PETER LOEWENBERG
515
Freud makes the distinction between the loss of object and the loss
of the object's love . The latter is the critical determinant of anxiety.
"The loss of love is the condition necessary for anxiety."
We are now on the grounds of massive psychic trauma and its
se–
quelae
in the post-traumatic stress disorders. We have careful and detailed
studies oflarge populations of concentration camp survivors, World War
Two , Korean and Vietnam War veterans, Hiroshima and Nagasaki
survivors, the Buffalo Creek Flood, the Chowchilla schoolbus children,
and the victims of hostage-taking, including the Teheran United States
Embassy and a Netherlands train kidnapped by Molluccans. The evidence
is clear: Given a large enough social or collective traumatic event, no
one escapes a post-traumatic stress disorder. [ts hallmark is a fixation on
the trauma but with new variations and with an altered conception of
the self and of the world. The symptoms are lifelong. No one is
immune. Adaptive and coping capacities are enfeebled.
This is the crucial bridge to history. Weare no longer speaking of
singular cases or a unique psychogenesis. Our history as humans is the
story of large-scale traumas of war, disease and epidemics, famine, dislo–
cation and migration, economic crises, droughts and pestilence. Trauma
is the theoretical link from individual
to
group, cohort, population, na–
tion, the world. And here the historian appropriately introduces his
categories for understanding groups and institutions, politics, national
boundaries, educational systems, military service, youth movements, tradi–
tions, civic culture, myth, symbol, the artifacts of popular and high cul–
ture.
The Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century was a
trauma of major proportions , a significant rupture in the stability of
Western Christendom, whose effect took centuries to work out to a
new and secure equilibrium. One response of European religion, culture,
and politics to these traumata was a new piety, flagellation, widespread
practice of torture, and epidemics of demonic possession, which seized
groups in the late fifteenth century for the first time. [n this period we
see the emergence of the witch mania that tortured and killed thousands.
In one year the Bishop of Wurzburg killed nine hundred, the Bishop of
Bamberg over six hundred; in Savoy eight hundred were burned in a
festival. [n 1514 three hundred were executed in the small Diocese of
Como.
We tend to forget that Max Weber's great thesis,
The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit oj Capitalism
(1904-1905), was in essence propelled by
the
psychological
dynamic of anxiety. Weber saw and delineated among
Calvinists an "ideal type," a characteristic pattern of social and economic
behavior of restless activity, continuous work, an acquisitive manner of
life combined with a personally ascetic tendency. As Weber noted of the
