An Efficient System for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy: A Pilot Study

In this paper, we describe an actuator-based EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) virtual assistant system that can be used for the treatment of participants with traumatic memories. EMDR is a psychological therapy designed to treat emotional distress caused by a traumatic event from the past, most frequently in post-traumatic stress disorder treatment. We implemented a system based on video, tactile, and audio actuators which includes an artificial intelligence chatbot, making the system capable of acting autonomously. We tested the system on a sample of 31 participants. Our results showed the efficiency of the EMDR virtual assistant system in reducing anxiety, distress, and negative cognitions and emotions associated with the traumatic memory. There are no such systems reported in the existing literature. Through the present research, we fill this gap by describing a system that can be used by patients with traumatic memories.

“I am making myself remember that awful time”: Juvenilia, Hiroshima, and the Politics of Peace

In 1951, Asata Orada, a professor of education at Hiroshima University, took on the grim task of collecting first-hand accounts from children who had survived the atomic bombing of August 6, 1945. Of the over 1000 testimonials he received, he compiled 105 into Genbaku no ko: Hiroshima no shonen to shojo no uttae [Children of the A-Bomb: The Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima], a book meant to honour the dead and make a bold contribution to peace education. This article argues that children’s writing about the atomic bombing was implicated in multiple, interrelated political projects. The first section examines the writers’ work of navigating the meaning of their survival, as well as Japan’s new pacifist identity; some of the children express ambivalence or even distrust toward this new national script. The second section picks up the more explicit politics that the children’s stories came to represent. The left-leaning Japan Teachers’ Union sponsored two films based on the book, but neither fully achieved the goal of communicating both the deplorable intensity of war and the spiritual imperative of peace to a broader audience. The third section dwells on the extent to which children fought to articulate their grief, and focuses on the unwilling writer, an unusual figure in juvenilia studies. The children were asked to sublimate their pain into the work of peace, but their writing testified instead to an experience that defied articulation altogether, and to a need for resolution that was ultimately beyond their ability or responsibility to deliver. Through Children of the A-Bomb, juvenilia studies can recognize children’s writing as a tool for political action, a site of traumatic memory, and also a fundamentally limited form of communication that could only know the surface of human pain, and leave readers wondering at the soundless depths below.

Franciscan Characters in Bosnian-Herzegovinian Drama Literature: On the Phenomenon Of Remembrance and Memory

In seven dramatic texts written by six Bosnian-Herzegovinian authors – Borivoje Jevtić, Štefa Jurkić, Nikola Šop, Nasko Frndić, Nada Đurevska and Dževad Karahasan – from the perspective of the art of memory we follow the construction of literary imaginaria on the examples of three Bosnian-Herzegovinian Franciscans (Anđeo Zvizdović, Matija Divković and Ivan Frano Jukić). The paper examines the relationship between historic reality and fiction, where in history was an inspirational incentive for dramatic texts, with individual members of the Franciscan order transformed into a collective place of traumatic memory. For this conscious work on cultural memory we are to thank both the history of remembrance and memory (mnemohistory) and the motivational associative images that have been cultivated in literature and the historiography of literature for more than a century.

Сучасна українська література в об’єктиві студій пам’яті: жіночі виміри

The article is dedicated to a very important topic, which belongs not only to literature but also to Ukrainian history, culture and social life. Speaking about memory, we mean the experience of the past, which very often influences the main aspects of our modernity, in particular, if we are talking about traumatic experience of the history, which was not rethought and did not become a socio-cultural discourse. In the context of the mentioned research problem, the fact that women experience cruelty, humiliation, and injustice is one of those questions, which were not solved during the last decades of developing of democratic societies. Contemporary Ukrainian literature tries to find a solution of unfair reception of the past using a very important method of rethinking traumatic memory. That is why it becomes the subject of different researches, one of which is in the suggested article.

Poeticile memoriei la Paul Celan și George Steiner: literatura și culpa supraviețuitorului

Both Paul Celan’s and George Steiner’s writings deal with the relationship between culture and barbarism; both originate in a terrible guilt of the survivor. In Paul Celan’s case, it is the guilt of surviving his own parents, exterminated in an internment camp in the Transnistria Governorate in 1942. In Steiner’s case, when he was 11 years old and on a vacation with his family in New York, his father decided that they would not return to Paris, but remain in the United States; in a few weeks, the Nazi army would occupy Paris; of Steiner’s Jewish colleagues at his elite high school in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, only one would survive (besides Steiner himself). In an autobiographical essay published in 1965 in Commentary, “A Kind of Survivor,” Steiner states directly: “I am a survivor, and not intact.” The Holocaust’s traumatic memory imbues every line in Celan’s poetry and every sentence in Steiner’s scholarly books – long before Holocaust studies became an academic discipline (he has done enormously himself in this respect). The present article documents traces of this fundamental trauma both in Celan’s poetry and in Steiner’s academic and autobiographic writing.

