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The authors would like to thank Alex Ropes, Migle Staniskyte, and Emmanuel Ruhamya for assistance with manuscript preparation.
Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Amy Lehrner, James J. Peters VA Medical Center, 130 W. Kingsbridge Road (526/OOMH), Bronx, NY 10468 ; E-mail: [email protected].The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929, p. 249
It has long been recognized that the experiences of parents and ancestors influence future generations (Harper, 2005). Many cultural practices and rituals function to transmit historical knowledge and experience across generations. The Jewish Passover seder gathers family and friends for a meal during which the biblical story of the escape from bondage in Egypt is retold and freedom is celebrated. Children are specifically instructed to consider what the story means to them and about them. When survivors and witnesses to communal trauma, such as genocide, die off, cultural memory is enshrined and conveyed through memorials, museums, the arts, and memorialized anniversaries and rituals. Cultural trauma has been defined as occurring “when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (Alexander, 2004). The shared experience of cultural trauma, targeting a cultural or ethnic group, becomes part of the story the community tells about the world, about itself, and about its survival (Volkan, 2001). It is hoped that the lessons of the past will be passed on, although the nature of the lesson may be a matter of disagreement. While the historical events may be in some way fixed, they are also open to reinterpretation and new meaning for future generations.
In the fields of psychology and psychiatry, both the experience and the developmental sequelae of trauma have primarily been conceptualized and studied as individual-level phenomena. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) defines trauma as “exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence,” including war, physical assault, threatened or actual sexual violence, terrorism, natural or human-made disasters, and severe accidents (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Diagnoses such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression following trauma are,...