This chapter and the next form the heart of the thesis in the book. This chapter focuses on the role history plays in understanding the psychosocial response to war trauma, while the next chapter focuses on the role social factors play in psychological understanding, building together to develop the concept of the personal narrative. The arguments can be expressed from a variety of cultural perspectives, but due to my own upbringing and background, the examples that are used to illustrate what is meant by memory, history, social discourse and narrative are drawn largely from my own experiences of being brought up English and European.

The focus here is on the psychological perspective. We are trying to understand at the level of the individual, but we are all socio-cultural creatures, so in order to understand the individual effectively we need to draw on broader social and cultural forces so as to understand how a person interprets the past and the present, and how that person looks to the future. If we want to understand psychological processes fully, we need to be able to separate the universal from the cultural aspects. What are the key universal psychological processes about memory, coping and the response to stressful events, and what are the cultural aspects of these? This is intensely relevant to trauma studies, but is also relevant to the ways in which all of us live our lives as social beings. There are two fundamental truths about humans that are relevant here.