COLLECTIVE TRAUMA IN REFUGEE LITERATURE (BASED ON ALMANACS – 14 GIGABYTES AND HALLELUIAH)

Theories of traumatic memory are uniquely topical in modern theoretical discourse, Collective trauma is a complex of psychological sensations, which is formed in witnesses or participants of tragic events, who have to deal with psychological stigma. Theoretical framework about the collective trauma is relevant to events that have taken place in Georgia, as the epochal tragedy has changed ethnic and cultural environment in Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region. As the subject of research, we have defined the almanacs reflecting Georgian-Abkhazian and Georgian-Ossetian (provoked by the third force) conflicts: 14 Gigabytes and Halleluiah. Uniqueness of 14 Gigabytes is reasoned by the concept set by the editor (Nana Gaprindashvili) and the complier of the almanac (Tea Kalandia) – 14 narrators tell about the Abkhazian episode of Russian-Georgian war. Personal stories create the monumental canvas-reflection of the feelings of youth who have been deprived of childhood. Authors of the poetic almanac Halleluiah published in 2018, under the editorship of Mzia Khetaguri, are united under refugee stigma, pain caused by losing homes, trauma, which marks each of the texts like an unhealed wound. It must be emphasized that in none of the researched authors’ texts reflects hostility or aggression towards “conflicting sides” or even the main provoking power – Russia. The presented discourse allows us to confirm the research hypothesis: conflicts provoked by Russia have forced Georgian population of Abkhazia and Tskhinvali Region to leave their homes, to go through the horrors of war. Refugees have to deal with the stigma of being refugees and grave experience of collective trauma, which is creatively transformed, reflexed in the almanacs 14 Gigabytes and Halleluiah.

Rethinking the Traumatic Memory of the Holocaust in Literature (Based on Monika Schneiderman’s Work “Fałszerze pieprzu. Historia rodzinna”)

The article analyzes the attempt to reconstruct the historical memory of the Holocaust in the novel by Polish writer Monika Schneiderman “Fałszerze pieprzu. Historia rodzinna”. The writer questions the issue of Polish-Jewish relations, the responsibility and guilt of Holocaust witnesses to its victims. The author, who has a complex identity, seeks to find out for herself why her Polish family did not show enough sympathy for the suffering of Jews during World War II, including her Jewish relatives. As such indifference on the part of Poles to Holocaust victims was quite common, Monica Schneiderman tries to explain this by examining the relations between societies who lived side by side for centuries in the pre-war period, concluding that the two neighbouring nations lived in separate communities that were not open to each other. Based on the reproduction of the history of her own family, the author seeks answers to difficult questions of universal human values – perception and understanding of others, empathy, compassion. In her works Monica Schneiderman shows the need to include these recently “closed” but extremely important topics in the public discourse.

Traumatic Insight on Film Memory: Forced Assimilation in the Focus of Post-totalitarian Bulgarian Documentaries

Documentaries cover the subject of the extremely tragic processes of forced assimilation of Muslim population in Bulgaria in different ways. During the Communist regime, they feature the negative political visions. Social engineering in the totalitarian state aimed at confessional unity of the nation and this process was especially intense during the 1980s. Documentaries were a part of the government manipulative tools that targeted revival of the communist nationalism and an apprehensive play on the strings of patriotism. Cultural propaganda covered up repression, assaults, forced change of names, forced deportation, internment in prison camps, harassment of intellectuals from the Muslim community, and human rights violation. After 1989, Bulgarian filmmaking started interpreting this traumatic past in a different way, making a reassessment of history. Documentaries also took an active part in the debate on totalitarianism, using the screen to throw light on the political crimes. Beyond any dispute, one of the most painful subjects is the violence against Muslim communities that escalates to genocide. The subject of assimilation was more intensely covered during the 1990s and in the beginning of the Millennium. During the last decade, it gradually faded away and young authors today even neglect it. Although many good films have been made, we still get the feeling of insufficiency and understatement. The cinematic interpretations reactivate and question the traumatic memory, and further diagnose society. Quality documentary filmmaking always provides a multifaceted image of the past, preserves memories, and manages to aestheticize history in opposition to the trivial media images of the trauma. This paper analyses the genre and typological patterns specific for post-totalitarian Bulgarian documentaries. The focus of the study falls on leading authors, such as Maria Trayanova, Tatiana Vaksberg, Ivan Rossenov, Adela Peeva, Iglika Trifonova, Antony Donchev, Stanislava Kalcheva, Irina Nedeva and Andrey Getov, Dimitar Kotzev-Shosho. Two imagery trends are mainly identified: 1) documentary investigation with reconstruction of historical chronology and handling extremely valuable archives; 2) domination of the apprehensive portraiture genre, where personal records of events shape the picture of events in the past and track the consequences in the present. So far, Bulgarian film studies lack any full comparative study of the screen interpretation of assimilation processes before and after 1989.

Cultural Memory as a Means of Understanding Transculturality

Memory studies have been particularly active since the second half of the 20th century and include a mix of fields of culturology, social psychology, media archeology, political philosophy, and comparative literature. Memory studies have formed the basis of both collective and individual identity studies, as well as the study of psycho-social factors in understanding traumatic memory and attempts to overcome trauma. Memory studies have activated an in-depth analysis of the construction of national and cultural identities and brought them into the context of transnational and transcultural studies.Based on the above, the purpose of this report is to provide a transcultural understanding of national culture based on the study of cultural memory, which is primarily based on the study of national identity and the analysis of the compositional nature of common / shared myths.

Elaborare il trauma

In the article the author analyses the transition from poem in verses to "poem in prose" in Franca Mancinelli’s works. This stylistic choice was defined by the ability of the poem in prose to represent trauma. The article contains the results of an analysis of Libretto di transito from the point of view of post-traumatic memory. Nel presente articolo è analizzato il passaggio dalla poesia divisa in versi alla poesia in prosa nella lirica di Franca Mancinelli. Questa scelta stilistica è stata definita anche dal potere del genere ibrido della poesia in prosa di rappresentare il trauma. L’articolo riassume i risultati dell’analisi di Libretto di transito dal punto di vista della memoria post-traumatica.