THE SOUTH AFRICAN POLICE SERVICE AS SPECIFIC CONTEXT IN WHICH THE RESEARCH IS CONDUCTED

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CHAPTER THREE: THEORETICAL OVERVIEW OF TRAUMA

Introduction

This chapter focuses on psychoanalytic theory and concepts related to trauma. As was mentioned in chapter one, psychoanalytic theory reflects my epistemology. Much of the trauma literature in psychology has been based on a psychoanalytic paradigm (Garland, 1998; Van der Kolk, 1987). A brief history of trauma and a discussion of psychoanalytic thinking related to trauma is used as a point of departure and to provide a context for the study. The final section of the chapter constitutes a deliberation of key psychoanalytic concepts which are relevant to the current research.
The historical perspective on trauma indicates that since the earliest involvement of psychiatry with traumatised patients there have been vehement arguments about the aetiology of trauma. Is it organic or psychological? Is trauma caused by the event itself or by its subjective interpretation? Or is it perhaps caused by pre-existing vulnerabilities? Are trauma patients malingerers who suffer from moral weakness, or do they experience an involuntary disintegration of the capacity to take charge of their lives? (Van der Kolk, Weisaeth & Van der Hart, 1996). The way in which clinicians and researchers regard trauma has shifted over the years. Recent authors such as Allan Young (1995) have asked whether this shift reflects a change in the symptomatic expression of traumatic stress in Western culture over time, or rather whether clinicians have focussed on different aspects of the same syndrome during the past century and a half. The question becomes relevant if one looks at the historical meaning of this shift of focus. While not being able to answer these questions with any certainty, the following section attempts to clarify certain aspects of the questions posed.

