Tracing Historical Memory – Inter-Generational Trauma and Social Habitus

In this paper I want to discuss an important but neglected theme in Norbert Elias’s work, historical memory, tracing its intimate connections with inter-generational trauma and the formation of social habitus. Sigmund Freud argued that harmful events are stored as overwhelming episodes which are repressed into the unconscious mind, forming trauma: ‘we experience trauma when there is a disruption of a protective barrier in our mind, which protects us from harmful and painful excessive stimulation. In young children, this filtering, protective function is largely provided by the mother/caregiver, through her sensitivity in knowing what her child is able to manage at any one time. As we get older we take over this filtering function ourselves, of course, with varying degrees of success’ (Freud, 1920). According to Elias (2013) sociologists need to face and re-engage with the task that that Freud originally tackled by exploring the connection between individual and collective processes of trauma, the relation between the outcome of the conflict-ridden channelling of drives in a person's development and his or her resulting social habitus. How do we begin to uncover and explain these ‘we-layers’ of individual habitus, complex symptoms of disturbance which have largely been forgotten?