Political Trauma Research Articles

Вместо Утраты: Материализация Памяти и Герменевтика Боли в Провинциальной России

SUMMARY: By analyzing the activity of the Altai Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, the article explores how people deal with the political trauma caused by the Chechen and Afghan wars in a situation of public ambiguity about the policies that led to these casualties. The author examines why the Committee’s response to the losses produced by state-organized violence is framed almost exclusively in terms of family relations, biographical facts, and personalized emotional events. In this case, the domestication and materialization of loss function first of all as a means of self -organization, capable of shaping otherwise amorphous groups. The lack of civic discourse, the article suggests, is often mitigated by powerful and emotionally charged rituals of remembrance and commemoration.

Ohio: The History of a People. By Andrew R. L. Cayton. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. viii, 472 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8142-0899-1.)

Writing as much as a native son as an historian, Andrew R. L. Cayton has written a big bicentennial book about the state of Ohio and its people. The result is a complex story that was written, and can be read, at many levels. Here we get the historian successfully shaping a grand contemporary synthesis; we also get the native son writing in the despairing yet elegiac mode honed by two centuries of Ohio writers. Cayton divides his story of Ohio since statehood into twelve chapters. The first four chapters cover the first sixty years, as “Strangers in Canaan” gradually settle and move on to “Improving Ohio,” “Considering Ohio,” and “Defining Ohio,” a definition crystallized in the antebellum crisis and the Civil War of Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. The next block of four chapters carries the story through the 1920s, focusing on the impacts of immigration and industrialization, the impulses of reform, and the rise of the most influential generation of Ohio writers, that of William Dean Howells, Sherwood Anderson, and James Thurber. The final four chapters carry the story through the twentieth century, detailing the parallel migrations of Appalachian whites and Deep South blacks into Ohio's industrial cities, the contest over conditions of labor in a culturally divided society, the emerging postwar suburban ethos, and the political traumas and compromises engendered by those transformations.

Solemn Witness: A Pilgrimage to Ground Zero at the World Trade Center

A visit to ground zero of the World Trade Center debris site became more than a voyeuristic tour. It became a personal pilgrimage into reflections on the connections between personal and political traumas, between the most intimate of tragedies and the most global of nightmares. A narration of travel experiences in a walk around the disaster zone is punctuated with considerations of how therapy can dialogue with trauma and how it may be possible to transcend cycles of violence and vengeance for both individuals and societies.

From supportive-listening to a solution-focused intervention for counsellors dealing with political trauma

This article focuses on a brief 'helping the helper' intervention with school counsellors during a nation-wide political trauma, the recent Intifada in Israel. An emergency field intervention programme for Israeli school counsellors was developed that was aimed at addressing their personal as well as professional (and role-related) concerns to reduce or prevent burnout and enhance empowerment. The action research method was used to adapt the programme to the participants' needs. The resulting brief intervention programme was designed to shift processing of the perceived situation from affective processes to more structured and controlled cognitive processes. The burnout prevention programme included a short (process) debriefing to promote the affective to cognitive coping processes shift, presenting coping strategies to enhance cognitive adaptation to threatening events, and using a solution-focused guidance intervention. The rationale and the results supporting the face validity of the intervention are presented.

Social medicine in Latin America: productivity and dangers facing the major national groups

There is little knowledge about Latin American social medicine in the English-speaking world. Social medicine groups exist in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Mexico. Dictatorships have created political and economic conditions which are more adverse in some countries than others; in certain instances, practitioners of social medicine have faced unemployment, arrest, torture, exile, and death. Social medicine groups have focused on the social determinants of illness and early death, the effects of social policies such as privatisation and public sector cutbacks, occupational and environmental causes of illness, critical epidemiology, mental health effects of political trauma, the impact of gender, and collaborations with local communities, labour organisations, and indigenous people. The groups' achievements and financial survival have varied, depending partly on the national context. Active professional associations have developed, both nationally and internationally. Several groups have achieved publication in journals and books, despite financial and technical difficulties that might be lessened through a new initiative sponsored by the US National Library of Medicine. The conceptual orientation and research efforts of these groups have tended to challenge current relations of economic and political power. Despite its dangers, Latin American social medicine has emerged as a productive field of work, whose findings have become pertinent throughout the world.

Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (review)

Reviewed by: Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz Daniel Morris Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz, by Lisa Saltzman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 173 pp. $40.00. Compared to literary studies, the discipline of art history has been slow to theorize the complex relationship between historical reality and its representations. In part through the incorporation of film theory, however, art historians have begun to incorporate post- structuralism into their work. Developing an eclectic model indebted to psychoanalysis, feminist film theory, and narratology, Lisa Saltzman places a leading German artist, Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945 to non-Jewish parents), in the sociohistorical matrix of the haunted environment of contemporary Germany. His art is a symptom of the difficulty contemporary Germans have had in moving from a stagnant state of melancholia to a [End Page 163] psychologically productive mourning of Hitlerism. Her work resituates Kiefer as a post-war artist who may have more in common with filmmakers such as Wim Wenders and Werner Fassbinder, and with novelists such as Günter Grass, than with the “neo-expressionist” artists to whom he is usually compared. For Saltzman, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is the most influential essay in film theory. Although Mulvey describes how the male gaze dominates the female body in film, Saltzman interprets the essay as an example of a post-modern ethics based on the Mosaic injunction against the worship of images. She argues that Mulvey writes in the tradition of a prior classic of post-modern ethical criticism, Theodor Adorno’s “Cultural Criticism and Society” (1949), in which he wrote that “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.” Saltzman’s point is that Kiefer represents a visual trace of his own theorization of the hebraically inflected ethical issues of representation that informed Adorno and Mulvey. Unlike the strict injunction against iconography in the paradigmatic essays by Adorno and Mulvey, however, Kiefer registers ambivalence about the prohibition against image making. He plays out the desire to witness the Holocaust while framing silence in a way that represents the world of the past and the struggle to remake the German self after Auschwitz. Kiefer pivots between a wish to mourn the past and, therefore, to work through his belated relationship to Hitlerism, and a melancholic realization that forgetting the past is impossible for him. Saltzman succeeds in making her case for Kiefer’s ethical imagination, especially when she pays close attention to the aesthetic (formal) elements of his art. Her attention to his technique of burning, charring, or cauterizing his surfaces in works after 1975, for example, enables her to theorize his painting as “the concrete trace of historical wounding.” His art becomes a site to visualize the wound of an historical reality that is unrepresentable, except as an erasure. Because Kiefer is in a belated relation to history, he is in the impossible situation of trying to come to terms with events that shattered his identity, but that he never experienced directly. When Saltzman moves away from a close scrutiny of the texture of his work, her readings of his intention to mourn the Shoah sometimes feel strained. I was not convinced by her argument that political trauma was Kiefer’s motivation for entitling his obscure paintings with Kabbalistic titles. Gershom Scholem has demonstrated that messianic movements tend to be a reaction to social and political catastrophe, but must the general category of mysticism, which fits Kiefer, necessarily be tied to historical trauma, as Saltzman suggests? Saltzman’s thesis is based on a historical understanding of Kiefer, and so it is important to her argument to link Kabbalah to political trauma. At the end of the book she mentions that Kiefer has also developed an interest in Hinduism. How does this new interest in the myths of Hindu culture relate to German catastrophe? Because Saltzman is dealing with so many issues and theories in a short study, and because Kiefer’s pictures are mysterious and opaque, her book is valuable for opening [End Page 164] up questions about the meanings of his art, rather than for answering them. She describes Kiefer’s interest in Jewish culture as a form of “German Orientalism” but does not...

Caught between empires: ambivalence in Australian films

Australian films have gained an international reputation for their whimsical look at everyday life. Beneath the quirky veneer of Australian movies, however, lies a deep ambivalence to Australia's cultural dependency on Britain and America. The article explores this dependency in two interrelated parts. Part one examines how in the early period of Australia's film renaissance the collective focus was on the search for a distinctive national identity. An identity that concentrated on presenting Australia from a settler perspective shaped by Australia's colonial past, rather than as a post-colonial society psychologically scarred by its past. The settler identity became ironically one of mimicking the British in the search for a unique national identity. The predominant form this identity took was through the character/caricature of the “ocker”, ostensibly an anti-authoritarian “man” whose failings were disguised by sentimentality. By the 1980s, Australian filmmakers began to shift their gaze from that of a colonial one to that of an Imperial one and this shift was principally towards America, which, in turn, made the settler identity more ambivalent against a nation that had experienced a revolutionary break from Britain. The emergence of Aboriginal land rights saw the positions of the settler become even more problematic as indigenous peoples came to symbolise the authentic Australian identity. Part two explores this ambivalence by comparing how both Australian and American filmmakers attempted to deal with the political traumas created first by the removal of the head of government, and second, by the Vietnam War. While American film directors excessively played out the politics of these traumas, Australian filmmakers repressed the shortcomings of their own political regime. The lack of balance was fertile ground for the subsequent political move to the right, evident in the whitewash of Australia's role in Vietnam and the reaffirmation of the Constitutional Monarchy.

