How Historical Humiliation Is Transmitted Across Generations
Introduction: The Past That Does Not Pass
Not every historical defeat becomes a political time bomb. Not every loss of territory, empire, or status transforms into a lasting wound that continues to live in language, myths, symbols, and state behavior. But some events have a different fate: they do not remain in the past. They embed themselves in the collective psyche and begin to exist as unfinished affect.
This is what the psychoanalyst Vamık Volkan called “chosen trauma” – a historical event of great humiliation, defeat, or loss that was never symbolically processed and is therefore transmitted further as an element of group identity. This is not merely about memory. It is about memory that has ceased to be an archive and has become the collective’s nervous system.
A chosen trauma is not necessarily the greatest tragedy in a people’s history. It is the tragedy that the collective unconsciously selects as the central node of its self-perception. It begins to perform the functions of explanation, justification, and mobilization. Through it, the present is read. Through it, allies, enemies, compromises, and the boundaries of the permissible are assessed. Through it, the past ceases to be completed time and becomes a perpetually open wound.
This is why some conflicts appear irrational only to those who analyze them at the level of interests. Where a chosen trauma is at work, politics is no longer merely the management of resources or security. It becomes a stage on which the collective repeatedly tries to reenact its own humiliation—now under new conditions, but with the same emotional core.
This explains why rational instruments so often prove insufficient. For a collective living within an unhealed trauma, the question is not merely about what is advantageous. The question is about what humiliates, what returns shame, what recalls powerlessness – and what allows, even symbolically, the restoration of lost wholeness.
In this sense, the politics of memory is not an adjunct to geopolitics but one of its hidden foundations.
And this is precisely why chosen trauma is not merely a matter of historical consciousness. It is a form of political time. Where trauma remains unresolved, the past does not stay behind – it continues to dictate what in the present should be considered a threat and what should be considered the restoration of justice.
How the Mechanism Works
Chosen trauma is not transmitted as dry fact. It is transmitted as an emotionally saturated structure. Not as a date in a textbook, but as an image. Not as a completed history, but as an unfinished internal process.
The mechanism of its operation can be described in several sequential steps.
First, an event of great collective rupture occurs: defeat, occupation, the collapse of an empire, mass expulsion, the loss of sacred territory, humiliation at the hands of a stronger neighbor or external force. But the event itself does not guarantee the emergence of a chosen trauma. What is decisive is something else: whether this event was symbolically processed, or whether it remained in the psyche as something that could not be fully lived through.
If not, a state of deferred historical affect emerges. The collective does not live through the trauma but preserves it. It begins to transmit not only knowledge of the defeat but also the unfinished emotion: shame, anger, resentment, the sense of stolen grandeur, the fear of repetition. This is how intergenerational transmission of trauma takes shape.
In the next stage, the trauma becomes encrusted with symbols. It enters school narratives, literature, ceremonies, political rhetoric, the language of national dignity. It becomes sacralized. Any attempt to reexamine it with distance begins to be perceived as betrayal. The collective no longer simply remembers the wound – it guards it as part of itself.
After this, the most crucial development occurs: the trauma begins to shape political behavior. Contemporary decisions are made not only with regard to the present situation but also under the pressure of a past that has not passed. The state may exaggerate threats, react disproportionately, experience any external pressure as painful, reject compromises that appear rational from the outside but are internally read as renewed humiliation.
Thus emerges history that governs the present not directly but through affect.
Chosen trauma is dangerous not only because it preserves pain. It is dangerous because it creates identity around pain. Consequently, it produces a situation in which healing is perceived almost as a threat: if the wound heals, who will we be then? What will sustain our moral righteousness? What will give us the right to demand, to mobilize, to remember, to punish?
At this point, trauma ceases to be experience and becomes a role. And a role, as we know, is politically more durable than fact.
It is at this point that trauma ceases to be merely pain and becomes a political ontology – a way of existing in the world for the collective. It no longer simply explains the past. It defines who we are, what we have the right to feel, whom we should fear, and what we must reclaim in order to feel whole again.
