Comparing Loss and Trauma

Reading Wagner’s (2008) ethnography of the identification of Srebrenica survivors’ relatives exhumed remains evoked, for me, parallel thoughts about trauma survivors and the process of recovery. 

As defined in western psychological notions, many victims of trauma experience a sense of timelessness, as Stolorow (2011) describes:

“Trauma devastatingly disrupts the ordinary linearity and unity of our experience of time, our sense of stretching-along from the past to an open future. Experiences of emotional trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which we remain forever trapped, or to which we are condemned to be perpetually returned through the [portals] supplied by life's slings and arrows. In the region of trauma, all duration or stretching-along collapses, past becomes present and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition. Trauma, in other words, is timeless” (p1).* 

Recovering through psychotherapy often involves situating experiences of trauma or danger on a timeline (i.e. past, not present), which provides the opportunity for a new experience of the present and future (hopefully more positive) (See for example, Rothschild, 2000). 

Likewise, Wagner (2008) describes the experience of Srebrenica survivors existing in a state of absence of their dead loved ones that “signifies both a spatial and temporal void” (p176).  The process of corroborating memory and DNA information in order to successfully identify the dead seems to serve a similar function to trauma treatment.  It was interesting to read about the delicate process of informing survivors (post-identification) and awaiting their acceptance of this information, sometimes taking up to five years.  Throughout the book, at times, I wondered, given the extent of the devastation with body fragmentation and secondary gravesites, how much truth is too much truth?  Sometimes, our mind does construct memories in the experience of the absence of knowing that serve as a sort of scab or enclosure of meaning.  As Wagner (2008) points out, “Not every family member can accept the dismantling of his or her imagined narrative” (p159).  I appreciated the discussion of the contact between fact and narrative both in the sharing of positive identification by the PIP workers, but also in the process of identification itself.  It seems that in this process, positive identification is constructed through a combination of scientific and social processes.

Towards the end of the book, in the chapter on the Technology of Repair, Wagner (2008) explains that “identifying remains deflects attention from state inaction or even responsibility concerning how or why people went missing…. [thereby] subtly turn[ing] the discourse away from responsibility for death toward responsibility for social repair” (p257).  I completely agree in the sense that nation states seem to have a terrible time admitting any wrong doing, at the same time, it is noteworthy to point out that at least they are doing something.   Stolorow (2007) also discusses what is known as secondary trauma being sometimes more culpable in long-term traumatic injury when compared to the event itself.  This secondary trauma refers to the experiences of how the trauma is dealt with, for example, the rape victim whose story is not believed by the police may suffer more greatly than the victim who is taken for their word, whether or not the perpetrator is found.  In this instance, I believe that the returning of remains is an acknowledgement of what happened at a governmental level, and amidst the international community.  In this way, I wonder if the experience of Srebrenica survivors contrasts significantly to survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide?  With only a sentence touching this topic in the entire book, I am left wanting more.


Rothschild, B. (2000) The body remembers:  The psychophysiology of trauma and trauma treatment.  New York:  W.W. Norton & Co.

Stolorow, R. (2011). Trauma and the hourglass of time. Huffington Post.  Website. Authored: 02/23/2011. Accessed: 09/22/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-d-stolorow/coping-with-trauma_b_826995.html

Stolorow, R. (2007). Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Wagner, S. E. (2008) To know where he lies: DNA technology and the search for Srebrenica’s missing.

* There is imbedded in western psychology and trauma theory an assumptive valuation of linear time, which is due its critique, but in this case seems to fit Wagner’s account of Srebrenica survivors’ experiences.