Revisiting the Historians' Debate:Mourning and Genocide

Abstract

My basic premise in this paper is that the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis (such as transference, resistance, denial, repression, acting out and worlting-through) undercut the binary opposition between the and society and that their application to or collective phenomena is a matter of informed argument and research. Freud developed these concepts in a clinical context and thought they applied to collective processes only through analogy, and a recurrent concern is how it is possible to extend them to collectivities. I believe that this concern, both in Freud and others, is based on mistaken individualistic ideological assumptions and gives rise to misguided questions. One should rather call into question the very idea that one is working with a more or less flimsy analogy between the and society and argue instead that there is nothing intrinsically individual about such concepts as repression and working-through. These concepts refer to processes that always involve modes of interaction, mutual reinforcement, conflict, censorship, orientation toward others, and so forth, and their relative or collective status should not be prejudged.1 Mourning may obviously take collective forms, for example, in rituals. Lieux de memoire (in Pierre Nora's phrase) may be lieux de trauma as well as commemorative sites, and the question is whether and how they may become lieux de deuil for working through traumatic events. But to what extent are modern sites (for example, memorials and museums) viable in making mourning possible? Can mourning be