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