Trauma and Identity: When Pain Becomes the Form of “Us”
Collective identity is rarely built on positive content alone. Nations define themselves not only through culture, language, creativity, or institutions but also through what was done to them, what was taken from them, what they were deprived of, whom they lost. There is nothing strange in this. The memory of suffering is a natural part of historical consciousness.
The problem begins when trauma ceases to be one element of memory and becomes its center. Then the collective begins to think of itself primarily as one that was humiliated, betrayed, surrounded, misunderstood, unrecognized, or robbed. Identity narrows. Its core becomes not creation but woundedness.
In such a state, even real successes do not bring stability. For a psyche organized around a wound always returns to what was lost. It does not live in the present but in the scene of the old blow. This is why some nations, despite formal independence, economic growth, or international recognition, continue to behave as if the main event of their history has not yet concluded. The most obvious contemporary example is Russia after the collapse of the USSR. Formally, it retained statehood, nuclear status, a seat on the UN Security Council, vast resources, and territory. But the political behavior of the Russian elite over decades showed something else: the collapse of the empire was experienced not as a completed historical fact but as a refusal to accept the loss of scale. This is precisely why the independence of its neighbors, above all Ukraine, came to be perceived not as a normal condition of the international system but as an extension of a personal historical grievance.
Here it is important to distinguish between memory of trauma and identity of trauma.
Memory of trauma can be honest, dignified, and even ethically necessary. It allows us not to forget the crime, not to erase the victim, not to falsify the past.
Identity of trauma is something else. It is a state in which the collective no longer simply remembers the wound but begins to live by it. Then any new event is automatically drawn into the old schema: humiliated again, surrounded again, betrayed again, they want to destroy us again. The past becomes a matrix that disciplines the perception of the present.
This is why chosen trauma often makes a collective particularly sensitive to symbolic gestures. Where an external observer sees a technical condition, a treaty, or diplomatic pressure, the traumatized community may see a repetition of the old scene of humiliation. Where the analyst speaks of compromise, the collective psyche hears: “they are putting you on your knees again.”
Conversely, a harsh, even self-destructive reaction may be experienced as the restoration of dignity.
Therefore, working with trauma in political analysis means asking a different question. Not only “what does the side want?” but also “what can it not allow itself to experience a second time?”
Sometimes this question proves more precise than all the usual diplomatic formulas. For at the center of a conflict may lie not an interest but a forbidden repetition – something the collective cannot allow to happen again without feeling its own internal collapse.
History Knows Different Fates of Trauma
Not every great historical defeat leads to revanchism. And not every trauma automatically turns into political pathology. History knows different models of how societies live through humiliation.
One model is trauma as a school of organization. The Roman experience can be partially read in this way. Rome experienced not only external blows but also deep internal crises, civil wars, ruptures that could have destroyed its political body. But the Roman response often lay not in a cult of resentment but in translating the shock into a new institutional form: reform, discipline, reorganization of power, a new order. Even after the collapse of the imperial political form, the Roman world did not preserve itself as a single political subject, but its legacy did not close in on itself in ressentiment; it was translated into other forms of endurance – law, church organization, the educational canon, the idea of universal order. This was not the end of presence but a change in its type. Not trauma as cult, but loss as a school of civilizational transformation.
At the same time, the Roman experience was not painless or unambiguously “mature.” Civil wars, proscriptions, the transformation of the republic into an empire – all this was also a form of processing trauma, at times a brutal one. Rome shows not an ideal model but that even within a single society, different ways of responding to catastrophe are possible: from institutional reorganization to outward violence.
Another model is trauma as revanche. The most famous example is Germany after Versailles. The defeat in the First World War, the humiliating terms of the peace treaty, territorial losses, and the symbolic blow to national greatness created precisely the type of collective affect that easily became political fuel. Here the trauma was not processed – it was radicalized. It was not translated into a new ethic of responsibility but embedded in the language of revenge, the restoration of honor, and the return of scale. The result was not the search for a new place in the world but an attempt to forcibly abolish the humiliation itself.