Political trauma and recovery in a protracted conflict: Understanding contextual effects.

Psychologists have discovered useful therapeutic strategies to understand and heal the inner world of individuals traumatized by political violence. However, psychological approaches built on unspoken assumptions about context, present an incomplete therapeutic picture for individuals traumatized in protracted social conflicts. Because political environment and psychological well-being are bidirectionally related, situational issues need to be addressed. Four context-related propositions are presented. In a protracted war: (a) traumatizing experiences are not only episodic but also systemic, extending over many years; (b) context may also function as a source of healing; (c) healing efforts do not take place in war-free and comfortable contexts but rather in unsafe and impoverished conditions; and (d) trauma survivors are not only victims and effects, but also empowered transformers and causes of contextual change. Applications to Philippine experiences illustrate the 4 propositions. Further explorations ...

Surviving Pleasure at the Periphery: Chiang Mai and the Photographies of Political Trauma in Thailand, 1976–1992

Surviving Pleasure at the Periphery: Chiang Mai and the Photographies of Political Trauma in Thailand, 1976–1992

The Antinomies of Collective Political Trauma: A Pre‐Theory

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination has less of a lasting impact on the Israeli public's political values, beliefs and attitudes than might have been anticipated from the magnitude of the event and intensity of the immediate responses. Why did the assassination have such a short‐lived effect? This article considers the puzzle as a specific case of the broader phenomenon of collective political trauma and its consequences for values, beliefs and attitudes held by the mass public toward issues that it associates with the traumatic event. The article offers six deductively inferred hypotheses that describe, explain and link affective, cognitive and behavioral aspects of collectively experienced trauma. These hypotheses form a pre‐theory explaining the perseverence of core political cognitions, even in the face of a considerable challenge to their validity and relevance.

Health And Social Context

Health And Social Context

The Gulf and Afterwards: The Future of American Foreign Policy

The vast changes that have occurred in the world over the past two years have been so sudden and unanticipated that the United States has been forced to respond in ways that are hesitant, improvised, and only partially calculated. Any close reading of statements and reflections coming from official sources, or from those few participants of the foreign policy establishment they are most likely to listen to, reveals a great deal of uncertainty. Just as the USSR is undergoing a political and social trauma, the Bush Administration's foreign policy has merged a restatement of America's traditional ideological verities and militarist impulses with profound doubts about the future at one and the same time.

The Myth of Zero Partisanship: Attitudes toward American Political Parties, 1964-84

Studies of attitudes toward the two major American political parties have relied on either the Center for Political Studies' open-ended party likes/dislikes questions or its party feeling thermometers. Problems arise with interpreting (1) nonresponses or balanced responses on the open-ended items as indicators of neutrality and (2) the thermometers at face value. Discriminant analysis can address these problems by extrapolating from the thermometers the party attitudes of those with nonresponses or balanced responses on the open-ended items. A measure based on this procedure produces far more prototypical partisans, those positive toward one party and negative toward the other, than do other studies. Positive-negatives did decline after 1964 with the infusion of young people into the electorate, the increase in independents, and the political traumas of the 1960s and 1970s, but by 1984 most Americans were positivenegatives. This reversal suggests the resiliency of electoral partisanship.

Criticism of Germanistik in the Light of Political Trauma

In recent years the concept of Germanistik has come under severe questioning. Our professional magazines frequently feature alleged shortcomings, suggested reforms, and expressions of discomfort and bad conscience. While not wishing to say that everything is perfect in our discipline and the detractors should be ignored, I would like to restore the balance somewhat by exposing an inadequately discussed weakness in the antagonistic arguments and by stressing the benefits of the study of Germanistik which are in danger of beiog forgotten.

The Problem of Innovation and the Nixon-Kissinger Foreign Policy

The political trauma of the war in Vietnam and the long, painful recessional from it have posed analytical questions as fascinating for the scholar as the issues are challenging to the policy maker. The student of foreign affairs finds in the history of our engagement a unique opportunity to consider the circumstances and requirements for policy innovation. For if, as the old adage claims, necessity is the mother of invention, American policy making for the past four years should have been percolating with imaginative innovation. The central questions of this inquiry are these. (1) Has the adversity experienced been so compelling as to engender a fresh vision of today's international system and a new definition of U.S. security interests in it? (2) Judging, as we do, that termination of our involvement in the war depends on a reformulation of the conceptual bases of policy, how do we assess what changes represent a qualitative break from the past, i.e., are innovative as opposed to adaptive? (3) When adaptation is evident, hIow do we explain the failure to innovate? This essay endeavors to answer these questions through a