious, Symbolic Authority, and the Transmission of Trauma

I want to propose a concept here: the “ethnic complex.” This is not a diagnosis of individual psychopathology, nor a label that pathologizes a people, an ethnic group or an identity as such. Rather, within the framework of ethnopsychoanalytic and social psychoanalytic theory, it is an analytical tool for understanding how historical traumas become organized within a collective psyche. The concept is not biological or essentialist — it is a historical, symbolic and psychological proposition. Here, Georges Devereux, Mario Erdheim, and Jakob Müller together with Cécile Loetz offer three complementary theoretical axes.

Georges Devereux, in his work Normal und Anormal (Normal and Abnormal) (1982, Suhrkamp, p. 11), draws a theoretical distinction between the individual unconscious and the ethnic unconscious. For Devereux, the ethnic unconscious is not a biological or essential inheritance. It is the sum of psychic traces transmitted across generations, arising from a particular ethnic group's shared historical, social and political experiences. These traces are not remembered directly. They surface indirectly, in rituals, myths, folktales and collective narratives. Devereux states this plainly: the ethnic unconscious is the psychic residue of a group's shared experience — acquired historically, not inherited. Mario Erdheim's concept of the social unconscious carries Devereux's ethnic-unconscious approach onto the social and political plane. For Erdheim, societies produce similar reactions not only because they live together, but because there are things they do not want to remember — because they repress together. The social unconscious is not independent of the individual unconscious, but it cannot be reduced to it either. When certain historical ruptures, traumas and crimes go unexamined, a society represses these experiences, and they return as automatic defence mechanisms in response to particular triggers. Erdheim describes this process by stressing that the social unconscious is not a static residue but a dynamic field, continually reorganised by present-day conflicts (Mario Erdheim, 2013, Gesellschaftlich Unbewusstes, Macht und Herrschaft [The Social Unconscious, Power and Domination], Psyche, No. 9/10).

These two approaches are complemented by Jakob Müller and Cécile Loetz's analysis of pre-modern power and symbolic authority. In their study Zur Psychoanalyse der Verschwörungstheorien (On the Psychoanalysis of Conspiracy Theories), Müller and Loetz argue that in pre-Enlightenment societies, power was organised not primarily as an institution but as a personified figure. In their view, the king or ruler was not merely a political actor but a symbolic figure who carried order, continuity and meaning. The loss of that figure was therefore experienced not simply as a change of ruler, but as the collapse of the symbolic order itself. The authors put it this way: In pre-modern societies, power is not primarily organised institutionally; it is personalised. Order itself is embodied in the person of the ruler. (Müller, Jacob Johann & Loetz, Cécile , 2021, Zur Psychoanalyse der Verschwörungstheorien, Psychoanalyse im Widerspruch, No. 66, p. 91)

Taken together, these three theoretical threads make clearer why collective traumas do not simply "stay in the past." The ethnic and social unconscious take shape when traumas organised around the loss of symbolic authority are repressed rather than mourned. These repressed experiences are later reconstructed through the figure of the state, the nation or the ruler, and resurface as extreme sensitivity to criticism, the demonisation of opponents and criminalisation. What is at issue, then, is not a group's "nature," but a psychic organisation in which unexamined historical experience continues to shape present-day political and emotional responses.

This theoretical framework shows that the defence patterns discussed so far are not abstract or universal psychodynamics, but the psychic consequences of specific historical ruptures. Taken together, the ethnic unconscious (Devereux), the social unconscious (Erdheim) and the personified structure of symbolic authority (Müller & Loetz) make it easier to understand why collective trauma tends to concentrate around the state, the nation and figures of power. The question, at this point, is no longer whether trauma exists, but which historical experiences turned it into a constitutive psychic organisation. In the Turkish context, this question inevitably points to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the loss of empire, mass displacement, and the experience of a generation socialised amid war as it built a new political order. The heading "the trauma of Turkishness," then, is not meant to debate the moral or cultural qualities of an identity — it is meant to understand which historical losses, repressions and unmourned experiences that identity was built upon.

