Collective trauma

Collective trauma is a lasting psychological and social wound shared by a community after catastrophic violence, disaster, or loss. It can reshape group identity, memory, relationships, and institutions across generations.

Psychological trauma: Lasting psychological effects of experiences that overwhelm a person's ability to cope. Individual trauma can accumulate and interact across a community.
Holocaust: The systematic genocide of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II. Survivors, descendants, and communities continue to confront its profound losses and aftermath.
Kai Erikson: An American sociologist known for studying disaster, social breakdown, and collective trauma. His account of Buffalo Creek showed how disaster can damage a community's social fabric.
Mass psychogenic illness: The rapid spread of physical symptoms within a group without an identifiable infectious or toxic cause. It describes contagious symptoms, not a lasting social wound after catastrophe.
Social memory: The ways groups preserve, interpret, and transmit accounts of their past. Shared remembrance gives collective trauma a durable public form.
Armenian genocide: The mass deportation and killing of Armenians by the Ottoman government during World War I. Its lasting effects are bound to family memory, displacement, and disputes over recognition.
Jeffrey C. Alexander: An American sociologist whose work developed the theory of cultural trauma. He analyzed how groups construct events as injuries to collective identity.
Collective effervescence: A heightened sense of shared energy and solidarity generated by group rituals and gatherings. It names a form of group experience that can unite communities without shared injury.
Intergenerational trauma: Psychological and social effects of trauma transmitted from one generation to another. The wound can persist beyond the people who directly experienced the catastrophe.
Rwandan genocide: The 1994 mass killing of Tutsi and moderate Hutu in Rwanda. The genocide left widespread grief and shaped the difficult work of rebuilding social life.

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