Psychoanalysis, collective traumas and memory places

Robert D Hinshelwood · et al.

Dec 2015 · Frenis Zero

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 Psychoanalysis has always had to reckon with the epistemology of the witnessing of the analysand, but perhaps it has only recently been reckoning with the discourse of the ethics of testimony. “Here I am” is the answer addressed to those who call on us to testify. And who are the people who have answered with a “Here I am” in this book dedicated to the places of the memory of ‘Mediterranean civilisations and their discontents’? The reference to the work of the same name by Freud (1929) is clear here, but what many of the authors and of the essays in it seem to have in common is the attention to the traumatic nature of certain places of the memory: theatres of wars, such as the wars in the Balkans at the centre of the contribution by N. Janigro, lines in the diary of a father, who miraculously survived genocide, that a daughter-essayst (J. Altounian) wrenches from oblivion, or even non-places of a memory in which the witnesses-survivors are the many refugees who have fled their homelands. As Bohleber writes, psychoanalysis began as a theory of trauma. In this book, the places of the memory are often the rooms of analysis, places of re-evocation of collective traumas which have not always taken place historically along the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In some cases, the victims of collective traumas, undergone in the home Mediterranean countries, take their dramas of migrants and refugees to analysts in the North of Europe (as in the case of Varvin and Papadopoulos). In other pieces, neither the geographical origin of the analysand nor that of the analyst have apparently any connection with the Mediterranean. We are referring to the essay by M. Ritter and that of Halberstadt-Freud: however, in them, the consulting rooms are places of the memory in which the analyst reflects on the subject of trans-generational transmission of collective guilt connected with Nazism and with the Shoah, which also affected the history of Mediterranean countries. In other contributions in this book, the places of the memory are those of the Middle East caught up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From different points of view, three authors, Y. Gampel, J. Deutsch and H.-J. Wirth, speak to us of places of the memory where the collective traumas have not been assigned once and for all to the work of historians (as in the case of the Shoah and of the other genocides of the 20th century) as, unfortunately, they are still on-going.