Last Friday the New York Times published a surprising article by Sabrina Tavernise and Sebnem Arsu. Headlined “Inside Turkey’s Psyche: Traumatic Issues Trouble a Nation’s Sense of Its Identity,” the article came on the heels of a House of Representatives committee vote that condemned the mass killings of Armenians in 1915 as genocide. The article was packaged under a “News Analysis” overline, but “News Psychoanalysis” would have been more appropriate.

Tavernise and Arsu start by asking the question:

If most of the rest of the world argues that the Ottoman government tried to exterminate its Armenian population, why does Turkey disagree?

Their answer, they say, “is hidden deep inside the Turkish psyche.” It begins with the suggestion that the construction of the new Turkish state after World War I required the creation of a new Turkish citizen. In writer Ali Bayramoglu’s words, “The identity of a Turk was very much an engineered one in order to form a unified nation.” Tavernise and Arsu then argue that this new Turkish identity “was built on a painful foundation.” They quote sociologist Fehat Kentel, who readily describes this this formation as “traumatic.”

As the words I’ve italicized suggest, Tavernise and Arsu put forth a deeply psychoanalytic interpretation of Turkish history. The history of Turkey is the history of the Turkish citizen, the history of the Turkish citizen is the history of the Turkish psyche, and the history of the Turkish psyche is a history of trauma.

It was Freud himself who, in Moses and Monotheism, most famously tried to apply psychoanalytic categories to sociology-sized groups of people. But the more relevant work in this context is Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud began to develop the theory that the psychic subject was in some way or other brought into being by an original trauma. This, according to Freud, is why memories of traumatic events are difficult, if not impossible to recall; the original trauma is inaccessible not because is repressed, but because it exists in some sense before the subject does. The archetypal model of this trauma is, of course, birth.

So far, it’s easy to see why Tavernise and Arsu would be attracted to the theory of trauma as a way to explain Turkish history. But the first sign of trouble shows up when we consider the terms of their analogy. In its major development, the psychoanalytic theory of trauma was concerned with the victims of trauma. (For example, famous papers by Anna Freud and Sándor Ferenczi sought to explain why victims of trauma so often identified with their agressors.) Thus philosopher Ian Hacking could write, “Traumatology has become the science of the troubled soul, with victimology one of its bitter fruits” (Historical Ontology, 18).

But in Tavernise and Arsu’s article, it is the aggressor (the Turkish state) not the victim (the Armenian people) whom the trauma of the massacre is said to create. On this point they are clear, and they bring in further examples of aggression as well:

Beyond the Armenian genocide, in which 1.5 million Armenians in eastern Turkey were killed, there were mass deportations of Greeks and executions of Islamic leaders and Kurdish nationalists.

The problem with invoking trauma as an explanation lies not only with the terms of the analogy but also with the ends to which it is deployed. Hacking offers the necessary reminder that “at the moral level, events…presented as trauma, experienced as trauma, exculpate…. A traumatic childhood is used to explain or excuse a later antisocial person.” (15). By shifting the terms of the massacre from genocide to trauma, Tavernise and Arsu suggest that moral and political condemnations of the massacre are misplaced. They come close to saying so explicitly when they write,

Measures like the genocide bill in the United States Congress serve only to complicate the work of those trying to open society, Ms. Cetin [a historian] and Mr. Kentel said. It was not an honest attempt to heal, as lawmakers who supported it argued, they said, but a political statement issued to prove a point, which creates a highly charged, unfriendly atmosphere.

In fact, from everything that Tavernise and Arsu write, it would seem that the real category they ought to use to talk about the Armenian massacre is not trauma but shame. As Primo Levi famously argued, shame is not the same thing as guilt. One feels guilt for the things one has done, but one can feel shame for the deeds of others. Levi wrote in The Reawakening that shame is what

the just man experiences when confronted by a crime committed by another, and he feels remorse because of its existence, because of its having been irrevocably introduced into the world of existing things, and because his will has proven nonexistent or feeble and was incapable of putting up a good defense.

Granted that the motives of the U.S. House of Representatives probably have more to do with political grandstanding and self-righteousness than justice, the resolution passed this week is still important. It is not a question of attacking Turkey—nearly every modern nation has a similar enormity buried somewhere in its near or distant past. Nor is it a question of hunting down the criminals; the genocide happened more than ninety years ago and no one alive could possibly be guilty of it. It is a question, simple but crucial, of that first step toward justice: naming the crime.