Affect and Trauma Transmission

My paper takes up a comparative view on individual identity as featured in two literary works that deal with traumatised Jewish youth in the aftermath of the Holocaust: Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. As I intend to show, the trauma of the Holocaust forces an arbitrary process of identity deconstruction upon the juvenile characters’ incompletely developed selves, which triggers in their adult lives a need for self-reconstruction, essentially experienced against thoroughly altered cultural, historical and geographical backgrounds. These characters’ initial flight for their lives and concurrent transgression of various national borders, with all the tribulations that they entail, will be regarded as complex steps towards mapping a physical trajectory of inner change. Ultimately, this survival journey will be retraced and re-mapped in old age in an attempt to reconstruct, negotiate and reconcile with an original identity.
Indubitably, forceful migration engenders a break with former patterns of selfhood and generates a re-shifting of identity elements such as the cultural, ethnical, national, psychological and geographical. The prevalent prevailing ethnic factor is the lens through which these characters later perceive their rapidly changing time and space, while their interest in poetry, literary discourse and architecture expresses a need to assume and incorporate this change. Comparatively, this focus on ethnicity will be regarded against current views of plural identity affiliation and multiple membership, in an attempt to enquire into the extent to which these destinies strike an incipient balance between localism and cosmopolitanism, exclusion and inclusion, alterity and sameness.
My purpose is to explore the physical and emotional distance between the deconstructed and reconstructed types of Jewishness as embodied by these fictional characters, and to stress the uniqueness of their physical and mental path back to themselves.

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According to the poet Elias Canetti, "All the things one has forgotten / scream for help in dreams." To the ancient Egyptians they were prophecies, and in world folklore they have often marked visitations from the dead. For Freud they were expressions of "wish fulfillment," and for Jung, symbolic representations of mythical archetypes. Although there is still much disagreement about the significance and function of dreams, they seem to serve as a barometer of current mind and body states.

In this volume, Deirdre Barrett brings together the study of dreams and the psychology of trauma. She has called on a distinguished group of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers--among them Rosalind Cartwright, Robert J. Lifton, and Oliver Sacks--to consider how trauma shapes dreaming and what the dreaming mind might reveal about trauma. The book focuses on catastrophic events, such as combat, political torture, natural disasters, and rape. The lasting effects of childhood trauma, such as sexual abuse or severe burns, on personality formation, the nature of memories of early trauma, and the development of defenses related to amnesia and dissociation are all considered. The book also takes up trauma and adult dreams, including Vietnam veterans and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Holocaust survivors and perpetrators, rape victims, and firestorm survivors. Finally, this volume concludes with a look at the potential "traumas of normal life," such as divorce, bereavement, and life-threatening illness, and the role of dreams in working through normal grief and loss.

Taken together, these diverse perspectives illuminate the universal and the particular effects of traumatic experience. For physicians and clinicians, determining the etiology of nightmares offers valuable diagnostic and therapeutic insights for individual treatment. This book provides a way of juxtaposing the research in the separate fields of trauma and dreams, and learning from their discoveries.

"Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture is Douglas Robinson’s study of postcolonial affect—specifically, of the breakdown of the normative (regulatory) circulation of affect in the refugee experience and the colonial encounter, the restructuring of that regulatory circulation in colonization, and the persistence of that restructuring in decolonization and intergenerational trauma. Robinson defines “somatics” as a cultural construction of “reality” and “identity” through the regulatory circulation of evaluative affect.
This book is divided into three essays covering the refugee experience, colonization and decolonization, and intergenerational trauma. Each essay contains a review of empirical studies of its main topic, a study of literary representations of that topic, and a study of postcolonial theoretical spins. The literary representations in the refugee essay are a novel and short story by the Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat; in the colonization essay a short film by Javier Fesser and a novella by Mahasweta Devi (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak); and in the intergenerational trauma essay novels by James Welch and Toni Morrison and a short story by Percival Everett. The first essay’s theoretical spins include Deleuze and Guattari on nomad thought and Iain Chambers on migrancy; the second’s, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and theories of postcolonial affect in Bhabha and Spivak; the third’s, work on historical trauma by Cathy Caruth and Dominic LaCapra.
Douglas Robinson is Dean of Arts and Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University."

"""Europe’s architectural ruins and urban blend of past and present are thematised in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz as both localisers of memory and metaphors of human trauma. Together with the written, archival testimonies, on the one hand, and the unwritten, human memory, on the other, the fictional urban sites depicted in this novel  ( i.e. the London streets and tube stations, the Antwerpen, Luzern and Paris train stations, the former Prague ghetto and many other ruins and fortress walls) still bear the wounds of combat, oppression and murder. Discovered through a complex process of archeological reconstruction and identification, these public places help reconstruct a harrowing personal story of self-loss and self-discovery.