It is important to add that Versailles was not merely symbolic humiliation but also an objectively harsh treaty – reparations, territorial losses, military restrictions. It was precisely the combination of material weight and psychological unacceptability that made it ideal fuel for revanchism.
A third model is trauma as chronic vigilance. The Polish historical experience – partitions, occupations, the repeated disappearance of statehood – did not turn into classic revanchism but shaped an exceptionally sensitive security imagination. Poland remembers not only that it was humiliated but also that guarantees have repeatedly proved insufficient. This is why its reactions to the Russian threat often appear exaggerated to parts of Western Europe, when in fact they are rooted in a history where the loss of sovereignty has already become reality more than once.
A fourth model is trauma as a frozen national wound. The Hungarian experience after Trianon is instructive here. The loss of a significant part of historical territories and population became for Hungary not merely a fact of postwar border redrawing but a long nerve of political memory. The trauma does not necessarily lead to direct military revanche, but it can for decades nourish the image of a robbed nation for whom the past remains unfinished. Trianon remains a “living nerve.” Viktor Orbán’s politics – for example, the simplified granting of citizenship to Hungarians abroad or the use of the “Greater Hungary” map – is based precisely on this wound being not healed but frozen as an instrument of mobilization.
It is important to emphasize: such instrumentalization is a political choice, not an inevitable consequence of the trauma itself. There were periods in Hungary when Trianon did not play a central role in political rhetoric. That today it has become the dominant narrative is the result of a deliberate decision by the ruling elite, not of fate.
This example is important for our analysis: it shows that a chosen trauma can be “thawed” or “frozen” depending on political needs. Changing the function of memory is not a matter of fate but of institutional design, political will, and civic maturity.
Thus, what is decisive is not the scale of humiliation itself but the way it is historically processed. One trauma becomes revanche. Another becomes a school of institutional maturity. A third becomes a form of chronic vigilance. A fourth becomes frozen ressentiment.
One might put it differently: history not only wounds nations – it also tests the form of their internal digestion. Some communities translate loss into institution. Others into myth. Some into vigilance. Others into vengeance. And this difference is often more important than the original blow itself.
To these models, one more should be added – trauma as institutional processing. The most striking example is Germany after the Second World War. A defeat that in scale of humiliation surpassed Versailles did not lead to new revanchism but became the foundation for a reconstruction of political culture, European integration, and a constitutional order that embedded the memory of crimes into the very fabric of statehood. This shows that even the deepest trauma can be processed if institutions emerge capable of bearing the pain without its political exploitation.
European and Near-European Examples
Chosen trauma is not an exotic pathology of particular societies. It is one of the most widespread mechanisms of historical politics.
Russia is one of the most obvious examples of how the unfinished experience of lost imperial greatness is transformed into contemporary political aggression. This is not merely about the collapse of the USSR as a geopolitical event but about its psychic experience as humiliation, the collapse of scale, the loss of historical mission, and the destruction of the self-image as center. In this logic, the post-Soviet space ceases to be merely a zone of interests. It becomes a territory on which the imperial psyche seeks to abolish the very fact of its own loss.
The Serbian case is also incomprehensible without the phenomenon of chosen trauma. Kosovo in Serbian historical consciousness is not merely territory but a sacralized scene of historical defeat transformed into the core of collective memory. When such an event ceases to be the past and becomes part of the national “we,” any political discussion of rational compromise encounters not only strategic resistance but an almost religious unacceptability of concession.
Ukraine is a special case, demonstrating how a chosen trauma can operate from both sides of a conflict but with fundamentally different political functions.
For Russia, Ukraine’s independence became an extension of imperial trauma – the loss of scale, historical primacy, the right to define meanings. The Kremlin’s narrative of “one history” and “one people” is not merely ideology but an attempt to psychically abolish the fact of its own diminishment. This is precisely why Russian aggression against Ukraine carries such emotional charge: it feeds not only on geopolitical interests but on the need to heal the imperial wound through subjugation of what is perceived as a “torn-away part of itself.” This is the classic dynamic of the aggressor’s chosen trauma: pain is transformed into a demand for the blood of others.
