This article argues that today’s search for identity, in the context of the rise of a new spirituality and the decline of authoritative memories, facilitates the forging of a new connection between soul and memory and enhances the importance of traumatic memories. Consequently, we witness the sacralization of memory which in unsettled times, when memories tend to become fixed and frozen, can undermine intergroup cooperation. The article asserts that an ethical burden, prompted by viewing memory as the surrogate of the (...) soul and the overrating of the importance of the politics of identity, can result in the displacement of public concerns with private ones. It stresses a need to rethink what kind of memory is compatible with a just, pluralist and cohesive democratic system. (shrink)

How to mobilize a traumatic national history on behalf of a less fractured polity? How to gain closure over a past that bifurcates the nation and establishes (at least) two national histories — history as told by the victims and by the perpetrators, now to be replaced by a history, as Mark Sanders (2003: 79) describes it, not of `bare facts but, at a crucial level, a history judged, and thus shaped, according to norms of universal human rights'. How to (...) engineer through politics the creation of new national selves, no longer pathologically attached to old and circumscribed forms of identification? These are now the critical questions confronting many elites: the overcoming of traumatic memory through various publicly mandated `technologies of the self'. To heal the nation requires the curing of the self. The politics of social repair understands itself largely through a psychologically inflected vocabulary of regret, apology, and forgiveness — the language of reconciliation. `Social cure', or reconciliation is understood as a process of social healing. In the face of traumatic ruptures in the body politic, in short, governments have sought to repair past wrongs and to heal an emotionally infirmed community. Such politics imply that societies have the capacity to repair themselves, to overcome traumatic pasts, just as an individual possesses the potential to overcome his or her own psychic trauma and fragmentation. But what evidence is there to support the claim that trauma — even for the individual — can be overcome, that history can be overridden, that forgiveness is possible? Psychoanalysis offers the most fully developed systematic body of work embracing a concept of the healing of the self. The article's aim, based upon an empirically derived (case-based) psychoanalysis, is to move toward a more robust theory of self-transformation and political reconciliation in post-traumatic communities. Thus, the article considers contemporary psychoanalytic evidence and asks of it the following questions: How is traumatic experience in the past recovered, and disabled, in the present? Is it necessary through memory to `return to the scene of the crime', in order to move beyond it? What features in the present-day therapeutic setting and in the therapeutic relationship promote healing? The objective is a grounded theory of reconciliation that includes discussion for whole societies of the role of historical recovery in social repair, the relation of the present to the past in self-constitution, and the requisite structure of the present-day reparative community to promote self-transformations. (shrink)

: Although many women experience harmful behaviors that fit the legal definition of sexual harassment, very few ever label their experiences as such. I explore how psychological ambivalence expressed as sadomasochism may account for some of this gap. Following Lynn Chancer, I argue that certain structural circumstances characteristic of highly stratified bureaucratic organizations may promote these psychological responses. After discussing two illustrations of this dynamic, I draw out the implications for sexual harassment theory and policy.

Although many women experience harmful behaviors that fit the legal definition of sexual harassment, very few ever label their experiences as such. I explore how psychological ambivalence expressed as sadomasochism may account for some of this gap. Following Lynn Chancer, I argue that certain structural circumstances characteristic of highly stratified bureaucratic organizations may promote these psychological responses. After discussing two illustrations of this dynamic, I draw out the implications for sexual harassment theory and policy.

In light of the great interest in interdisciplinary trauma research, this article explores the philosophical-literary concept of cultural trauma from the perspective of psychiatric and psychoanalytical studies of the long-term consequences of the Holocaust. The extensive literature on the psychological after-effects of the Final Solution offers an exceptional opportunity to study the aftermath of extreme violence from different subject positions, including the perspectives of survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and their descendants. Moving from the epicenter of the historical event of the Holocaust (...) to its psychological periphery, the survey reveals how much the concept of trauma has changed in the course of five decades as a result of political and cultural developments. But the review of the literature also demonstrates that none of the existing concepts of Holocaust trauma is well suited to explain the effects of Holocaust representations on individuals or collectives who encounter the Final Solution only as a media event for educational or entertainment purposes. (shrink)