The Unconscious of History #7: Vajont, October 9, 1963
Introduction to the column: The Unconscious of History
History doesn’t end in textbooks. It survives in the institutions we inhabit, in the ways we think about care, in the language we use to describe those who suffer. “The Unconscious of History” starts from a simple conviction: understanding how the past built the psychological categories we use today (normality, deviance, therapy, exclusion) is a necessary clinical and intellectual act, not a nostalgic exercise.
Each issue takes a historical moment, a movement, a reform, a figure, and brings it into the present. Not to celebrate or condemn, but to ask: what of that moment is still alive in us? What does it tell us about practice today?
The column is addressed to anyone who works or moves in the world of psychology (researchers, clinicians, students, educators) and to anyone concerned with history or the humanities, with the curiosity to look at their own discipline from the outside as well. The Unconscious of History was born precisely at the intersection: it is neither a text on psychology applied to history nor a history of psychology, but a space where the two perspectives question each other, convinced that understanding the past helps us read the present better, and that psychology, in order to know itself, also needs to know where it comes from.
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Only a few minutes, just a few minutes separate a before and an after. Before, a village exists, with its houses, its lives, its stories. After, it is gone.
Some disasters are so vast that it seems impossible they could have unfolded in a few minutes. Because their effects last a long time, for decades, handed down from generation to generation.
Like the Vajont, the disaster that shook the Piave valley, whose instrument of death is still there, standing unaware over the valley, indestructible and grim as it must have looked on that fatal night.
Psychology has often spoken of trauma by looking at individual people, but in the Vajont’s toll of victims there were in fact a few more than we think.
They were called Longarone, Pirago, Faè, Villanova and others still: the villages destroyed by the wave were victims too, their communities wounded and mutilated.
First, though, let us remember what happened that night. It was October 9th, and 10:39 p.m. marked a before and an after.
01 — The world as it was: the race to the dam
Today, who remembers the Vajont? Who knows its true story from beginning to end? The young cannot know, because they were born afterwards. The elderly have lived through so many other tragedies in these twenty years. The survivors have removed that event from their consciousness, as the only possible way to survive. But can the Vajont be forgotten?
Tina Merlin
To understand how one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in Italian history could happen, we must look at the Italy of that time. The years from 1957 to 1963, which saw the construction of the Vajont dam, belong to that Italian postwar period in which the desire for redemption was strong. The nation needed to push its industry forward, and to do so it needed all the electricity it could get.
When the dam project began, the national electricity service did not yet exist: the one that would be called ENEL, which was effectively created in 1962. SADE was the company that started the project, and from the very beginning it was clear how badly it wanted that dam to see the light of day: it was to be the first of a vast energy production system that would be called the Greater Vajont.
A project so important and imposing did not go ahead without dissenting voices. There were contrary opinions. There was skepticism from the experts called in to carry out the preliminary studies. And there was the understandable distrust of the villagers, who saw their houses and land expropriated. And as in so many tragedies, there was also a Cassandra: Tina Merlin, a journalist for l’Unità, who courageously denounced the speculation behind the project. She, as if by a cruel joke, was herself put on trial for spreading false and biased news.
In the end, the dam was built, the reservoir was filled with water, and problems arose right away. The landslide movements worried the population of the villages, so much so that on the day before, the municipality of Erto, warned by SADE’s technicians, issued a notice cautioning people to stay away from the shores of the lake. Fearsome waves might rise as a result of landslides from Monte Toc, the notice read. How ironic! Nobody imagined how fearsome the real wave would be.
02 — The fracture: like a stone in a glass
A stone fell into a glass full of water, and the water spilled onto the tablecloth. Only the glass was hundreds of meters high, the stone was as big as a mountain, and below, on the tablecloth, were thousands of human beings who could not defend themselves.Dino Buzzati
The stone that fell was an enormous landslide that detached from Monte Toc and plunged into the reservoir. When I use the word enormous, I am trying to convey what in numbers is 266 million cubic meters of earth and rock. How can we picture how big that is in reality?
