Collective Trauma

Humanizing the devastating emotional forces released by the worldwide plague of collective violence and trauma demands developing integral awareness. This article develops an ecological perspective that views human communities as ecosystems and individuals as embedded in these environments. This perspective offers a space large enough to generate fresh ideas. The process evolved under the press of fieldwork in crisis areas in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. To explore psychosocial and political characteristics of human ecosystems Riedel employs a biaxial map, the Mandala of the Five Worlds. The map brings into purview in dynamic mandala format the Familial and Societal Worlds on the horizontal axis, the worlds of Nature and Mind on the vertical axis, and the Rhizome World at the core. Riedel views the rhizome world as a container and co-created field of human inheritances and codes, natural-physical and socio-cultural. The rhizome plays a central role in the resonance and synergistic phenomena interrelating elements of the five spheres. Community self-states are collective aggregates that involve elements from all five spheres of the mandala. Riedel explores patterns of dynamic forces of aggregation and evolution that determine a group’s connectivity and tendencies. For example, in community states of collective violence and trauma at extreme levels of severity, the socio-cultural and nature-mind dimensions of the map are “unhinged,” resulting in nature-nurture and humane-ethical considerations being split off from social behaviour with fractionizing fields dominating. Via emotional resonance, purposeful action interventions seek to loosen adhesion to the collectivity of suffering through which people are connected to the social traumas of their groups, past and present. Thus the rhizomic systems approach raises awareness about the dynamic of cultural seizures as major sources of sociocultural difficulties.