Jacques Austerlitz is now a professor of architecture, a British citizen plagued - at the end of his career - by the crisis of non-identity. His travels take him around Europe for assiduous research and careful observation of historical ruins and architectural wonders, while he himself is haunted by the eerie feeling of something essential missing from his life. It is when he decides to retrace the train trip back to his native Czech Republic from London (via Germany) that early childhood memories - thought dead - start coming back to him. The map of his estrangement as a child refugee during WWII is now reconstructed step by step, with a double climax in Prague and Paris, two urban spaces still imbued with trauma, where he tracks down elements of his parents’ own story of deportation and death at the Nazis’ hand. 

This paper proposes, therefore, to explore the archeology of trauma as a sum of fragmented stories preserved and transmitted by architectural relics as a reassembled whole, one that carries, compliments and sometimes replaces human memory. Although materially tangible and more reliable than the often elusive human memory, these soulless sites of trauma fail nevertheless to provide that soothing, reassuring element so necessary to closure and human healing."""

El siglo XXI supuso un momento importante para la sociedad española con respecto a su propio pasado violento. Influenciado por los ejemplos internacionales de justicia reparadora y el movimiento para la recuperación de memoria histórica, el interés renovado en la guerra civil, la dictadura de Franco y la Transición dio paso a una mirada más crítica del pasado reciente en la esfera pública. Las iniciativas lideradas por grupos como la Asociación para la recuperación de la memoria histórica (ARMH) ponen la atención en las familias que aún buscan recuperar los restos de sus allegados asesinados. Estos procesos individuales de duelo inconclusos, junto con la noción de un déficit de memoria colectiva, pusieron de relieve toda una serie de tareas pendientes con respecto al pasado. Como resultado, las representaciones culturales buscaban arrojar luz sobre estos temas. En el caso de la literatura, tanto autores veteranos como escritores de una nueva generación buscaban corregir ese déficit, descubriendo historias y episodios perdidos, ignorados u olvidados del pasado reciente. En la presente tesis, empezamos con la premisa de que no solo hay un déficit de memoria sino también un déficit afectivo: ¿qué implica la existencia de miles de duelos inconclusos individuales para el colectivo? ¿Cómo nos ciernen estos ejemplos de pérdidas pasadas en el presente? ¿Cómo hemos de aproximarnos a estas experiencias cuando, generaciones más tarde, no se perciben como experiencias propias? Para abordar estas cuestiones, examinamos la literatura para explorar qué otros modo de representación podrían existir más allá de aquellos que buscan recuperar ciertos detalles históricos. Proponemos una categoría de narrativa que denominamos “narrativas postraumáticas de duelo persistente” con el objetivo de explorar cómo la narrativa podría (re)describir maneras de abordar experiencias de pérdidas pasadas que pudieran llevarnos a un potencial proceso de duelo colectivo. Más que construir un inventario exhaustivo de ejemplos, el objetivo principal de esta caracterización es examinar las novelas sobre la guerra civil publicadas a partir del año 2000 a fin de comprobar que se les puede aplicar la categoría de “escritura de duelo”. La tesis está dividida en dos partes. La primera sienta las bases teóricas sobre el duelo, cómo estos conceptos se han aplicado a colectivos y a la literatura y ofrece una descripción de esas narrativas postraumáticas de duelo persistente, su temática y su poética. La segunda parte aborda el caso español, el boom literario de memoria y el aumento de producciones literarias a partir del año 2000. También se examinan el caso de procesos de duelos inconclusos y la noción de una necesidad de un proceso de duelo colectivo. Luego ofrecemos un análisis de tres obras españolas que consideramos como “narrativas postraumáticas de duelo persistente: Los girasoles ciegos (2004) de Alberto Méndez, Santo diablo (2004) de Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga y Las voces fugitivas (2013) de Alfons Cervera. El objetivo de esta tesis es explorar los modos en los que la literatura se puede concebir como una práctica en representar y (re)dibujar los lazos afectivos de experiencias de pérdidas pasadas con nuestra realidad presente como un modo de participar de un proceso de duelo colectivo.

......

The 21st century marked an important moment for Spanish society with regards to its own violent past. Influenced by international examples of reparative justice and the historical memory movement, the renewed interest in the Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship and the Transition led to a more critical gaze of the past in the socio-political sphere. Initiatives like the exhumations carried out by groups like the Asociación para la recuperación de memoria histórica (ARMH) place attention on grieving families who had yet to recover the remains of their murdered loved ones. These arrested individual mourning processes, along with the notion of a deficit in the social collective memory, highlighted a series of unfished tasks at large. As a result, cultural representations sought to bring these topics into the spotlight. In the case of literature, both veteran writers and authors of a new generation alike sought to correct this deficit, uncovering lost, hidden or forgotten stories and episodes from the recent past. In this dissertation, we start with the premise that not only has there been a memory deficit, but also an affective deficit: what does the existence of thousands of unfinished individual mourning processes mean for the collective? How do these examples of past losses concern us in the present? How are we to approach these experiences when, generations later, they may not be perceived as directly our own? To address these questions, we turn to literature to explore what other modes of representation of the past might exist, beyond those that seek to recover certain historical details. We a narrative category we call “posttraumatic narratives of persistent mourning” with the aim of exploring the ways in which narrative might (re)describe approaches to past experiences of loss that could lead to a potential collective mourning process. Rather than constructing an exhaustive inventory of possible examples, the principal aim in this characterization is to examine novels on the Civil War published after 2000 to confirm that the category of mourning narrative may be applied to them. The dissertation is divided into two main parts. The first lays the theoretical groundwork on mourning, how these ideas have been applied to collectives and to literature, and offers a description of these posttraumatic narratives of persistent mourning, their themes and narrative poetics. The second deals directly with the Spanish case, addressing the memory boom and the increase in literary productions from the year 2000 on. The case of unfinished mourning process and the notion of a need for a collective mourning process are also examined. We then offer an analysis of three Spanish works that we consider “posttraumatic narratives of persistent mourning: Los girasoles ciegos (2004) by Alberto Méndez, Santo diablo (2004) by Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga and Las voces fugitivas (2013) by Alfons Cervera. The objective of this dissertation is explore the ways in which literature can be conceived of as practice in both representing and (re)drawing the affective bonds of past experiences of losses to our present reality as a way of participating in a collective mourning process.

