The psychic skin between individual and collective states of mind in trauma

This article attempts to develop an argument about a relationship between the individual intra-psychic functioning and the social and political life in trauma. This relationship, it is argued, is mediated by the skin and sensations related to touch and the imagination of it. The deepest transformations of the individual self and a group’s political and social life seem to go through a rearrangement of the psychic skin as a means of development. Three examples show how the psychic skin operates at the point of intersection between the individual and group states of mind reshaping the individual self and group identity. One example is about the relationship between the fascist architecture in the city of Rome and the 1930s fascist political project of shaping a ‘New Man’; another is my understanding of the post-traumatic suffering and changes of my refugee patients who have survived torture, which is a trauma inflicted by a collective; and third, it is an hypothesis of the role which the Western Wall in Jerusalem had in reshaping Israeli identities on the backdrop of traumatic history and wider tensions of two peoples on that disputed territory.

The narrative matrix: a narrative-hermeneutic approach in refugee care

This article presents an approach to refugee care that is based on a hermeneutic understanding of the meanings constituted by narratives in therapy. It proposes distinguishing psychotherapeutic models commonly used in therapy with refugees, such as post-traumatic stress disorder or post-traumatic growth theories, from an approach that involves many different narratives in the form of multi-voiced conversation within the therapeutic setting. Such a concept, called here the narrative matrix, is discussed and presented as an alternative and efficient way of providing therapeutic support for refugees and asylum seekers. It discusses family therapy with refugees as an example of the narrative-hermeneutic approach that involves not only different voices from members of a family but different psychotherapeutic models.

Large-group psychology and political conflicts: an introduction to the psychosocial work of Vamik Volkan

Professor Volkan responds to questions about the emergence and development of his work as a psychoanalytic consultant and mediator in inter- and intra-national conflict situations. He outlines the circumstances of its beginnings at the University of Virginia and its subsequent growth including the development of interventions based on the ‘Tree Model’. He emphasises the centrality to this informal diplomatic work of the concept of large-group identity, and refers to some of the elaborations of this, for example in the influential concepts of chosen trauma and chosen triumph. He discusses the relationship of this non-clinical application of psychoanalytic ideas to the clinically-based schools of psychoanalytic thought, considers the conditions which lend themselves to effective interventions, and the possibility for improved management of political conflicts.

Healing the ‘split’: trauma as a dynamic in psychosis

In this article, the first author uses an autobiographical account of a trauma she experienced and shows how, in her understanding, this led to her developing what was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenia. The trauma forced her to accept a distortion of her understanding of reality, which, she explains, caused a split in her ego between the inner truth of the event and the imposed distortion. She considers Freud’s theory of how trauma develops and looks at how it applies to her case. Using Winnicott’s theory of there being a ‘false self’ in psychosis, she shows how a false self was formed out of the distortion. Bion’s understanding of the development of thought applied to trauma is used to give insight into how the mind finds it difficult to process thought when a trauma occurs and, using Brown’s understanding, she indicates how this is similar to what happens in psychosis. She utilizes Winnicott’s explanation of there being a trauma not lived through, as if not experienced, being present in psychosis and how the need to experience, ‘remember’, this trauma is for healing to take place. In conclusion, she argues how the reaching and establishing of the inner truth is what is needed for recovery to happen and for the split in the ego to heal.

Devices for illuminating defended subjectivities in complex qualitative case interpretation: An example from recent BNIM practice

For a long time now, fairly central to what has emerged as ‘psychosocial studies’ has been the notion of psychosocietal ‘defendedness’. This is the psychoanalytic notion that people (not excluding social science researchers) must be understood in general as being ‘defended subjectivities’. This immediately raises the question of the ‘defended researcher’ being sensitive to – and having procedures for detecting and interpreting the working of – such ‘defensiveness’ in the interactions of their subjects and themselves. Biography-based research raises these issues particularly strongly. One such method, known as the ‘biographical narrative interpretative method’ (BNIM) of interviewing and case interpretation, has been used in the anglophone world for more than 20 years. While BNIM prescribes an audit trail for its interpretative practices, it is rare to discover a fully audited sequence of components, and rarer still to have access to illuminating free-associative fieldnotes that catalogue the researcher’s evolving subjectivity. This article discusses defendedness in a case interpretation within a BNIM-using PhD. We conclude that, to defeat the defensiveness of both researcher and peer-auditor (the co-authors of this article), several BNIM techniques need to be used systematically and that, in particular, a ‘private and confidential’ independent peer audit is valuable under certain conditions, and should be provided for in any research proposal. Through peer audit, the researcher can be (usually uncomfortably) sensitised to new possibilities about their otherwise inadequately understood defended processes and conclusions.

Reanimating the plague

The idea of ‘plague’ has returned to public consciousness with the arrival of COVID-19. An anachronistic and extremely problematic concept for thinking about biopolitical catastrophe, plague nevertheless offers an enormous historical range and a potentially highly generative metaphorical framework for psychosocial studies to engage with, for example, through Albert Camus’ (2013) The Plague and Sophocles’ (2015) Oedipus The King. It is, moreover, a word that is likely to remain firmly within the remit of public consciousness as we move further into the Anthropocene, to face further pandemics and the spectre of antibiotic resistance. A return to plague also opens up the question of a return to psychoanalysis, which Freud is often cited as having described as a ‘plague’. Psychoanalysis is, like plague, a troubling and problematic discourse for psychosocial studies, but, like plague, it may also help us to work through the disorders and dis-eases of COVID times. In fact, if the recent pandemic has reanimated the notion of plague, the plague metaphor may in turn help to reanimate psychoanalysis, and in this article we suggest some of the analogical, even genealogical, resonances of such an implication.

From negation to negationism: the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil

Even beyond the dramatic social and health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, one can affirm that the manner in which the pandemic was and is being handled in Brazil involves more than mere questions of public health. This article focuses on the negationist discourse that emerged in Brazil, and proposes that its roots are to be found in a previous process of dismantling established knowledge and identifications. This process is observed in the government’s handling of the pandemic. To support this idea, we refer to two main clinical and theoretical frameworks, the first of which involves a psychoanalytic understanding of the place of truth in discursivity and in identification processes; this will be employed to shed light on a particular functioning of negationist discourses. Second, the idea of historical ontology is introduced from the philosophy of science to gain a further understanding of the effects of this process on identification.

Writing into the Open

This Open Space article poetically explores the potential of writing as a transformative practice. The interweaving of analytical and creative registers generates an intertextuality that is influenced by Hélène Cixous’s concept of ‘écriture féminine’. This practice is taken as a methodology and contributes to the article through providing examples of the ways in which different forms of writing are capable of pushing boundaries and, in due course, effecting change. In light of the profound impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, I attempt to illustrate how writing across and through genres and disciplinary boundaries might offer hopeful alternative ways of thinking and being.