At this point we are no longer talking about a cultural "sensitivity," but about a pathological defence mechanism. The "disorder" here is not a biological or essential flaw; it describes a historically embedded, repeating, self-reproducing collective psychic operation. This is not, in other words, a matter of "bad rulers" or "authoritarian governments." The matter is that the relationship with the state was, from the outset, built on traumatic ground. It is no coincidence that in this country, every attitude that criticises the state, questions the government or targets those in power is reflexively suppressed with violence. The content of the criticism is almost irrelevant. Its tone, the reasonableness of the demand, even loyalty itself — none of it matters. The mechanism that kicks in is this: criticism equals threat.

This equation has been so internalised that it no longer runs through a conscious decision process; it runs as a reflex. It resembles a chronic post-traumatic defence system: the traumatised structure perceives every stimulus as a repetition of past destruction. That is why even the smallest objection is seen as a "beginning" — the beginning of dissolution, disintegration, annihilation. The result is a defence that is kept in a permanent state of attack. Violence here is not deviation; it is the norm. Repression is therefore not the exception; it is constant. Opposition is coded not as a temporary discomfort but as a structural enemy. Criticism becomes not a right but a symptom to be suppressed. And symptoms are not argued with — they are eliminated.

This is what I mean by "ethnic confusion": a society reacting with the same severity, the same violence, to certain triggers — freedom, equality, criticism of power — every time. Across different eras, under different governments, with different rhetoric, but the same reflex. This repetition is not only political; it is psychic. What we are talking about, then, is not a problem of regime but a constitutive defence pattern. The republic can change, governments can change, ideologies can transform. But this defence mechanism will not change unless it is examined. Because repressed trauma keeps reorganising itself. And each time, someone else pays the price.

The Individual Has an Unconscious. So Does Society

Researchers who wanted to test the universal validity of psychoanalytic theories turned to "foreign" cultures from an early stage. But these encounters were often driven not by curiosity but by a normative gaze: behaviour that struck the researcher as unfamiliar was quickly labelled "abnormal" or "pathological." This soon gave rise to a far more problematic question: do nations have pathologies? At first glance, the question carries a racist, fascistic and condescending assumption — that one group has the authority to declare another "sick." And that, in doing so, it takes its own behavioural patterns as the norm and the standard of health. This view is both epistemologically flawed and politically dangerous, because the language of pathology is often intertwined with the language of power. The one declared "sick" is not only an individual — it becomes a culture, a people, a way of life.

Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, teaches us something else: psychopathologies change historically. Hysteria was more visible in Freud's time; today, narcissistic structures, borderline conditions and experiences of emptiness are more common. This shows that it is not human nature that has changed, but the social order, its prohibitions, its expectations. Pathology must be sought not only in the individual's inner world, but in the psychic imprint of the era and the culture. That is why "declaring a society sick" often reveals not that society, but what the eye looking at it considers normal.

Still, there is a side to this worth considering: the issue is not "declaring a society sick from the outside," but diagnosing the abnormalities a society has normalised within itself. What is normal in some societies would be considered pathological behaviour elsewhere. For example, when a demand for freedom in a country is quickly cast as "terrorism," "treason" or "separatism"; when the very existence of an opposition is perceived as a threat; when the state mobilises every one of its apparatuses to suppress such demands — this is not merely a political choice. It points to a collective psychic formation.

The individual has an unconscious. Societies, too, have a collective unconscious in which they repress the violence, loss, guilt and shame they have lived through. If there is no mourning, no accountability taken, no reckoning, these experiences do not disappear. They are pushed into the unconscious. And like everything repressed, they return as symptoms. Disproportionate reactions, states of panic, the reflex to manufacture enemies, intolerance of criticism — these are psychic reflexes before they are political choices. Just as in individual neurosis: the reaction is directed not at the present, but at what has been repressed.

