National trauma is a concept in psychology and social psychology. A national trauma is one in which the effects of a trauma apply generally to the members of a collective group such as a country or other well-defined group of people. Trauma is an injury that has the potential to severely negatively affect an individual, whether physically or psychologically. Psychological trauma is a shattering of the fundamental assumptions that a person has about themselves and the world.^[1] An adverse experience that is unexpected, painful, extraordinary, and shocking results in interruptions in ongoing processes or relationships and may also create maladaptive responses.^[2] Such experiences can affect not only an individual but can also be collectively experienced by an entire group of people.^[2] Tragic experiences can collectively wound or threaten the national identity,^[3] that sense of belonging shared by a nation as a whole represented by tradition culture, language, and politics.^[4]

In individual psychological trauma, fundamental assumptions about how the individual relates to the world, such as that the world is benevolent and meaningful and that the individual has worth in the world, are overturned by overwhelming life experiences.^[1] Similarly, national trauma overturns fundamental assumptions of social identity – something terrible has happened and social life has lost its predictability.^[2] The causes of such shatterings of assumptions are diverse and defy neat categorization. For example, wars are not always national traumas; while the Vietnam War is experienced by Americans as a national trauma^[5] Winston Churchill famously titled the closing volume of his history of the Second World War Triumph and Tragedy.^[6] Similar types of natural disasters can also provoke different responses. The 2016 Fort McMurray Wildfire in Alberta was a collective trauma for not only that local community but also the large Canadian Province of Alberta despite causing no direct deaths^[7] yet the much larger Peshtigo Fire responsible for thousands of deaths is largely forgotten.^[8]

Responses to national trauma also vary. A nation that experiences clear defeat in war which had mobilized the nation to a high degree will almost inevitably also experience national trauma but the way in which that defeat is felt can change the response.^[9] The former peoples of the Confederate South in the American Civil War and the German Empire in World War I both created post-war mythologies (the Lost Cause in the former and the Stab-in-the-back Myth in the latter) of "glorious" defeat in unfair fights.^[9] The post-war experience of Germany after World War Two, however, is much more complex and provoked reactions from a sense of German national guilt^[10] to collective ignorance.^[11] A common national response to these traumas is repeated calls for national unity and moral purification, as in the post-9/11 United States^[12] or post-war Japan.^[13]

Examples

• 1973 coup d'état and the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile^[14]
• 1979 energy crisis in the United States^[3]
• 1985 Mexico City earthquake^[15]
• 1999 İzmit earthquake in Turkey^[16]
• 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia^[17] Sri Lanka, and Thailand^[18]
• 2003 invasion in Iraq^[19]
• 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan^[20]
• 2020 Beirut explosion in Lebanon^[21]
• 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake in Turkey^[22]
• American Civil War in the American South^[9]
• Armenian genocide in Armenia and the Armenian diaspora^[23]
• Apartheid in South Africa^[24]
• Assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States^[2]
• Assassination of Olof Palme in Sweden^[25]
• Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel^[26]
• Attack on Pearl Harbor in the United States^[2]
• Battle of Adwa in Italy^[27]
• Battle of Alcácer Quibir in Portugal^[28]
• Battle of Annual in Spain^[29]
• Battle of the Boyne in Ireland^[28]
• Battle of Caporetto in Italy^[30]
• Battle of Kosovo in Serbia^[28]
• Battle of Mohács in Hungary^[28]
• Berlin Wall in Germany^[17]
• Bosnian War in Bosnia and Herzegovina^[18]
• Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia
• Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine and Belarus^[17]
• Century of humiliation in China^[31]
• Cuban Missile Crisis in the United States^[2]
• Dirty War in Argentina^[17]
• Falklands War in Argentina^[17]
• Finnish Civil War, Winter War, Continuation War, and Lapland War in Finland^[32][33]
• First Nagorno-Karabakh War and Khojaly massacre in Azerbaijan^[34]
• Franco-Prussian War in France^[9]
• German occupation of Denmark during the Second World War^[35]
• Greco-Turkish War, the Greek Genocide and the subsequent Population exchange between Greece and Turkey in Greece^[36]
• Great Depression in the United States^[2]
• Great Famine in Ireland^[37]
• Great Kanto earthquake in Japan^[38]
• Greek Civil War in Greece^[39]
• Harrying of the North, scorched earth campaign in North England & Yorkshire during the foundation of the British Monarchy^[40]
• The Holocaust for European Jewish peoples^[17][41]
• Iran hostage crisis in the United States^[3]
• Lebanese Civil War in Lebanon^[42]
• McCarthyism in the United States^[2]
• MH370 and MH17 incidents in Malaysia^[43]
• Nepalese royal massacre in Nepal^[44]
• Norman conquest in England^[45]
• North Sea flood of 1953 in the Netherlands^[46]
• Rwandan genocide in Rwanda^[47]
• Second Boer War in South Africa^[48]
• Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in Armenia^[49]
• Second Schleswig War (1864) in Denmark^[50]
• September 11 attacks in the United States^[51]
• Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Netherlands^[52]
• Spanish–American War in Spain^[53]
• Spanish Civil War and Francoism in Spain
• Tate–LaBianca murders^[54]
• Treaty of Sèvres in Turkey (see Sèvres Syndrome)^[55]
• Treaty of Trianon in Hungary (see Trianon Syndrome)^[28]
• Vietnam War in the United States^[2][5]
• War of the Pacific in Bolivia^[56][57][58] and Peru^[59]
• Watergate scandal in the United States^[2][3]
• World War I in Germany^[9]
• World War II in Germany^[10] and Japan^[13]
• COVID-19 pandemic