Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
Beyond the political and social implications of the clinical practice, one
must also try to understand the clinical implications of the political and
social practice. Word games aside, what I would like to question is the very
possibility of healing people, if this means healing them back into the
midst of the homogenous narratives responsible for producing a paranoid
and conspirative world where forced “sames” are opposed to “others”, and
where questions of difference and responsibility are avoided. When this
ontological security based on fantasies of homogenization and unity has
been shattered by war, ethnic cleansing and genocide, shouldn’t healing be
possible only through the introduction of a cultural perspective which
potentially enables us to acknowledge the presence of difference in the
“sames” as well as in the “others-that-are-supposedly-opposed”, and to
identify responsibility at the socio-political level, rather than at an ethnic
level? Would this approach not also avoid the risk of ethnocentric pathologization
and psychiatrization, simply by using and working on the very
narratives of political and social justice that are offered to us in the first
place?
In particular, one should be very careful about uncritically accepting concepts
such as ethnicity and trauma, which have emerged gradually as
strategic discourses introduced purposely by specific social actors to
achieve political legitimacy in the different arenas (national and international)
where they have been circulated. More specifically, the ethnicization
and “traumatization” of political discourses need to be contextualized
within the passage from authoritarian collectivism to individualist
democracy, which is a process that encompasses and frames the post-
Communist transformation. In conclusion, what we would like to advocate
is the passage from the politics of memory, from the politicized and
instrumental ethnicization of social and political antagonism through the
manipulation of national symbols and narratives of national belonging, to
the memory of politics; a potential re-politicization of an ethnicized and
traumatized landscape of unity and sameness. This is a crucial passage in
order to fully understand and exploit both the psychological implications
of social intervention and the social implications of psychological intervention.
In Kosovo, as in the rest of Former Yugoslavia, the narratives people have
used to make sense of their feelings and events were usually those that
were produced and diffused, in the different cultural fields, by cultural
elites, as part of their specific local strategies of survival. These narratives
and discourses are key cultural resources, relating the individual and the
collective understandings and experiences of antagonism, suffering and
healing. At the basis of the suffering of Serb IDPs is the inadequacy and
insufficiency of those narratives of ethnic affiliation and hatred in sustain-
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