So what I call "ethnic automatic abnormal reactions" is not self-blame; it is an attempt at a different kind of understanding, a different way of making sense. It is a historical diagnosis, not a biological one. It is the psychic residue of things lived through but not meant to be remembered. And like everything repressed, it returns more aggressively the more it is denied. What I am trying to say here is not "Turks are like this or that" but "this is apparently how Turkishness was constructed, how Turkishness came to be formed." This is not an insult. It is a call for confrontation. A desire to look into the mirror within us. And perhaps what is truly disturbing is this: in some societies, what is dangerous is not the language of pathology, but what is considered normal.

The Construction of Identity, the Production of Emotion: Nation, Religion and Identification

People are told they are Turkish from birth, part of a lineage carried on through "Turkish seed"—an emphasis that matters, because historically "not coming from Turkish seed," especially being Armenian or Greek and of non-Muslim origin, has been grounds for severe exclusion and accusation—that they carry "Turkish blood" in their veins, and that they have been Turkish and Muslim since the first human, since the primordial covenant (kavl-i belâ). Identity is thus presented not as a historical formation but as an almost ontological fate. Yet this narrative is nothing more than a construction dressed up as something natural. Similarly, the belief that "every human is born Muslim first" fixes identity as an innate, unchanging essence. Then books enter our lives—and this ground we thought was solid begins to crack. Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism, 1992), Eric Hobsbawm (Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, 1993) and Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1993) teach us this: what we call a nation is not an ancient, unchanging essence but a historically constructed structure. In Anderson's phrase, the nation is an "imagined community"—a community in which people believe in the same story even though they do not know one another.

Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein (Race, Nation, Class, 1993) reveal how these identities are produced, and how borders and categories of "race" are made to appear fixed and natural. Identities that are in fact ambiguous, fluid and plural are turned, through history, education and ideology, into rigid, continuous structures. In other words, a person is not born Turkish—a person is made Turkish. Turkishness is learned, repeated, internalized. Cultural and ideological apparatuses, functioning almost like a factory, produce and reproduce this identity. This is exactly where what we call a nation begins: as a narrative. A narrative that invents its own beginning, fabricates continuity, and places its origin in mythological depth. This narrative has its heroes—victories, sacrifices, a "glorious" past... Isn't heroism, more often than not, the achievement of something forced? These narratives also contain traumas—losses, betrayals, wounds. And the story of struggle against these "evils"... And people do not merely believe this narrative; they identify with it. They feel it. They rejoice with it, grow angry with it, mourn with it. Because no identity, no belief, no sense of belonging is learned in a vacuum. In other words, a person is not simply Muslim. It is not only a cognitive matter but also an emotional equipment. A person does not merely become Muslim; they feel themselves to be Muslim. In other words, Turkishness, Muslimness, is felt.

You cannot teach a child their nationality or their religion without washing their brain. Because the construction of nation and religion is, from its very beginning, mythical. A child is given a world—and that world is repeated until it appears natural to them. Sacrificial rituals for an Aztec child, the meaning of the cross for a Christian child, the virtue of submission for a Muslim child... These are not merely taught; they are normalized, internalized, moved into the realm of the unquestionable. The matter runs deeper than "brainwashing." The matter is how the world will be constructed. The child is born into the world of meaning presented to them. And they mistake the boundaries of that world for reality. The child internalizes what is narrated by identifying with it, and makes it part of themselves. Identification is not merely a form of learning; it is a form of attachment. The child does not merely accept the identity offered to them; they become attached to it, love it, exist with it. This is why what Abraham offers Ishmael is not merely a command, not merely submission or obedience, but also an order of meaning. And within that order, even being sacrificed acquires meaning. The same holds true for the nation. Turkishness, Germanness, Frenchness... These are not merely stories that are told; they are worlds that are felt. They are built through repetition, ritual, education, language, symbols. Flags, anthems, heroic tales...

All of them serve the same purpose: turning a story, a mythical narrative, into emotion. And after a while, a person does not merely "think they are Turkish"—they feel Turkish. As thinkers concerned with the history of emotions have shown, emotions too are not fixed, innate essences; they are produced within history.

