Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
consistent with a hyper-moralized and authoritarian moral world and
with a mode of subjectivation in which dynamics of authoritarian repression
of individual impulsions and desires were widely hegemonic, as this
was instrumental to guarantee the survival of a collectivist identity.
This approach leads to a very interesting analysis confirming our hypothesis
of “heterogeneous subjectivity”, and allows for a promising outlook
on the future:
People who had direct intense libidinal relationships with members of a
different ethnic group seem to cope better with pain and suffering, as they
seem to have access to narratives that account for antagonism and
responsibility in more meaningful terms. Their experience of love and
friendship across two ethnically different cultures enabled them to
acknowledge individual similarities beyond and against the influence of
hegemonic discourses reinforcing and introducing differences along ethnic
lines.
While the trilateral approach is a first contribution of theoretical and practical
relevance, a second one concerns the relationship between remembering
and forgetting, a classic theme of oral history. In the last two and a
half decades, a large number of oral historians in all parts of the world
have shown that the various ways of intertwining between the two constitute
as many strategies put in practice by memory. Silence and oblivion
appear to be not only the results of traumas, of personal and collective
decisions, and of the psyche’s propensity for functioning by associations,
but also of rhetorical devices within a narrative universe. All this is confirmed
and enriched by the papers in this collection. In general, the writings
presented here evidence the spontaneity of forgetting as a defence by
which, in order to remove painful memories of death and loss, people
remove everything connected with the war. However, going a step further,
these writings reveal the extreme complexity of the connection between
individual and collective memories and its pertinence to the question of
silence.
As Silvia Salvatici has written elsewhere, the first stage of the training
course for psychosocial counsellors devoted to the memory of the war,
focused on the role played by memory in sharing painful stories, which
had been generally restricted to the experience and memory of their individual
actors. Sharing that painful experience was also considered preliminary
to sharing its consequences on the psychological well-being of
the people, in order to point out that those very consequences could be
considered as “normal” reactions to “abnormal” events (such as the war),
instead of psycho-pathologies. The work done within the first stage
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