Cultural memory and psychosocial narratives: Remembering 1968

Abstract

Through reflecting back on the political imaginations and urgencies that informed an engagement with 1968 I share some of the promise and the difficulties in relating the personal to the political. I show the appeal of a certain kind of class politics but also the silences and suppressions that it can create through its tacit universalism, which involves, with Marx, a transcendence of differences. Through exploring the cultural memories of a political moment I argue for the importance of learning from these social inventions and experiments for ways of living differently in the present and for revisioning a notion of democratic politics. Learning to listen to ourselves in our differences, but also to others in what we share, I argue for shaping different kinds of psychosocial narratives that can bring thinking across the boundaries of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. I argue for embodying identities in ways that do not fix people into pre-given categories but allow for a fluidity that grants a sense of equal respect and equal voice as we shape multicultural psychotherapies that can learn from the cultural memories of the past as we learn to engage with different layers of experience. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.