A brief overview of the historic construction of trauma¹

The effects of trauma on humans were described for the first time in the 1860s by physicians such as John Erichsen and Herbert Page. The effects of trauma were mostly associated with railway accidents and were called “railroad spine”. From this genesis, the role of mental factors, especially that of fear and the desire for compensation, was recognised in the onset of symptoms (Erichsen in Young, 1995). Thus the concept of trauma as physical injury (wound) was extended to include psychogenic ailments whose starting point was the experience of fear, conceived as a memory, of traumatic pain. It was discovered early on that fear seemed to play an important part in cases of both surgical and nervous shock: fearful patients sometimes died before their surgery and the surgeons linked their deaths to the power of their emotions (Young, 1995). Van der Kolk, McFarlane and Weisaeth (1996) mention that an association between psychological trauma and hysteria has been noted ever since psychiatry was recognised as a scientific discipline. A traumatic memory was considered to be different from an ordinary memory because the individual was unable to assimilate its meaning (Janet, 1925) and it was noted that the failure to integrate traumatic memories led to dissociation.
The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud showed an interest in traumatic events during two periods: the years between 1892 and 1896 when he examined the causes of hysterical attacks, and the years following World War I when he turned his attention, very briefly, to the aetiology of the war neuroses. His original theory postulated actual sexual experiences during infancy and early childhood as the cause of all trauma and the basis for neurosis. In his later work with war veterans, Freud acknowledged the role of actual experiences in the development of neuroses, and distinguished between traumatic neuroses and anxiety neuroses on the basis of whether a neurosis was caused by a real occurrence or an imaginary experience.
According to Freud (1919/1955a), traumatic neuroses were caused by real experiences such as accidents, death and combat, whereas anxiety neuroses were the result of sexual and aggressive fantasies based on early witnessing of the primal scene. In his short paper, “Thoughts for the times on war and death”(1915/1957), Freud recognised not only that “in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality”, but that in the death of an other, even when it is someone we love, there is something of a triumph for the survivor. Added to the impact of the traumatic event is the task of mourning, for others and for the self – for the person’s own lost world, pre-trauma life and identity, as well as guilt feelings. Freud also compared the fear of losing one’s own life with the fear of taking someone else’s life. This suggested that a person might also be traumatised by the violence he² inflicts on others, and thus a soldier can be both the victim and perpetrator of his traumatic violence. With this observation, a place is opened for traumatic guilt alongside traumatic fear Freud believed that the pathogenic agency is invested in the patient’s memory of the trauma. When the attached affect of traumatic experiences is discharged, memories of the events become ordinary recollections and are accessible to the conscious mind. A reaction discharge is, however, not always possible and undischarged memories are said to enter a “second consciousness” (Freud, 1966, p.153) where they become secrets, either isolated from the conscious personality or available to it in a highly summarised form. The paper, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920/1955b) reflects on Freud’s experience with soldiers who had survived extremely frightening experiences during World War I, and who showed a compulsion to repeat in recurrent memories and re-enactments of some of the most frightening moments of the experience, as though they needed to do this in order to master the anxiety produced.
Throughout the twentieth century, wars and its devastating effects on humanity have had a profound impact on the development of ideas surrounding trauma. Most army doctors in World War I were inclined to believe that flawed heredity and constitution have a determining effect in the majority of cases of war neuroses (Smith, 1916; Wolfsohn, 1918), which stigmatised the condition. The German neurologist Herman Oppenheim (1885), who was the first to use the term “traumatic neurosis”, proposed that functional problems are produced by subtle molecular changes in the central nervous system. Ascribing an organic origin to traumatic neuroses was particularly important in combat soldiers as it offered a honourable solution for all parties involved (Van der Kolk , McFarlane & Weisaeth, 1996). Abram Kardiner (1941), an American psychoanalyst in World War 2, describes the symptomatic reaction that follows traumatic events as a form of adaptation. It is an effort to eliminate or control painful and anxiety-inducing changes that have been produced by the trauma in the organism’s external and internal environments. The kind of adaptation that occurs in a particular case will depend on the individual’s psychological resources and the person’s relations to his primary social group (Kardiner, 1959). In Kardiner’s account, traumatic events create levels of excitation that the organism is incapable of mastering, and a severe blow is dealt to the total ego organisation. The individual experiences this as a sudden loss of effective control over his environment which leads to an altered conception of the self in relation to the world. After World War 2, psychological interest in trauma declined until the Vietnam War (1969-1975).
The immense impact of the Vietnam War on the psychological health of veterans lead to the current classification and “defining” of trauma in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder (Young, 1995; Van der Kolk , McFarlane & Weisaeth, 1996). Careful research and documentation of what is now labelled post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) began in earnest after the Vietnam War when a large number of American war veterans suffered from undiagnosed psychological effects of war-related trauma. The Vietnam War was different from previous wars in that it was experienced as dreadful, filthy and unnecessary (Allerton, 1970; Bourne,1970; Haley, 1984). Public support was minimal and the meaning of the war was questioned by society. In 1978 the psychiatrist Chaim Shatan listed typical symptoms of what he called “post-Vietnam syndrome” namely, guilt, rage, psychic numbing, alienation and feelings of being scapegoated (Shatan, 1978). Post-traumatic stress disorder was adopted by the American Psychiatric Association as part of its official nosology in 1980 and included in the DSM-III (APA, 1980). PTSD in relation to the current study will be discussed in chapter four.
Through the years the effect of trauma on people has been called various names such as “railroad spine”, “traumatic neurosis”, “cardiac neurosis”, “shell shock”, “war neurosis” and “combat neurosis” and culminated in the current label of post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps the most important lesson from the history of psychological trauma is the intimate connection between cultural, social, historical, and political conditions on the one hand, and the ways that people approach traumatic stress on the other (Fischer-Homberger, 1975).

