Chapter 3 - Coping, or Not, with Genocide and War

Summary

Chapter 3 focuses on psychosocial coping and different mechanisms people use for dealing with stress, in general, and with traumatic situations of genocide and war, on the personal, family, group, inter-generational and community/national level, in particular. We look closely at three conceptualizations: Bar-Tal’s Ethos of Conflict, Bar-On’s working through, and Volkan’s chosen trauma, which address the relevance of genocide and war for direct victims and (in)direct descendants. We also explore the connections between elicitation and analyses of personal narratives in the context of genocide and war, in order to help understand how people live with the impacts of these traumas. We end the chapter with a focused look at how Germans and Jews cope with the horrors of the past genocide and how Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians cope with the ongoing intractable war between the peoples.