Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai<br />
sequences of being portrayed and manipulated by “their own” culture and<br />
society as a victimized population, in order to justify aggression, war and<br />
displacement. Moreover, because of their hyphened belonging to<br />
Serbhood, they intrinsically resisted the homogenization of their personal<br />
experiences and histories. In other words, the dramatic events of the last<br />
ten years has allowed a large section of the Serbian population to take a<br />
critical position about the concept of a Serbia united against all of its<br />
antagonistic others. Alongside the gradual fading of the appeal of this fantasy<br />
of unity, a new, nonnarcissistically-regressive version of local culture<br />
is being articulated and advocated. This culture can now acknowledge differences<br />
within Serbdom and return to politics what pertains to politics,<br />
beyond any attempt to freeze and conceal social and political antagonism<br />
behind strategic discourses of ethnicity.<br />
All of this reveals the necessity of doing more than acknowledging an<br />
abstract need to take responsibility for the political and social implications<br />
of our therapeutic work. In order to heal people in a non-pathologizing<br />
social and cultural context, we should also force ourselves to actually<br />
elaborate and introduce, within and around the therapeutic setting,<br />
counter-narratives of political and social justice and of subjectivation that<br />
are consistent with heterogeneous thought and democracy. We might, of<br />
course, limit ourselves to doing this by offering explanations and narratives<br />
of events which are alternative to those present in patients’ accounts.<br />
We might also try and actively challenge the existing gendered models of<br />
personhood that are rooted in a patriarchal symbolic order and that libidinally<br />
sustain unity, homogeneity and authoritarianism at individual and<br />
collective levels. It is only by re-activating and giving voice to the various<br />
gender and age-related factors of social differentiation, to the differences<br />
which are suppressed within any ethnically homogeneous and patriarchal<br />
symbolic order, that this order can be made to collapse under the weight of<br />
its own injustices and contradictions. Only then will the liberated space<br />
offer these social components an opportunity for self-recognition,<br />
emancipation and development beyond antagonizing discourses of ethnic<br />
unity. It is not by chance that the majority of organizations striving to<br />
maintain contacts with their purported “enemy” counterparts in the times<br />
of war and confrontation following the break up of Yugoslavia were<br />
feminist and youth associations. These groups kept on seeking and finding,<br />
in their existential condition of being young or against patriarchy, or<br />
in their belief in justice and democracy, the central defining aspect of their<br />
selves as politically pluralist subjects in a forcibly homogeneous world. By<br />
acknowledging the political nature of their selves, they found the cultural<br />
resources they needed to resist an ethnicized definition of their identity,<br />
which had so long deprived them of so many aspects of a culture they<br />
found important to their self-recognition and liberation.<br />
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