Emotional Processes in Elaborating a Historical Trauma in the Daily Press

Resumo

Twentieth century has witnessed several cases of mass traumatization when groups as wholes were ostracized even threated with annihilation. From the perspectives of identity trauma, when harms are afflicted to a group of people by other groups because of their categorical membership, ethnic and national traumas stand out. This paper aims to investigate long-term consequences of permanent traumatization on national identity with presenting a narrative social psychological study as a potential way of empirical exploration of the processes of collective traumatization and trauma elaboration. A Narrative Trauma Elaboration Model has been introduced which identifies linguistic markers of the elaboration process. Newspaper articles (word count = 203172) about a significant national trauma of the Hungarian history, Treaty of Trianon (1920), were chosen from a ninety year time span and emotional expressions of narratives were analysed with a narrative categorical content analytic tool (NarrCat). Longitudinal pattern of data show very weak emotional processing of the traumatic event. Results are discussed in terms of collective victimhood as core element of national identity and its effects on trauma elaboration.