Traumatic experiences are events that resist being articulated as memories and instead emerge in the present through their aftereffects. In the case of the Spanish Civil War and, especially, the long postwar that was the dictatorship, official history and social memory failed to articulate a convincing representation of those traumatic decades. In the absence of thick description that brings to consciousness the magnitude and intensity of the events, the character of the trauma must be inferred from social symptoms and traced back to the events themselves. But symptoms have great potential for distortion of the original affect and, as time passes, for grave misinterpretation and even erasure of the association with the past. The dissipation of the liberal and libertarian traditions, the intimidation of several generations of losers, the massive conformism and scapegoating mechanisms, and the low public awareness of the historical facts are some of those symptoms. Although not dealing strictly with the subjective dimension but with social processes of repression and distortion, the problem of the historical memory can use the psychoanalytic notions of trauma, resistance, and substitute formations to understand collective behavior and to explain the difficulties experienced by Spaniards in coming to grips with the facts that confront them as victims and perpetrators of an unreconciled past.

No other medium has brought the historical memory to the focus of public attention as television has, and no other genre has delved so much in the misrecognized and often unknown recent past as the television documentary. For years, the documentary has been the principal means for working through the resistance to memory of the majority of the population. The effectiveness of television relates to its popularity, intimacy, and loose conditions of reception, which need not be passive but may include a certain degree of interaction between viewers and programmers. These features, combined with the low level of attention demanded from the viewer, make the television screen a projective surface onto which psychic formations are transferred on a large scale. While it would be farfetched to compare the viewer's couch with the psychoanalyst's, television can nonetheless help to objectify inarticulate emotions and unconscious reflexes.

Simmering emotion keeps the memories of the Civil War and the dictatorship from becoming mere historical knowledge. People in Spain are not capable yet of looking on that period with indifference.