This article discusses the impacts that an extreme social crisis on the construction of identity and the psychic conditions of the country’s citizens. The author seeks to identify approriate psychic and social dynamics that will help persons face danger, overcome the crisis and restructure their lives after the combats are over. We focused on Lebanon because it has been the scene of a long inter-ethnic war where the Druses were the center of the confrontations. In order to become acquainted with reality we collected and analyzed thirteen life-stories. The analysis of this material showed that the role of collective memory and ethnic discourse is to promote group cohesion. It also showed that idealization and beliefs based on its ideologies guaranteed a sense of mediation of the the catastrophe they have gone through.
Identification processes; ethnic conflicts; Lebanon; Druses