International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 6(3): 197–203 (2009)

Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/aps.208

Trauma by Proxy: A Self-analytic

Exploration of the Trials of
Developing an Arab Identity*

YASSER AD-DAB’BAGH

As my name would suggest, I am an Arab. However, I do not share the Palestinian

origin of my famous namesake, the late Yasser Arafat. Therefore, what I will be
discussing in this paper is not the result of immediate experiences of the Middle
East conflict. Rather, it is the result of reflection, or a bit of self-analysis if you
will, on the remote experience of the conflict; that I hope would shed some light
on the process of Arab identity formation in my generation. It is very important
to note that the experiences discussed in this paper do not in any way approach
the severity and/or significance of the experiences of Palestinians, and must be
understood to be relatively trivial in comparison.
First, I would like to clarify the meanings of some commonly used words. As
you will notice, linguistic issues are central to the thesis of this paper and fun-
damental elements of the perspectives I have come to have of this conflict.
The word “Arab” is the anglicized version of or ‘arabii, which etymologi-
cally is not a word that originally described an ethnicity. Rather, it indicates
that Arabic is the mother tongue of the subject. This is in contrast to the
common use of the word, particularly in the West, where it does refer to an
ethnicity. However, after Arab nationalism regained popularity in the geopoliti-
cal landscape in the 1950s and 1960s, many Arabs began using the term “Arab”
as an ethnic reference. This kind of ethnic identification was historically uncom-
mon, and existed only for relatively short periods of time over the centuries. The
word “Arabian” is actually a term that refers to inhabitants of Arabia, otherwise
known as the Arabian Peninsula. It is therefore a purely geographic reference,
yet has often been used interchangeably with the word “Arab” to refer to an
ethnicity. The peoples of Arabia speak Arabic, which would mean that they are
both Arabs and Arabian. Therefore, the Arabs of North Africa and other parts

* This paper was originally presented at the American Psychoanalytic Association meeting as
part of the Discussion Group on “The Application of Psychoanalytic Thinking to Social
Problems”, New York City, January 2008.

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 6: 197–203 (2009)

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps
198 Ad-Dab’bagh

of the Arab world are not Arabian. “Arabic” is strictly a reference to the lan-
guage, not the people.
The reason why this is relevant is that these words had roles to play in the
formation of my identity. I was actually an Arabian that did not speak Arabic
in my toddler years. Although I was born in Saudi Arabia, I could hardly speak
any Arabic when I was six years old. As a toddler, my family lived in the United
States and English was my spoken language. Upon return to Saudi Arabia in
the fall of 1974, there was enormous pressure to learn Arabic and to become a
“true Arab”. The need to become an Arab, in other words, was something I
remember being acutely aware of as a six-year-old English-speaking boy attending
an all-Arabic school in Riyadh city.
This was a difficult time for me, and when I visualize those memories, they
tend to be cast in dark shadows and devoid of color. My memories of these times
often depict loneliness, as if I had little or no help from my parents in negotiat-
ing these struggles. It was not simply the dramatic linguistic shock, and there
were incredible differences in all aspects of life between Hartford, CT, and
Riyadh. There was about an hour or so of American cartoons that Saudi televi-
sion aired daily, followed by an episode of Sesame Street; a period of respite from
the unfamiliar that was precious. The remainder of my television viewing was
in Arabic, and included a daily dose of the evening news.
As I reflect on those memories now, I realize that there were other goings-on
in the family that indirectly darkened the mood of the time further for me,
including the passing of my paternal grandmother a couple of years earlier, as
well as substantial financial strains. I remember my father talking and smiling
much less than he normally did, working long hours and appearing exhausted
most of the time.
This was the year that followed the 1973 Arab-Israeli War; a war Saudi
Arabia contributed to with its invocation of the Oil Embargo in protest of
Western support of Israel. King Faisal, was hailed as a hero of the Arab World,
and there was no shortage of related material on the evening news. There was
also no shortage of graphic coverage of the humiliation inflicted on Palestinians
in the occupied territories. When King Faisal was assassinated in March of 1975,
I was flooded with images of the tens of thousands of people at his funeral, with
the sounds of deep nationalistic sorrow clearly heard in the weeping of television
commentators covering that event. I had to understand what this incredible
emotion was about, and had a need to place it all in a coherent narrative. Bit
by bit, the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was revealed to me by my
parents, school teachers, news broadcasters and all sorts of written material.
This was a time of dichotomy. A time when no one had doubts about who
“the other” was. As clearly contrasted as black and white are, Palestinians were
the good guys and Israelis were the bad guys. Palestinians were never referred to
as “Arabs” in any discourse I can recall. This conflict had nothing to do with
language, and everything to do with national identity and land. The term
“Palestinian” is itself a way of saying that it is their land, Palestine, that is being

