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