Romantic love is one of the most striking examples of this. Before the 17th century, "love" in today's sense did not exist. Love was invented with Romanticism—shaped by poetry, the novel, art. People were taught how to love, what to feel, which pain would count as "love." And today love is lived as one of the most natural emotions there is. Just like the nation. Just like religion. Because once something is repeated enough, narrated enough, felt enough—it stops being a construction. It turns into emotion. And emotion is the strongest reality there is. Because the nation is not only an idea but also an emotion. And perhaps precisely for this reason it is this real, despite being a construction. This is exactly where the reaction arises to every text that questions these narratives of nation and religion, their internal contradictions, their hidden and invisible sides, the presentation of "evil" as though it never existed. These reactions can at times reach pathological proportions. Because when you try to make a contradiction concerning Turkishness or Islam visible, automatic reactions emerge. These people are not merely defending something. Through identification, they have become that thing itself; they are Turkish, they are Muslim. They do not merely form a bond with these identities—they become that identity. This is why the responses given to criticism directed at these identities are also, most of the time, automatic and reflexive. This is not merely a defense of Turkishness or of Islam; it is also the subject's defense of themselves. But precisely here a problem arises: a person builds what they call "themselves" upon these narratives. For this reason, every criticism directed at these narratives is experienced as a threat directed at the self. And this is why people, faced with such criticism, do not merely go on the defensive—they can at times display aggressive reactions as well. The automatic, aggressive, dismissive reactions of Turks toward anyone who speaks of democracy, freedom, independence, or the automatic reactions of Germans when the Nazi period is discussed, carry traces of exactly this past. In the Frenchness of the French, too, colonialism and the Enlightenment lie hidden, in other words...

This has gone on long enough…

A person carries not only what they themselves have lived through, but also the collective history they live within. No trauma remains confined to the individual who experienced it; even unspoken, trauma continues to live on in behavior, attitudes, fears and defenses. For this reason, the traces left by collectively experienced events become, over time, not merely a memory but a state of mind. People begin to think, feel and react from within that state of mind. After a while, defense stops being an exception and becomes the norm. In a society that has lived under constant threat, insecurity is not a pathology but a form of adaptation. Emotional withdrawal, silence, a state of excessive vigilance, or aggression become not individual character traits but part of a collective form of protection. A person begins to carry, unknowingly, the defenses they once developed to protect themselves as part of their identity. Defense turns into personality.

At this point, one of the hardest and most uncomfortable issues is that the line between victim and perpetrator is never absolute. Traumatic systems do not simply produce victims. They reshape the victim's inner world. Repressed rage, humiliation and a sense of powerlessness can, through identification, turn toward the perpetrator's position. This is precisely where Freud's concept of "identification with the aggressor" (Identifizierung mit dem Aggressor) emerges. To protect itself, the psyche internalizes the logic of the very power that once harmed it. In some historical and social contexts, this creates an invisible alliance between victim and perpetrator. The alliance is not a conscious agreement. It is a psychic accommodation born of fear and the need to survive. Instead of confronting the threatening power, a person may begin to speak its language, adopt its values, and even reproduce them. Internalizing the perpetrator's logic can feel safer than remaining its target. This happens not only at the individual level but at the collective level too. Societies that have suffered trauma can, over time, begin to reproduce the very structures that produced that trauma. Those who were oppressed can speak the language of oppression. Those who were silenced can silence others. Trauma does not only produce pain. It produces a worldview. Perhaps this is why, in some societies, people choose security over freedom, belonging over truth, protection over justice. Protection has become a precondition for psychic survival. No real threat needs to exist for this to happen. Genuine healing begins not only with remembering the trauma but with recognizing these internalized defenses. A person becomes free to the extent that they can distinguish which fears are truly their own and which were inherited. And perhaps the hardest question is this: is a person only ever the victim of what they have suffered, or do they sometimes become, without realizing it, the carrier and the perpetuator of it as well?