We can’t; we struggle to. Can we imagine all that mass rushing toward the water at 100 km/h?
The fall generated what some have called a tsunami. In reality there were three waves. The first two lapped at villages located in the upper part, near the lake, but it was the third that was staggering.
It crossed over the dam and fell into the valley below. Those who were there remembered the roar, and then the silence. Debris and earth were thrown up and created a devastating torrent of earth and water.
Micaela Coletti, who was 12 at the time, tells it like this:
“I felt as if my face was being pulled by the hair, there was a sort of hole that wanted to suck me in, and the room widening and then narrowing. My face like a jellyfish, sticky and stretched. My hands were at my sides, but I had a burst of rebellion and raised my arms in front of me: I had to touch my face, I thought I no longer had one. That is how I saved myself, I resurfaced from under the ground, I had been swept away, 350 meters from where my house, my bed, had been, buried in mud and water.”
Of every tragedy we always have numbers, and there are three that struck me in particular: 446, the dead who were never recovered, dragged who knows where, buried by the mud or torn apart by the fury of the great wave.
761, the dead whose features could never be recognized, who remained nameless. And finally 21, the days of life of the youngest victim. Who knows if that baby heard the roar that swept away, in four minutes, the security of the small world he knew, leaving only silence and destruction.
03 — The psychological lens: thirty houses and the cemetery
The Longarone that exists now I don’t know. For me Longarone is the thirty houses that were saved and the cemetery; all the people of my life are there, that is my village. Micaela Coletti
The generation that lived through that day was divided into survivors and those left behind. The former were the injured pulled from the rubble; the latter were those who were unharmed but had lost relatives and had seen their village destroyed. A changed geography, as a journalist observed in one of the many television reports after the disaster.
Longarone is the village that was wounded the most. It was almost entirely swept away, except for a few houses and the town hall. It was also the village where the inhabitants fought fiercely to rebuild it exactly where it had been, despite the threat, still looming at the time, of further dangers the dam could bring. Because yes, the dam survived, as a cruel joke, and immediately demanded works to secure the surrounding area.
Yet let us imagine this village (and many others in the valley). In the following days, all the points of reference the inhabitants had were gone. The roads were gone. Hundreds of houses had been destroyed. The first scene the rescuers saw was apocalyptic, with the dead stripped bare by the shockwave resurfacing, and in the following days people dug with whatever they had. The final blow to the community came with the news that they would have to move to a new area to rebuild; there was an uprising that led to a self-organized reorganization by the survivors, who rebuilt the village in exactly the same place. The fate of Erto, another village destroyed by the fury of the wave, was different: the citizens were offered the chance to build elsewhere, kilometers away. Angelina Corona says of this reconstruction: “They broke the roots, entire families disappeared. Many regretted it, some even killed themselves.”
In emergencies where communities are hit, the relocation of survivors becomes crucial for their wellbeing. Erikson, commenting on what happened to the community of Buffalo Creek after the mining disaster, observed that those who had escaped were placed in temporary trailers with no regard for the ties of proximity and familiarity that had existed before. What was created was a loss of communality that was added to the material and relational losses (home, relatives, friends...).
Does staying as close as possible to one’s village of origin help in overcoming a tragedy? There are other elements to consider. The Vajont has been the subject of numerous studies, in some cases supported by the very citizens’ associations of the affected villages. In the study by Favaro and colleagues (2007), 36 years later, 26% of the survivors interviewed met the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and 28% those of major depression. Fear is very common after a major disaster.
And the effects are not limited to mental health: there are many more illnesses among the survivors, respiratory, gastroenterological and dermatological. According to Zaetta and colleagues of the University of Padua, the increase in physical illness is not directly linked to exposure to the trauma but to social and cultural factors. Among those who stayed, avoidance mechanisms are at work that lead them to access health services less often.
There is a third key to reading the Vajont disaster, and it is given to us by Marisa Turrin, who lost her entire family that night.
“In those days people didn’t talk much about psychologists; tragedies were faced in the everyday course of life, at home they were only spoken of in whispers. I asked about my mom, and I was told she was no longer there, the water had carried her away.”