For Ukraine itself, the chosen trauma has a different meaning. Centuries of imperial domination, the Holodomor, political repression, attempts to destroy national identity – all this formed a deep layer of historical memory that today is not so much an obstacle to development as a source of resistance. Unlike the Russian case, Ukrainian trauma is not directed at subjugating others. It is directed at protecting its own existence. This is the trauma of a victim that, after 2014 and especially after 2022, underwent a transformation: from passive pain to active subjectivity. This is precisely what allowed Ukraine to build an army, institutions, an international coalition – and, importantly for this cycle, to become the material foundation for a new infrastructural architecture (the Black Sea-Danube Corridor) that could transform the economic logic of the entire region.
The Ukrainian case is important also because it shows: a chosen trauma is not a verdict. It can be processed not through forgetting but through translating pain into institutional and infrastructural work. The fact that Ukraine today is building new ports, logistics routes, integrating into European networks – this itself is a form of historical processing that does not cancel memory but changes its political function.
The Armenian experience also shows how genocide can become not only historical truth but also an unfinished psychic center of national self-perception. In this case, the memory of the catastrophe carries ethical necessity, but precisely because of its scale, any attempt at political rethinking of regional relations inevitably passes through a layer of pain that does not belong only to the past.
Here it is important to draw a distinction often ignored in public discourse. The Armenian experience is the trauma of a victim seeking recognition, truth, and guarantees of non-repetition. The Russian experience is the trauma of an aggressor seeking not recognition but revenge. The former can be a foundation for reconstruction and justice. The latter is dangerous not because it hurts but because it demands the blood of others for healing. To conflate these two types of trauma is to lose the capacity to understand the nature of the conflict.
Even in the case of Great Britain, Brexit cannot be reduced solely to economics or bureaucratic sovereignty. In a deeper sense, historical affectivity was also at work: the memory of uniqueness, imperial role, victory, island distinctiveness. Not trauma in the narrow sense of defeat, but rather the traumatic fear of diminished scale, dissolution in an alien framework, the loss of exceptionality.
All these cases are different. But they share one thing: the past does not serve as background. It functions as an active variable of contemporary politics.
And this is precisely why the same events can appear externally as “excessive reaction,” while internally they are experienced as a response to something far older than the situation itself. This is the power of chosen trauma: it makes the present merely an occasion to return to the unfinished past.
Why Rational Instruments Often Fail
The political systems of the modern world prefer to work with what can be counted: resources, flows, balances, sanctions, legal obligations. This is understandable. Rational instruments are easier to formalize, verify, and institutionalize.
But where a chosen trauma is at work, this is not enough.
Sanctions may strengthen not compliance but resentment. External pressure may be read not as a signal for negotiations but as a repetition of old humiliation. Compromise may be rejected not because it is strategically disadvantageous but because it is psychically unbearable. Even a peace agreement may fail if one side experiences it as a symbolic repetition of historical defeat.
This does not mean that psyche overrides material interests. It means something else: material interests always pass through the filter of dignity, shame, fear of repetition, and symbolic self-worth.
Where the analyst says, “this is rational,” the collective trauma may answer, “but this is unbearable.”
This is why some conflicts do not fade after circumstances change. They continue because their energy feeds not only on present contradictions but on unreflected yesterday. Politics that does not see this errs twice: it misdiagnoses the motives of the parties and overestimates the power of its own instruments.
It is no accident that the most failed diplomatic formulas often arise precisely where one side speaks the language of agreements and the other speaks the language of historical dignity, wounded memory, and unfinished humiliation. One of the most vivid examples is the postwar Versailles order. For the victors, it was a rational system of guarantees and constraints on Germany. For a significant part of German society, it became a symbolic architecture of national humiliation. What looked like stabilization to some was, to others, the entrenchment of shame. It was precisely this psychological incompatibility between the language of treaty and the language of trauma that made the system vulnerable to future explosion.
