Imagen as a carrier of trauma

Why do war photographs or videos cause post-traumatic stress in people far from the front?

Abstract

This paper analyzes the findings of recent studies on the occurrence of Post-Traumatic Stress Disease in Professionals dealing with distant conflict imagery: flight controllers working with drones  or editors tasked with receiving and editing photographs in centers such as New York, London or Paris. The study is conducted in the context of research, made with tools of emotions recognition in facial expressions, which aims to identify the feelings that war images provoke. According to this survey, the viewer manifests increasing engagement in a succession of images, while expressions of initial surprise and disgust diminish. The text considers images as conducting vehicles of the energy aroused by the original scenes, considering that their power is preserved by the ability to recognize the feelings expressed by the portrayed images, through mechanisms that make up empathy, such as mirror neurons, or deep memory records. The text relates this ability of images to preserve the energy of the original scenes with the concept of “emotion formulas”, created by Aby Warburg, for whom archaic images reprocessed in the present cause immediate emotion, because they are impregnated in collective memory (or “social memory” as he expressed it). He was inspired by the work of Richard Semon, creator of the concept of Mneme, idea considered a parallel to Carl Jung's concept of “collective unconscious”.