Confronting Cultural Trauma: Jungian Approaches to Understanding and Healing

Confronting Cultural Trauma:
Jungian Approaches to Understanding and Healing

by Grażina Gudaitė and Murray Stein

ISBN: 978-1-935528-65-4
268 pp.

Since the start of the twenty-first century, Jungian psychoanalysts around the world have turned their attention toward the impact of collective traumatic events on individuals and history. In this volume, Jungian psychoanalysts from Russia, Eastern Europe, Israel, Africa, and Asia join a number of others who have made recent important contributions to the growing literature on this subject. Some of the chapters are personal and bear witness to the authors’ own experience with cultural trauma; others offer a more general, historical look at the effects of trauma on patients and on cultures as a whole. Questions of practical treatment both for individuals and cultures are addressed, touching on political action and on possibilities for raising collective consciousness of a traumatic past and its present and continuing actuality.

*****
Praise for Confronting Cultural Trauma
«…could not be timelier given the conflicts that are currently raging in various parts of the globe… presents an eloquent and moving elaboration of the impact and psychological consequences of cultural trauma…»
Tom Kelly, President, International Association for Analytical Psychology
«…essential reading for anyone interested in the subject of trauma from historical, cultural, political and clinical perspectives… original in the variety of differing perspectives on trauma and its treatment… I highly recommend this excellent volume…»
Jan Wiener, Director of Training, Society of Analytical Psychology, London
«…a sympathetic and robust collection of papers with moving accounts of the long-term impact of traumatic events by perpetrators on victims… with appeal that will reach those whose empathic responses to human suffering and its causes are matters of deep concern and professional practice…»
Hester Solomon, Past President, International Association for Analytical Psychology and author of The Self in Transformation
«a wealth of first-class essays from different countries and times, this book re-fertilizes the socio-historical perspectives inaugurated by Jung…»
Luigi Zoja, Jungian analyst, Milan, Italy, author of Ethics in Analysis
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction

Grażina Gudaitė
A Second Introduction

Murray Stein
1 Horror Inherited: Transgenerational Transmission of Collective Trauma in Dreams

Kristina Schellinski
2 Dreams Don’t Let You Forget: Cultural Trauma and Its Denial

John Hill
3 Engagement with the Other: Reflections from Post-Apartheid South Africa

Astrid Berg
4 Collective Trauma and Individual Development: The Case of Germany

Eleonore Lehr-Rottmann
5 Reiterative Disintegration: Historical and Cultural Patterns and the Contemporary Mexican Psyche

Patricia Michan
6 «Father of the People» versus «Enemies of the People»: A Split-Father Complex as the Foundation for Collective Trauma in Russia

Vsevolod Kalinenko and Madina Slutskaya
7 Intergenerational Trauma: Difference, Genocide, and Holocaust

Jerome S. Bernstein
8 Between Aggression and Compassion: Treating Post-Trauma within a Trauma-Stricken Space

Gadi Maoz and Vered Arbit
9 The Healing Power of Stories: Mythodrama Group Therapy with Internally Displaced Children and Juveniles in Georgia, Caucasus

Allan Guggenbьhl
10 Liminality: Discourse as Cultural Trauma

Velimir B. Popovic and Marijana Popovic
11 Cultural Trauma in Modern Germany

Gert Sauer
12 Expressions of Transgenerational Trauma in the Estonian Context

Ursula Peterson and Monika Luik
13 The Shadow of Modernization in Japan as Seen in Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights’ Dreams

Mari Yoshikawa
14 Restoration of Continuity: Desperation or Hope in Facing the Consequences of Cultural Trauma

Grażina Gudaitė