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 6: 197–203 (2009)

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps
 Trauma by proxy 199

fought for. Being Arabs was a given and did not need emphasis. Being the victims
of an occupation of their lands was always the core of the discourse.
However, that Palestinians were Arabs and predominantly Muslims was the
reason why the conflict played a role in the formation of my identity. Learning
that it was the land of (AlQuds) – Arabic for Jerusalem – was a defining
moment for me. (AlQuds) is a word derived from a three-letter root1 that
is used to generate words about sanctity, holiness and sacredness. As the home
of the third holiest site in Islam (the Aqsa Mosque), and the historical land of
the prophets, the city’s name becomes much more than just a name.
The “depressed father” I was identifying with in my post-oedipal phase
seemed to contribute a part of my identity that suited the depressed mood I was
experiencing during my cultural and linguistic adjustment. However, the images
of what was happening in Palestine added a much more traumatic element to
my identity. It was inescapable. On a nearly daily basis for many years, images
of Palestinian men and youth being kicked, beaten, spat on, shoved, pushed and
humiliated in every imaginable way were aired during the evening news, on the
single and only television channel available. The images and voices of weeping
mothers and children of the men and youth being victimized by fully armed
Israeli soldiers always followed, and commentary about the viciousness of the
Zionist occupation completed the daily dose of traumatic exposure. There was
no censorship of images of bleeding and dying people, and no masking of the
sounds of bulldozers razing Palestinian houses to the ground. A deep demoral-
izing sense of defeat, helplessness, and hopelessness would then engulf me and
even paralyze me for a few minutes. I could see and hear the effect of these
images on my father as we watched. I could almost feel the intensity and heat
of his breaths as he sighed in pain and anger, and the genuineness of his despair
was evident when he cursed and swore at the Israelis whenever these images
were shown.
Growing up in the Arab World meant that one would be constantly bom-
barded with these scenes. It also meant that one would witness the impact of
the defeat of Arabs in their wars with Israel. No one felt Arabs were capable of
anything of significance. Self-deprecating discourse in the Arab World was the
dominant discourse in the 1970s and 1980s, and continues to a lesser extent
today. Feuds between Arab states and the Iran-Iraq War added to the sense of
cynicism that was malignant and rampant. This co-existed with the incredibly
popular conspiracy theories that blamed all the ills of the world on Zionism and
Zionist-sympathizers. Although I have flirted with those theories from time to
time in my adolescence, I have mostly found them to be silly and detracting
from what needed to change. Both the self-flagellation and the assertion of being
victims of conspiracies were affirmations of inadequacy. The “Arab” component
of my identity was increasingly becoming a bottomless dark abyss, climbing out
of which was both impossible and the only imaginable radical solution. However,
I had become a “true Arab”, and Arabic became my mother tongue. It also
became my main focus of study.

