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In Algeria today, individuals have long been subjected to terrible psychological, social, and political realities. The traces and consequences of this history remain to be discovered. The persistence of these traces in the present is an urgent matter, but it is drowned out by the noise seemingly emanating from elsewhere: an international context whose instability poses many social and economic threats, a political establishment that has been in a volatile state for many years, and, not least, a resurgence of religion that goes beyond national borders and has been behind Algeria’s bloody history, a history that is always ready to re-erupt.

The analyst seeking to find traces of these catastrophes within psyches and connect them to verbal expressions of “malvie,” or the angst of young Algerians, will be met with disappointment. She will encounter only matters of another order – economic, administrative, international – that mask the real inner despair plaguing subjects and the state. Distinguishing between the inside and outside, between private and political responsibilities, between individual and collective history, is no easy task. This gives a dizzying impression of a homogeneous, all-consuming whole. Each individual’s role as individual in the very make-up of society is constantly effaced, while an omnipotent force that lurks in the shadows is seen as fully responsible for all subjective and social disasters.

The outer catastrophes experienced by patients are described, recorded, catalogued, but correlating them with present-day effects on subjects and the larger public has remained a struggle. It is as though a gap both held the individual and the community apart and caused them to merge. The private becomes public, and, conversely, the public is quite simply private, making them an unbroken unit. This makes it exceedingly difficult to find distinct features which could be used beneficially to mediate between them. In this all-consuming whole, catastrophes are identifiable, but their specific and exact effects on the individual and the community remain hidden. Catastrophes are constantly experienced in the present tense. Past, present, and future are almost indistinguishable. In other words, it is hard to make the (catastrophic) event that occurs into a significant event that can be documented in the private and political spheres.

Psychoanalysis in Algeria has slowly ventured out past its regular cultural and linguistic territory and settled into these troubled waters. The 2000s were marked by an urgency to build and repair, not by a need for deconstruction, which is frequently used in analyses of the subject. The last war (1992–2000) had just shown a seemingly unprecedented level of atrocity, robbing countless children, women, and men of their voices if not their lives. The demand for psychoanalytic treatment speaks to the need to understand and move beyond the brutality experienced during what have been called the “bloody years,” the “dark years,” the “red decade,” the “reign of terrorism,” or the “nightmare years.” New questions have emerged as atrocities have spilled over into the private sphere and familiar friends can no longer be distinguished from foreign foes. External catastrophes have laid waste to inner lives, borders, languages, histories. The destruction was so vast that the conventional means of separating inside from outside proved to be no longer operational, failing at times to make any sense at all.

In this indecipherable landscape – to which I’ll return shortly – appeared an element that had been buried until then and which recalled one of Freud’s central insights: namely, the indissociable ties between the psyche and collective experience. Freud developed this idea as early as Project for a Scientific Psychology in 1885, arguing that interiority springs principally from a decisive encounter with the exterior (the environment) – this is the fundamental experience of every infant. He would later refine this idea by widening his notion of environment to include the social environment in 1913 with Totem and Taboo, and continued in this vein all the way up until Moses and Monotheism (1937), where he strove to explain how the unconscious is formed, unforgettably, before boundaries are drawn. In other words, it isn’t just national borders that are artificial: it starts with the border separating interiority and exteriority for the speaking beings we all become. However, we often forget this as we continue to cling to fragile borders for reassurance. Catastrophic events can put these borders at even greater risk.

In Algeria, each individual harbors within the degeneration of the collective body whose central organ is the social order. The discourse of patients from the 2000s sheds light on how this situation directly affects the bodies of subjects, especially in light of the fact that the disaster of the war of the 1990s was compounded by natural catastrophes in the following decade: repeated earthquakes, one of which caused more than 2,000 deaths, and floods no less destructive.³ All of this is not without consequence, as each catastrophe – although different in kind – finds itself tied to the previous one. These catastrophes are linked together by their shared belonging to the tragic sphere. And the psychological associations formed can be explained by the temporal proximity of the catastrophes and the great losses of human life occasioned by each. Tragedy of this sort marks the discourse of patients, who can be heard speaking of “an unrelenting fate,” of “being condemned to catastrophe,” or even of “divine punishment,” which evokes the “wrath of the gods” from Greek mythology. The collision between human atrocities from the war years and the ravages wrought by nature has led to a surge in religion: prayers, women turning to the veil again and a series of other acts to “placate the gods.” In both cases, between heaven and earth, God is at stake: a mysterious God called upon to shield one from natural catastrophes.

Calls for help made amid the murders and massacres during what has been deemed the “Internal War” remain unheard and unanswered. They have been drowned out by the lives lost due to natural disasters. The senselessness of human cruelty has been matched and complemented by nature’s unpredictability. Failing to find explanations for these, everything appears to be ruled by chance. Questions such as “How did we get here?” and “What’s behind this endless bloodshed?” – the countless dead and missing, the massacres, the savagery of it all – are like so many purloined letters.

A sense of dismay has spread and taken hold of the public at large. The line separating inside from outside, a reliable barrier in normal times, is now fragile and porous. The fabric of society is torn, plunging subjects into a quasi-permanent state of uncertainty and fear. This accounts for what I perceive to be a serious “social trauma” plaguing subjectivities, one whose causes and cures have yet to be discovered.