in Algeria has slowly ventured out past its regular cultural and linguistic territory and settled into these troubled waters. The 2000s were marked by an urgency to build and repair, not by a need for deconstruction, which is frequently used in analyses of the subject. The last war (1992–2000) had just shown a seemingly unprecedented level of atrocity, robbing countless children, women, and men of their voices if not their lives. The demand for psychoanalytic treatment speaks to the need to understand and move beyond the brutality experienced during what have been called the “bloody years,” the “dark years,” the “red decade,” the “reign of terrorism,” or the “nightmare years.” New questions have emerged as atrocities have spilled over into the private sphere and familiar friends can no longer be distinguished from foreign foes. External catastrophes have laid waste to inner lives, borders, languages, histories. The destruction was so vast that the conventional means of separating inside from outside proved to be no longer operational, failing at times to make any sense at all.
In this indecipherable landscape – to which I’ll return shortly – appeared an element that had been buried until then and which recalled one of Freud’s central insights: namely, the indissociable ties between the psyche and collective experience. Freud developed this idea as early as Project for a Scientific Psychology in 1885, arguing that interiority springs principally from a decisive encounter with the exterior (the environment) – this is the fundamental experience of every infant. He would later refine this idea by widening his notion of environment to include the social environment in 1913 with Totem and Taboo, and continued in this vein all the way up until Moses and Monotheism (1937), where he strove to explain how the unconscious is formed, unforgettably, before boundaries are drawn. In other words, it isn’t just national borders that are artificial: it starts with the border separating interiority and exteriority for the speaking beings we all become. However, we often forget this as we continue to cling to fragile borders for reassurance. Catastrophic events can put these borders at even greater risk.
In Algeria, each individual harbors within the degeneration of the collective body whose central organ is the social order. The discourse of patients from the 2000s sheds light on how this situation directly affects the bodies of subjects, especially in light of the fact that the disaster of the war of the 1990s was compounded by natural catastrophes in the following decade: repeated earthquakes, one of which caused more than 2,000 deaths, and floods no less destructive.3 All of this is not without consequence, as each catastrophe – although different in kind – finds itself tied to the previous one. These catastrophes are linked together by their shared belonging to the tragic sphere. And the psychological associations formed can be explained by the temporal proximity of the catastrophes and the great losses of human life occasioned by each. Tragedy of this sort marks the discourse of patients, who can be heard speaking of “an unrelenting fate,” of “being condemned to catastrophe,” or even of “divine punishment,” which evokes the “wrath of the gods” from Greek mythology. The collision between human atrocities from the war years and the ravages wrought by nature has led to a surge in religion: prayers, women turning to the veil again and a series of other acts to “placate the gods.” In both cases, between heaven and earth, God is at stake: a mysterious God called upon to shield one from natural catastrophes.
Calls for help made amid the murders and massacres during what has been deemed the “Internal War” remain unheard and unanswered. They have been drowned out by the lives lost due to natural disasters. The senselessness of human cruelty has been matched and complemented by nature’s unpredictability. Failing to find explanations for these, everything appears to be ruled by chance. Questions such as “How did we get here?” and “What’s behind this endless bloodshed?” – the countless dead and missing, the massacres, the savagery of it all – are like so many purloined letters.
A sense of dismay has spread and taken hold of the public at large. The line separating inside from outside, a reliable barrier in normal times, is now fragile and porous. The fabric of society is torn, plunging subjects into a quasi-permanent state of uncertainty and fear. This accounts for what I perceive to be a serious “social trauma” plaguing subjectivities, one whose causes and cures have yet to be discovered.
God’s reinforcement of failing institutions
The unceasing, demonic blows of the real spare no one. Everyone is exposed to them to varying degrees. Hence the unrelenting sense of a looming danger, which is all the more troubling as the source of the trauma remains unknown: heaven or earth, inside or outside, the state or religion, and so on.
Various forms of violence are embedded and rehearsed in the social sphere. For example, the vulnerability of subjects is even more acutely felt at sites of social interaction (institutions, work, family). Their feeling of defenselessness causes them to turn inward, becoming withdrawn and disengaged in order to avoid being exposed to danger. This produces a sort of tension in a public seeking a feeling of existence: on the one hand, the social fabric is being torn to pieces from all directions and continues to grapple with the long history of its fight to become a “nation,” the impacts of which are hard to measure; and, on the other hand, there is also an attempt to patch up these tears, a necessary step for moving on with one’s life, but also the source of new forms of violence. The social sphere both stages and witnesses these catastrophes, but it also strives at all times to cover them up, dismissing their very existence. In so doing, it only throws matters into further disarray.
Behind this tension between tearing open and patching up is the experience of the living, which has come under attack and which deserves further scrutiny. The expression of a damaged life in the social sphere and the ability of this expression to spread and wreak havoc on a subject’s future should be interrogated. For the individual subject cannot be reduced to the community. It traces its own private paths that are both within the public and unreachable at its margins. And yet serious conflicts within the larger public bar the emergence of subjectivities. An unavoidable clash arises, one that is designed to serve a political purpose. Repeat experiences of trauma have directly affected people’s relation to faith, as the resurgent visibility of religious practices has made clear. The importance of the visible forms these practices assume cannot be overstated. The material transformation of “belief” has a very particular social function, suggesting that faith depends on its visible demonstration although it remains invisible as a private matter. Faith, once immaterial, then assumes a demonstrable material existence, one that is put on display for all to see. Does this mean that religion has become no more than an outward display? What is behind this almost physical staging of belief?
The display of divine obedience serves as a bulwark against a feeling of insecurity that views the outside world as dangerous in light of its distant and not so distant past. Freud sees the “need for religion” as deriving from the infant’s experience of helplessness. This deep-seated feeling “is permanently sustained by fear of the superior power of Fate.”4 The “infant’s helplessness” is a primal experience of subjectivity. Each infant experiences it before a “figure of comfort” (usually the mother or a substitute) comes to put an end to its helplessness (unpleasant feelings, hunger, cold, pain, etc.). The “figure of comfort” registers as coming from the outside. This remains stamped on the psyche. Throughout the course of a person’s life, these silent traces of helplessness may be reawakened when the subject is confronted by danger. This primal experience marks an initial separation between inside and outside, and creates a welcomed and awaited experience of alterity. Indeed, the comfort and security brought to the crying infant by this figure allows it to begin to distinguish between inside and outside. This is how the subject at this early stage discovers the existence of difference. The outside becomes the source of calm for inner stirrings, discomfort, pain. The subject also learns to construct an interiority to shield off dangers emanating from the outside. It “interiorizes” the figure of a supportive Other, which henceforth will remain within it. At times, it may still call on the exterior figure when the interiority it constructed isn’t enough to handle the dangers that threaten it.
This primal experience of alterity