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 6: 197–203 (2009)

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps
200 Ad-Dab’bagh

I was obsessed with mastering Arabic, and it was clear to my middle school
and secondary school teachers that I had surpassed their knowledge of Arabic
grammar, syntax, semantics, etymology and literature. I felt driven and, in truth,
was often relentless. Earning awards for my prose and poetry seemed to give me
a fleeting sense of pride in being an Arab, only to be followed by the despair
brought on by the realities of Arabs. Each achievement was presented to my
parents and each one was received with pride and pleasure. However, the condi-
tions that drove me continued to exist and the need to repeat persisted.
While my father was content to be resigned to indignation and a sense of
hopelessness, my mother was never hopeless. She wanted desperately to change
the world. Somehow her romanticism was made less naïve by her intelligent yet
passionate discourse. As my siblings and I matured, she decided to go back to
school and eventually obtained a doctorate in social work. I could see in her
eyes and hear in her voice the expectation that I would not be yet another
stagnant Arab. I witnessed her face one obstacle after the other, and each time
she was unable to overcome an obstacle she drowned in depression for a few
months, only to go out again after that and find new obstacles to overcome. She
was no less cynical than everyone else, but she seemed incapable of being
jaded.
Eventually, I did take a path that would better enable me to be an agent of
change than being a master of a language. Or so it seemed in the Arab World.
Being a teacher or an academician would not have been enough. People lived
in sorrow, and needed to be helped at an emotional level. Perhaps this had
something to do with my choice of psychiatry as a profession. My own sorrows
may have had something to do with my pursuit of psychoanalysis. After all, I
moved from trying to be an archeologist of Arabic, to trying to be an archeolo-
gist of the psyche of Arabs.
In my attempt to understand my own internal drama, and analyze the moti-
vational status of the different happenings of this drama, I am reminded of the
distinction Ernst Kris (1956) made between shock trauma and strain trauma in
his paper. Shock trauma results from major overwhelming events that produce
more stimulation than can be processed at the time. Strain traumas, however,
are smaller events that exert their effect through their chronic recurrence. Fred
Pine (2005) referred to Masud Khan (1963/1974) when he described strain
traumas:

Strain traumas, the other form, contrast with shock trauma, but not in the tendency
toward repetition (which is common to both). Strain traumas grow on us and get under
our skin through the fact of their continual recurrence; they are not “all at once” shocks,
but rather cumulatively, and at times retrospectively, destructive traumas.

He later clarifies “repetition” as efforts towards mastery of the strain traumas and
attempts at working them through. At one level of discourse, it would seem
rather plausible that the daily exposure to traumatic events inflicted in a far

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 6: 197–203 (2009)

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps
 Trauma by proxy 201

away land on people that share a core component of my identity may have
motivated me to follow the pursuits that I have. This, however, could only be
one of many plausible analyses. At a crucial juncture in my life, I was faced with
the task of reconfiguring my identity, and had to incorporate a fractured nation-
alism and strain traumas in that process. I must have also internalized aspects
of my father’s hopeless resignation and may have been projecting it on my
patients or others. My mother’s expectations of me may have become elements
of my superego that are impossible to satisfy. Further, it is possible that my frus-
tration with the degree of empathic support I was receiving during the many
periods of helplessness may have inadequately modulated my infantile omnipo-
tence; leaving me more vulnerable to narcissistic injury resulting from the feel-
ings of humiliation generated by the media images of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
As a result of this reflective exploration, I have come to wonder about a
number of hypothetical consequences to the sort of trauma by proxy, or vicarious
trauma I have described that may be relevant to the formation of contemporary
Arab identity. The first is that the synthetic function of the ego will put the
different identification and introjection pieces together to form a gestalt puzzle
(Hartmann, 1939/1958). It would appear to me that most Arabs of my generation
have similar experiences of the strain traumas inflicted by the barrage of images
generated by the media, and the demoralizing processes of learning the conflict’s
history and engaging in the common defeatist public discourse. Whether the
outcome of this ego synthesis is adaptive or not will depend on many other
uniquely individual developmental factors. I would definitely expect different
individuals to employ different sets of defense mechanisms as part of their adap-
tation. The most troubling form of adaptation in my view would be identification
with the aggressors in these images, a process that could only contribute to the
cycle of violence.
Another consequence is the ease with which the conflict, like all military
conflicts, offers the opportunity to split the world into good and bad. I can see
how a paranoid-schizoid stance that refuses to accept the existence of alternative
perspectives toward Israelis must contribute to formation of the Arab identity.
It has become common parlance to equate Zionism with evil and malice, and
to even use the term as a synonym for premeditated, highly intelligent sadistic
malice.2 Projected bigotry and racism is not uncommon in lay discourse. It is
not surprising to see the term used that way in common jokes or in parapraxes.
The depressive position was just as common in intellectual discourse in the Arab
world, and increasingly becoming a dominant trend, with a self-critical, self-
deprecating attitude that is prevalent in the written media as well as learned
circles.
A third consequence is related to the improbability of development of a
holding emotional environment that would enable a child to manage this sort
of repetitive trauma. As such, these conditions may favor or contribute to the
development of false-self organizations and a chronic sense of inauthenticity

