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