SOCIAL TRAUMA AND EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENT

Abstract

Trauma can be described as an injury that leaves permanent consequences, latent traces that can be activated in periods of crisis (Krstić, 2009). In the second part of the 20^th century, the term trauma started being used ever more outside the medical and psychiatric context and entering the domain of social sciences (Sztompka, 2009). In the scope of this, one way the concept of trauma is used is in confronting negative and dysfunctional consequences that social change can leave in its wake. Various authors have studied social and psychological consequences of social changes on individuals and society. In this way, they opened the road to recognizing a new meaning of trauma, which they titled cultural or social trauma. It is known that the theory of emotional attachment states that in crisis or traumatic situations, members of a family group feel insecure, that risks in the environment can lead to lowered responsiveness of the parents, but it is less widely known if unresolved traumatic experiences of parents can be transferred to children and their later emotional attachment patterns. There is particularly little knowledge on whether significant social changes leave consequences on emotional lives of individuals and the emotional lives of their children. In this paper, we try to make a brief review of the literature on the topic, and summarize the theoretical and partly empirical knowledge in the area that exists so far.