Remembering, Repairing, and Working Through Conflicts in our Dolorous Past (I)
One of the most interesting of Freud's "technical" papers is his 1914 essay "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through." Since his death in London in 1939, and since the Holocaust especially which claimed most of the family he left behind in Austria, psychoanalysis has become more aware of and involved in thinking through some of the issues around historical memory of trauma like the Shoah; the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides of 1915; the Ukrainian Holodomor of the early 1930s; and more recent traumas involving mass slaughter.
When I first started, nearly five years ago, researching and lecturing about historical memory, especially in situations of religious conflict (the Crusades is a rich example here, but so too are Ukrainian Catholic and Russian Orthodox conflicts, especially at and after 1946, about which I have a book coming out late this year), one of the first people I read was the psychoanalyst and sociologist Jeffrey Prager of UCLA. His 1998 book Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering was very helpful, and even more his many scholarly articles in a variety of journals on historical memory, intergenerational trauma, and related issues.
I also had very enlightening and helpful conversations with the historian and psychoanalyst Charles Strozier of CUNY, who has written the definitive biography of Heniz Kohut, which I'm going to go back and re-read one of these days.
Strozier kindly sent me drafts of papers he was working on for us to discuss. One in particular was very helpful: the idea of "constructed humiliation," about which more later.
His book The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History was very helpful in itself, but even more so in introducing me to the thought and work of Vamik Volkan, to whom I have returned so very often, and regularly quoted and recommended to people. Volkan, a psychoanalyst at the University of Virginia and a prolific author, has a new book out this year, and I'm waiting for my copy so that I can interview him about it.
All this is just a lengthy preface to bring to your attention two recent books I have just finished reading that merit wide consideration by those concerned with the questions of how to both commemorate but also heal from a past that includes tragedies and traumas like slavery, police violence, and other forms of oppression. Both books, it bears mentioning, are largely focused on German realities from the Holocaust onward, but both very much admit of much wider application, including to discussions here in these United States, about issues that do not admit of simplistic solutions, including the vexed question of what to do with historic monuments and statues. I will attempt to draw out some of those applications here.
The first of these, from 2017, is Remembering as Reparation: Psychoanalysis and Historical Memory by Karl Figlio (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), xii+284pp.
The second is by Heinz Weiss, Trauma, Guilt, and Reparation: the Path from Impasse to Development (Routledge, 2020).
The first is more widely focused on cultural issues; the second hews more tightly to clinical material and individual case studies; but both have, as I hope to show, much wisdom for our current historical moment.
Continues.
When I first started, nearly five years ago, researching and lecturing about historical memory, especially in situations of religious conflict (the Crusades is a rich example here, but so too are Ukrainian Catholic and Russian Orthodox conflicts, especially at and after 1946, about which I have a book coming out late this year), one of the first people I read was the psychoanalyst and sociologist Jeffrey Prager of UCLA. His 1998 book Presenting the Past: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Misremembering was very helpful, and even more his many scholarly articles in a variety of journals on historical memory, intergenerational trauma, and related issues.
I also had very enlightening and helpful conversations with the historian and psychoanalyst Charles Strozier of CUNY, who has written the definitive biography of Heniz Kohut, which I'm going to go back and re-read one of these days.
Strozier kindly sent me drafts of papers he was working on for us to discuss. One in particular was very helpful: the idea of "constructed humiliation," about which more later.
His book The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History was very helpful in itself, but even more so in introducing me to the thought and work of Vamik Volkan, to whom I have returned so very often, and regularly quoted and recommended to people. Volkan, a psychoanalyst at the University of Virginia and a prolific author, has a new book out this year, and I'm waiting for my copy so that I can interview him about it.
All this is just a lengthy preface to bring to your attention two recent books I have just finished reading that merit wide consideration by those concerned with the questions of how to both commemorate but also heal from a past that includes tragedies and traumas like slavery, police violence, and other forms of oppression. Both books, it bears mentioning, are largely focused on German realities from the Holocaust onward, but both very much admit of much wider application, including to discussions here in these United States, about issues that do not admit of simplistic solutions, including the vexed question of what to do with historic monuments and statues. I will attempt to draw out some of those applications here.
The first of these, from 2017, is Remembering as Reparation: Psychoanalysis and Historical Memory by Karl Figlio (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), xii+284pp.
The second is by Heinz Weiss, Trauma, Guilt, and Reparation: the Path from Impasse to Development (Routledge, 2020).
The first is more widely focused on cultural issues; the second hews more tightly to clinical material and individual case studies; but both have, as I hope to show, much wisdom for our current historical moment.
Continues.
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