Shifts and developments in psychoanalytic thinking relating to trauma³

What has been largely overlooked in accounts of psychoanalytic theory concerning trauma is that Freud himself used the word trauma rather loosely in a range of contexts and circumstances (Greenacre, 1967), and that the term trauma is used just as loosely today among both psychoanalysts and non-analytic clinicians (Yorke, 1986). According to Laplanche and Pontalis (1973), the use of the term trauma or “wound” in psychoanalytic terms implies three ideas: a violent shock, a wound (which would relate to castration anxiety or narcissistic injury), and consequences which affect the whole organisation of the psychic system.
Developments and shifts in classical psychoanalytic thought and the emphasis on the role of fantasy in the development of trauma are well documented by Ulman and Brothers (1988) and Scharff and Scharff (1994). These authors note that Freud’s underestimation of the role of actual traumatic experiences in the development of adult psychopathology was challenged in the writings of many classical psychoanalysts including Ferenczi (1913/1952), Anna Freud (1967) and Masson (1984), all of whom emphasise the reality of early childhood traumatic experiences. In line with Freud’s later acknowledgment of the role of real experience in the development of the symptoms of trauma, the revisionist school of thought, including the work of Kardiner and Kelman with war veterans (cited in Ulman & Brothers, 1988), represents a shift away from the role of fantasy in the psychogenesis of symptoms in response to exposure to traumatic experiences. According to this view, reaction to trauma occurs as a result of the disturbance in adaptational functioning which results from “a pathological alteration in images of the self and the outer world”(Ulman & Brothers, 1988, p.59). This view adds a valuable contribution to the understanding of trauma in that it highlights the disillusionment that occurs with regard to the individual’s sense of self. The unconscious meaning of exposure to the trauma of combat is understood in terms of the individual’s sense of having failed to live up to an idealised sense of self. The important contribution of this approach is the shift in the person’s sense of uniqueness and strength to one of vulnerability, worthlessness and dependency.

DECLARATION 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
ABSTRACT 
CHAPTER ONE: BEGINNINGS
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Case studies from the researcher’s therapy room
1.2.1 Case study A
1.2.2 Case study B
1.2.3 Brief discussion of case studies
1.3 The aim of the study
1.4 Setting the scene
1.4.1 The South African Police Service (SAPS)
1.4.2 The concept of trauma
1.5 Outline of the thesis
CHAPTER TWO: THE SOUTH AFRICAN POLICE SERVICE AS SPECIFIC CONTEXT IN WHICH THE RESEARCH IS CONDUCTED
2.1 Introduction
2.2 The historical context of the South African Police (SAP)
2.3 The structure of the South African Police Service as organisation
2.4 Structural and strategic changes during the transformation process
2.4.1 Impact of change and transformation on the police subculture
2.4.2 Impact of change and transformation on individuals
2.4.3 The organisation’s response to the situation
2.4.3.1 Trauma debriefing in the SAPS
2.4.3.2 Suicide prevention programme in the SAPS
2.5 Concluding remarks
CHAPTER THREE: THEORETICAL OVERVIEW OF TRAUMA
3.1 Introduction
3.2 A brief overview of the historic construction of trauma
3.3 Shifts and developments in psychoanalytic thinking relatingnto trauma
3.4 Basic tenets of the psychodynamic approach
3.5 Theoretical concepts linked to a psychoanalytic construction of trauma
3.5.1 Traumatic memory versus ordinary memory
3.5.2 Trauma, memory and a sense of self
3.5.3 Fear, pain and defences
3.5.4 Avoidance, numbing and disassociation as defence mechanisms
3.5.5 The role of meaning on the experiencing of trauma
3.5.6 Meaning and perceived support
3.6 Conclusion
CHAPTER FOUR: OVERVIEW OF TRAUMA LITERATURE
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Trauma and stress in law enforcement agencies
4.3 Dynamics and variables specific to policing
4.4 The effects of police work on officers
4.5 SA psychology’s construction of trauma over three decades (1970-2002)
4.6 Conclusion
CHAPTER FIVE: METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Qualitative research
5.3 Social construction of narratives
5.4 The issue of reliability and validity in qualitative research
5.5 Collecting the data: Recruitment procedure and description of the participants
5.6 The instruments
5.7 My reflections on the research and the process
5.8 Analysis of data
CHAPTER SIX: RESULTS, DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
6.1 Introduction
6.2 What being a police officer means
6.3 Traumatic incidents
6.4 Organisational stressors
6.5 Transformation
6.6 Closing discussion
6.7 Concluding remarks
REFERENCES
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