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 6: 197–203 (2009)

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps
202 Ad-Dab’bagh

(Winnicott, 1965). The degree to which one is exposed to the impingement of

traumatic and humiliating images in the media during childhood is plausibly
directly related to the potential for a false-self organization.
Lastly, the reality of such experience of trauma in middle childhood may
have immediate affective and cognitive consequences of relevance to psychic
development. Trauma understandably moves one’s focus toward self-preservation.
In fact, good neuroscientific evidence supports a hijacking of the limbic system
by the anxiety-focused amygdala in traumatized individuals. It would be rather
difficult to reconcile empathy with self-preservation anxiety. However, it is in
middle-childhood that the development of the theory-of-mind acquires the
capacity for two-way intersubjectivity (Stern, 2005), and I wonder if repetitive
strain traumas may have an impairing effect on this aspect of normal develop-
ment. Further, these experiences would clearly have the potential to substan-
tially influence the subjective experience of even vaguely similar future events,
such as humiliation, abuse or trauma. This would be an example of Freud’s
Nachträglichkeit, or, as translated in France, après-coup (Faimberg, 2005).
It would be beyond the scope of this paper to exhaustively list the probable
psychological consequences of the Middle East conflict on the generation of
Arabs to which I belong. It Is also beyond the scope of the paper to offer thera-
peutic insights or suggestions. What I hope to have been able to communicate
is that there is both a unique otherness and a familiar and shared human psychol-
ogy on both sides of this conflict. It horrifies me to contemplate possible effects
the current war in Iraq would have on the contemporaries of my nine-year-old
son. While it would be redundant to say that military conflict results in trauma,
it might make it a bit more experience-near when remote, media-transmitted
traumas are related in an applied psychoanalytic framework. After all, the
purpose of our work group3 is to enable greater understanding of, and empathy
with the other in the hope that such an understanding might contribute to the
reduction of suffering on both sides of the conflict.

NOTES

1 Almost all Arabic words are derived from three-letter roots.

2 This process of vilification pales in comparison to the numerous toxic and bigoted representa-
tions of Arabs in Hollywood’s film industry.
3 The author is a member of a work-group of psychoanalysts focused on studying the Middle
East conflict from an applied psychoanalytic perspective.

REFERENCES

Faimberg, H. (2005). Après coup. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 86, 1–6.

Hartmann, H. (1939). Ego psychology and the problem of adaptation, D. Rapaport (trans.). New
York: International Universities Press, 1958.
Khan, M. M. R. (1963). The concept of cumulative trauma. In The privacy of the self (pp. 42–58).
New York: International Universities Press, 1974.

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Kris, E. (1956). The recovery of childhood memories in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Study of

the Child, 11, 54–88.
Pine, F. (2005). Theories of motivation in psychoanalysis. In E. S. Person, A. M. Cooper, &
G. O. Gabbard (Eds), Textbook of psychoanalysis (pp. 3–19). Washington, DC: American
Psychiatric Publishing.
Stern, D. (2005). Intersubjectivity. In E. S. Person, A. M. Cooper, & G. O. Gabbard (Eds),
Textbook of psychoanalysis (pp. 77–92). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The maturational pro-
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Yasser Ad-Dab’bagh, MD, FRCP (C)

Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario
Mental Health Patient Services
401 Smyth Road
Ottawa, Ontario, K1H 8L1
Canada
yaddabbagh@cheo.on.ca

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies 6: 197–203 (2009)

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd DOI: 10.1002/aps