Marisa describes her sense of anger, helplessness and abandonment because she was the only one who survived, all emotions that as a child she could not express because they could not (must not) be talked about. The memory of a collective trauma is a thorny subject for the community that was wounded, because remembering can be a way of surviving by recovering the community that is no longer there and giving it a new place in the present (and in the future), but at the same time constructing a meaning around what happened is not simple. Members of the community disagree about what to remember and how much, and sometimes, as in Marisa’s case, they leave certain things unsaid even while continuing to remember the event. One of the most emblematic images of the aftermath is relatives caressing the coffins without knowing whether their loved one was really inside. It doesn’t matter; they are part of them.
04 — The legacy: the only seed that remains
Lo là l’unica seménza che e restà (There is the only seed that remained) Marisa Turrin
There is a very significant piece in Famiglia Cristiana, called “The Courageous of the Vajont,” which tells of the rebirth of Longarone. It recounts the extraordinary resilience of the living, highlights the remarkable number of births in the municipality, and describes how people did not stand still but actively set about finding a home again.
In the same magazine, years later, another piece tells of the thesis of Ilaria Perrotta, a student from Milan who went to Longarone and interviewed the elders of the community. Perrotta says: “From the interviews carried out with about sixty people from Longarone, a shared perception emerges of a shattered community, marked by divisions and conflicts at several levels.” She goes on to list another division, between those who have always lived there (the natives) and those who arrived later (the immigrants), distinguished as if they had different citizenships. And the new generations? The children and grandchildren of those who escaped the disaster?
Perrotta also notes a malaise among the youngest, who see the divisions within the community and, however important they consider cultivating memory, cannot find a solution to the fracture that has formed in their villages. Significantly, this was one of the few contributions that spoke openly about how to intervene on the group, how to mend the divisions and ease the existing conflict. Many researchers have focused on individual suffering, wanting to answer the implicit question “but how long can the effect of a trauma last?”, while leaving unaddressed the fact that to answer it one must look at the group in which the person lives.
And then there is a second question: how much does trauma reach the new generation? The boom in births seems to have been a positive reaction, but what do we know about the care given to these children? The transmission of trauma is a controversial subject, with studies by various Jewish authors on the children of Holocaust survivors. Yehuda and colleagues note how the children of parents who had post-traumatic stress disorder developed the disorder themselves. As children they received inadequate care and were more easily victims of emotional abuse, as if their parents struggled to care for their children’s emotional needs in an adequate and responsive way. However, other studies refuted the hypothesis of intergenerational transmission, such as that of Sagi-Schwartz and colleagues, in which grandchildren did not suffer traumatic stress consequences even though the grandparents showed symptoms of unresolved trauma.
Perhaps in the malaise of the new generation that Perrotta detected there is the trace of the fracture of a wounded community, and not the festering scar of a grandparent or parent, which makes it hard to imagine that there could be anything positive in the future.
05 — The open question
Stories don’t exist unless someone tells them. Marco Paolini
While putting together the material on the Vajont, I was surprised by how many teenagers wrote that they knew nothing about it, in the comments under the videos or podcasts that talked about it. I had known this story since I was a child: the story of a dam that never collapsed, an engineering masterpiece built in the wrong place. Because the dam was also this, and it still survives in spite of everything, right above Longarone, like a reminder of the hubris of the men who wanted to build it.
Piecing together what I remembered, and making sense of it with the keys of reading the psychologist in me, I came to understand how relevant the Vajont disaster is today.
How much it speaks to us whenever an area is struck by a natural disaster (and I think of Amatrice) or one for which we humans are to blame (and I think of the Morandi Bridge and the community of Via Porro).
How it tells us that we are capable of building incredible works, but if we don’t do so with respect for what surrounds us, for the nature we must understand, we can only suffer for it.
How it lives on in those who still live in the Piave valley.
And so, joining Tina Merlin, I ask: “But can the Vajont be forgotten?”
Conclusion
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