1. Home
2. Culture
3. Shock and Survival: A Testimony of War and Trauma in Lebanon

Caught between shock and survival, this poignant testimony from a patient in psychoanalysis delves into the psychic trauma experienced by the Lebanese, who are daily witnesses to the horrors of war.

Testimony


"I live in a neighborhood not far from areas that are frequently bombarded. Every day, I am immersed in constant terror. The incessant shelling, the persistent drone hum in the sky, and the whistling of missiles create an exhausting state of hyper-vigilance, fraying our nerves. At the slightest noise, I jump violently, my heart pounding. My sleep is constantly disrupted by terrifying nightmares that wake me up in a cold sweat. My appetite has completely disappeared, as anxiety knots my stomach constantly. Like many other Lebanese, I am trapped in a constant state of trauma that erodes my emotional and mental stability.

Yet, despite—or perhaps because of—this constant anxiety, I can't stop myself from being glued to my phone, reading endless updates on daily strikes and watching videos of suffering and horror that are often unbearable. As soon as I hear an explosion, I need to know immediately what it is: Was it a strike? A sonic boom? Was it far away or close by? They say we are in the age of instant information and that this is progress. But I can’t help wondering: Is it really?

A few days ago, I came across a video that left me stunned. It showed a large gathering of men, armed with their phones, waiting for a shell to hit a building. Apparently, some self-proclaimed forecaster had announced in advance the name and location of the targeted building, and all these people had convened to witness the event and film the spectacular collapse of the structure. Their reactions were ambiguous: were their cries of admiration or horror? Were the invocations I heard pleas for help or glorifications? There was an ambivalence, a blend of terror and fascination, that was hard to comprehend.

What disturbed me even more was realizing that I felt the same way as these people: both frightened and impressed by the precision of the destructive technique. The thought even crossed my mind that I might have been among them. This deeply unsettles me. It makes me wonder if I, too, could derive a perverse satisfaction from the spectacle of horror. It seems as though we no longer question the number of victims or the destruction of lifelong possessions, which had become a part of one’s identity. It’s as if we’ve become strangers to ourselves, to our own sensitivity.

What also devastates me is imagining the profound impact of this violence on our children. They, who should be living a childhood like those in peaceful countries, are brutally exposed to the unspeakable. Around me, I see alarming signs of deep emotional distress: a crushing fear that never leaves them, constant anxiety eating away at them, waking in panic even at the sound of thunder, withdrawal into themselves, alarming muteness, and sometimes bursts of aggression. I am terribly worried about the long-term psychological scars on an entire generation of children, forever marked by the traumas of war.

What frightens me most, perhaps, is feeling that I might become like many of my compatriots: resigned to the insidious normalization of daily horror. Over a million displaced people live in constant fear and precarity, and yet we seem almost indifferent to the daily devastation, as if anesthetized. This 'banality of evil,' to use Hannah Arendt’s term, is it our only way to psychically survive? To avoid descending into madness in the face of a reality that has become unthinkable? I don’t want to lose my lucidity about the utterly dramatic situation we are living through, nor my empathy for all this suffering. And yet..."

Explainer

This testimony clearly illustrates the psychic trauma affecting many Lebanese, subjected daily to a level of violence that overwhelms and shatters the usual defensive capacities of the psyche, leaving it stunned and in shock.

Can the act of photographing scenes of destruction be understood as a defense mechanism against an unbearable traumatic reality, a futile attempt to create symbolic distance from the horror? One could interpret this act as a desperate effort to achieve symbolic mastery over what inherently defies all meaning and representation. By framing and containing the unimaginable within the borders of a picture, the individual attempts to transform raw, incomprehensible reality into something that, though terrible, feels somewhat "tamed." However, this attempt at symbolization through imagery only cruelly highlights its failure to heal the traumatic wound or to psychically process the experience.

For both children and adults, Winnicott’s work on the early mother-child relationship sheds light on the potentially devastating effects of an environment that fails in its essential function of providing a secure "holding" space. War, with its chaos and horror, shatters the protective framework of family life, leaving the fragile psyche of the child profoundly wounded. This abrupt collapse of a "good enough" environment exposes the child to primal terrors and what Winnicott called "primitive agony" or "fear of breakdown," which some adults now seem to be reliving.

This normalization of horror, as described by the witness, may represent the gradual development of a "false self," a concept theorized by Winnicott to describe a paradoxical defense of the self. This outward compliance with the mortifying demands of the environment allows individuals to preserve their true inner selves, but at the cost of a schizoic fragmentation that exacts a high psychological toll.

UNICEF provides almost incomprehensible statistics: since early October, at least one child has been killed daily, while ten others are injured to varying degrees. The witness's concern about the impact of this ongoing tragedy on children is entirely justified. It resonates with the central issue of the intergenerational transmission of unresolved trauma. The symptoms described—anxiety disorders, hyper-vigilance, flashbacks—are characteristic of entrenched psychological trauma that, if left unprocessed, risks being passed down to future generations like a crypt in the unconscious mind.

In such profound distress, the therapeutic space of psychoanalytic treatment can provide what Françoise Davoine calls "a place to lay down the trauma," a transitional space where the trauma can gradually be re-experienced and symbolized. Here, individuals may begin to weave together the threads of meaning and historicity that have been frayed by the traumatic rupture, reclaiming their stories and imbuing them with meaning.

This testimony also underscores the collective dimension of this trauma, which extends far beyond the individual. Analytic work cannot disregard the social, political and collective dimensions of trauma, even as it preserves an attention to the uniqueness of each person’s history.

This is an extreme situation that tests the limits of our individual and collective psychic resources. Only an immense cultural and symbolic effort might allow the threads of historical and identity continuity, torn apart by trauma, to be rewoven. What is at stake is the mental health of an entire population, an entire society, and with it, our collective capacity to face horror without succumbing to dehumanization.