Social memory and traumatic image of the past: sociological discourse

The possibilities of the methodology of sociological sciences, allowing to study social memory based on trauma are in the article discussed. The empirical basis of the study was the materials of in-depth interviews that the author conducted in 2018 among relatives of missing during the armed phase of the Ossetian-Ingush conflict of 1992. During the interviewing victims, the study of individual traumas of relatives of missing have been built within the following logical chain: trauma as a loss - trauma as a symbolic matrix - trauma as a consolidating event". Considerable attention is paid to the characterization of approaches to the analysis of social memory, methodological aspects of its construction by people who have experienced psychological trauma. The key concepts of social memory are presented, both at the individual and collective levels of victims.