Under such conditions, even a precise agreement can be psychically unworkable.
And here the main limitation of technocratic politics becomes evident: it knows how to work with interest but hardly knows how to work with humiliation. Yet humiliation is among the most dangerous fuels of collective history.
The Danger of Political Exploitation of the Wound
Chosen trauma does not only live within the collective. It almost always becomes an object of political management.
Elites, regimes, charismatic leaders, and propaganda machines well understand the power of the unhealed wound. It provides what no technocratic agenda can: moral tension, emotional mobilization, justification for harshness, consolidation through pain, the right to demand loyalty, and the ability to brand doubt as betrayal.
This is why trauma so rarely remains merely memory. It is translated into ritual, into political symbol, into the language of grievance, into an annual reminder that the collective “was not given,” “had taken from it,” “was humiliated,” “was denied historical justice.”
In this state, trauma becomes not only psychological legacy but also a resource of power.
It allows the complexity of reality to be reduced. Any internal problem can be explained by an external enemy. Any demand for reform can be declared inappropriate in the face of great historical threat. Any softness can be declared dangerous because “history has already taught us where that leads.”
Thus a closed circle forms: trauma breeds fear, fear breeds harshness, harshness provokes new conflicts, new conflicts confirm the old trauma.
And the longer this continues, the harder it becomes to distinguish real historical memory from its political instrumentalization.
Here it is important not to fall into the opposite extreme. To say that trauma is exploited is not to say it is invented. On the contrary. The most effectively exploited wounds are real ones. This is precisely why working with them requires particular precision: not denial of pain, but refusal to allow pain to become the eternal engine of politics.
In other words: politics loves not invented traumas but real ones. For real pain gives it the most reliable legitimacy. And this is precisely why any mature political culture must know not only how to remember the wound but also how to protect it from those who would turn it into an endless engine of power.
What to Do About It: Not Erasing Memory but Changing Its Political Function
A chosen trauma cannot be addressed by a command to forget. Collectives do not renounce their wounds simply because someone suggests “looking forward.” Such language usually only strengthens resistance, as it is read as a demand to abandon part of oneself.
Therefore, the task is not to erase memory but to change the political function of memory.
First, it is necessary to distinguish between dignified commemoration of trauma and the construction of identity exclusively around it. Memory can be a form of maturity. But it ceases to be so when it no longer opens thought but locks it in a ritual of repetition.
Second, the creation of spaces in which the historical wound can be acknowledged without automatically being transformed into political weapon. This is the most difficult. For it concerns not neutral academicism but a symbolic space where the collective is not forced to renounce its pain but gradually separates it from the demand for perpetual mobilization.
Such spaces can include:
– Joint historical commissions with a mandate not for political reconciliation but for establishing facts. Example: the German-Polish textbook commission, which for decades created a space where both sides could speak of their shared past without automatically shifting into accusation. Similarly, the Ukrainian-Polish dialogue on the Volhynia tragedy, despite all difficulties, allowed a transition from mutual silence to shared commemoration of victims.
– Museum and memorial spaces that avoid the heroization of violence but preserve the memory of suffering. Example: the Topography of Terror in Berlin – a museum complex on the site of the former Gestapo headquarters. It does not offer “reconciliation” as a political program but creates a space where visitors encounter concrete facts, names, documents. This prevents the transformation of trauma into an abstract symbol for political mobilization. In Ukraine, the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide performs a similar function: it establishes the fact of the crime but does not offer it as a pretext for hatred toward the descendants of those who committed it.
– Architectural projects that transform the symbolic landscape. Example: the postwar reconstruction of Warsaw – not only the restoration of the historic center but the creation of a space where Polish identity is no longer defined exclusively through the trauma of occupation. A contemporary example: the Iron Gates project within the Black Sea-Danube Corridor – the joint work of Serbian and Romanian engineers on regulating the Danube does not abolish historical contradictions but creates a new level of interaction where shared interest proves stronger than old grievances.
