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“According to Volkan (2001), some ethnic groups have a major traumatic experience
that has become part of their cultural identity. This experience may have been a
defeat in battle, or a genocide, or a major loss of prestige or status. The humiliation
of this event lives on in the collective memory, and it becomes the job of the next
generation to either resolve the loss or reverse the humiliation. No attempt to set
the historical record straight will have any effect, as it is not the facts of the event
that are relevant, but its mythologized nature as handed down the generations. For
example, in Blood Lines, Volkan (1998) describes how the Serb obsession with their
defeat by the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 became conflated with
their war against the Bosnian Muslims. Mladic, Karadzic and Milosevic saw
themselves as bearing the responsibility of restoring Serb pride, lost centuries ago.
Mourning has been described as the psychological process through which an
individual learns to bear a traumatic loss through repeated and painful
remembering (Mitscherlich-Nielsen, 1989, p. 405). There are many ways in which
the mourning process can go awry and the final resolution phase remain
incomplete. Most common is chronic mourning (Herman, 1997, p. 86), where the
acute symptoms of separation anxiety persist interminably. There remains a
continual obsession with the loss, life gets stuck in a futile attempt to reunite with it,
and all other priorities become insignificant. There is also a sense that the loss is
very recent, though it may have occurred years ago”
How my heart sings 