– Cultural and educational exchanges that are not “soft power diplomacy” in the traditional sense but work with concrete people. Example: joint theater projects between actors from countries in conflict (former Yugoslavia, Israel and Palestine, Armenia and Azerbaijan). This does not resolve political contradictions but creates a space where people from different sides see one another not as carriers of abstract traumas but as concrete individuals. This does not erase pain but deprives it of its capacity to be an automatic trigger for the dehumanization of the other.
– Digital archives accessible to all sides of a conflict. Example: shared databases of crime victims (such as the archive of Second World War prisoners of war), where families from different countries can search for information about the missing. This is not political reconciliation but a technical infrastructure of memory that works with facts, not political myths.
What unites all these examples is this: they do not require the collective to “forget” or “forgive.” They offer a different format for the presence of the past in the present – not as an eternal engine of mobilization but as a space where pain can be acknowledged without automatically being transformed into a demand for the blood of others.
Importantly: none of these spaces appears on its own. They require institutional support (state, international, civil society), funding, protection from political sabotage. And above all, they require time. Trauma is not healed in a single political cycle. But it can be shifted from acute inflammation to a mode of chronic coexistence that does not explode at every external stimulus.
Third, changing diplomatic language. Where a chosen trauma is at work, one cannot speak only in the language of interests. Not because interests are unimportant, but because they will not be heard if they touch an unhealed wound. In such cases, a language is needed that acknowledges historical dignity without legitimizing aggression.
Fourth, preparing institutions to work with psychological asymmetry. Not all sides of a conflict are equally traumatized. Not all traumas function in the same way. And not every reference to historical pain carries the same moral and political weight. Sometimes it concerns the memory of a victim seeking recognition. Other times, the memory of a former empire that cannot accept its diminished scale. To conflate these modes is to err about the very nature of the conflict.
Fifth, cultivating a culture of reflection within societies themselves. No external policy can ultimately “heal” another’s chosen trauma. At most, it can avoid feeding it with crude blindness. Genuine work is possible only when the collective itself begins to ask itself the difficult question: do we remember the pain – or do we already live by it?
It is with this question that maturation begins.
And perhaps this is where one of the most important boundaries of political maturity lies: between the society that guards its wound as the final proof of its righteousness and the society that can remember pain without turning it into the sole meaning of its future.
Infrastructure by itself does not heal trauma. But it can change the conditions in which trauma is reproduced. When a neighbor ceases to be merely a threat and becomes a partner in a shared project, the wound begins to lose its political function. This does not cancel memory but deprives it of its capacity to serve as an eternal engine of mobilization.
In Place of a Conclusion: The Wound That Seeks Repetition
Chosen trauma is dangerous not because the collective remembers the past. It is dangerous because the past begins to seek repetition – not literally, but in the form of a constant return to the same emotional scene.
The humiliated collective seeks not merely security. It seeks the moment in which the old shame can be abolished. And if such a moment does not arise in the form of mature politics, it often arises in the form of aggression, harshness, rejection of compromise, or a cult of historical grievance.
This is why chosen trauma is not merely a problem of memory. It is a problem of the future.
For a society that cannot distinguish memory from repetition will sooner or later begin to reproduce its own wound in new forms. And then history ceases to be a lesson. It becomes a script.
And perhaps the most dangerous thing here is not the past itself but the temptation to live as if only the past grants the right to power, anger, and moral weight. For in that case, the future is no longer built – it merely becomes a new stage for the old wound.
The next text in this cycle will be devoted to the trauma of empire – a particular type of collective wound in which what hurts is not only loss but the diminishment of scale, the narrowing of space, and the impossibility of accepting one’s own new size.
This text is part of the series “The Geopolitics of the Unconscious.” Previous texts: “Silence,” “Form,” “The Narcissism of Small Differences,” “The Triangle,” “The Actor Without Will,” “The Chain Reaction of the Subject,” “The Black Sea-Danube Corridor.”
Translation assisted by AI.
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