Evidence from imaging and anatomical studies suggests that the midcingulate cortex (MCC) is a dynamic hub lying at the interface of affect and cognition. In particular, this neural system appears to integrate information about conflict and punishment in order to optimize behavior in the face of action-outcome uncertainty. In a series of meta-analyses, we show how recent human electrophysiological research provides compelling evidence that frontal-midline theta signals reflecting MCC activity are moderated by anxiety and predict adaptive behavioral adjustments. These findings underscore the importance of frontal theta activity to a broad spectrum of control operations. We argue that frontal-midline theta provides a neurophysiologically plausible mechanism for optimally adjusting behavior to uncertainty, a hallmark of situations that elicit anxiety and demand cognitive control. These observations compel a new perspective on the mechanisms guiding motivated learning and behavior and provide a framework for understanding the role of the MCC in temperament and psychopathology.

"El fantasma comporta un estatuto dual al comienzo del siglo XXI: una evanescencia fascinante que, sin embargo, mantiene su capacidad perturbadora, aun cuando sólo haga uso de ella en ocasiones especiales. Me atrevo a sugerir que esa dualidad del fantasma contemporáneo está directamente relacionada con dos fenómenos. En primer lugar, la consagración a finales del siglo XVIII de la razón moderna a expensas de otros saberes, otras formas de conocer y otras posibles relaciones del saber con el poder. A partir de ese momento, se hace posible señalar ciertos saberes como producto de la superstición, el mito, la ignorancia; todos, la contracara oscura de la razón luminosa. No en vano durante una buena parte del siglo XVIII la razón victoriosa, optimista, se cree capaz de dominar los más íntimos secretos de la naturaleza y de expulsar los más terribles fantasmas de la historia. En segundo lugar, aparece, sin embargo, la necesidad de reubicar las fuerzas inquietantes que acompañaban esos otros saberes, de encontrarles otros espacios menos amenazadores, de domesticarlos. Nacen los teatros de sombras, las cajas fantasmagóricas y otros espectáculos similares. El belga Etienne Gaspard Robert combinaba “experimentos ópticos […] y efectos de teatro para seducir a un público impresionable […] [y generar] un efecto macabro, terrorífico y fascinante a la vez” (en Roca, J. (c) 2007). Fantasmagoría que cada vez pierde más de lo terrible y gana en espectáculo, en muchos casos difiriendo su potencial inquietante. No obstante, como señalan Slavoj Zizek y Jacques Derrida, los desarrollos modernos en tecnologías y telecomunicaciones en vez de disminuir el ámbito de los fantasmas aumentan su poder y su capacidad de asediarnos. Tal vez por eso encuentran un hogar propicio en el cine y —quizá en los momentos más lúcidos, precisamente cuando no pierde su dimensión terrorífica— también en el arte y la literatura. No se explica de otro modo el que algún perturbado — y no lo digo en el sentido patológico, aunque también admite esa acepción— se acercara a los espejos de Óscar Muñoz, para borrar con sus manos los rostros crispados que llegan del más allá. Esto no es un acto ingenuo ni gratuito; al contrario, en un país donde la figura del ‘desaparecido’ constituye una devastadora inscripción rutinaria de lo espectral en lo social, el borrón sólo puede entenderse como una salida desesperada. "

Between 2002 to 2005, there were saturation levels of media coverage in Japan on the abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korean agents in the 1970s and the 1980s. What were the cause of this intensive focus? This article focuses on the television during this period to show the factor's driving coverage,  the effects of this in shaping public opinion, and in turn, public opinion's influence on Japan's foreign policies towards and negotiation tactics with North Korea.

... her research participants. Carolyn Mears evokes the need for empathy when she sets the tone of her book, writing: "Successful interviewing requires attention to another's point of view" (p. 4, emphasis added). Some years ago ...

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How to mobilize a traumatic national history on behalf of a less fractured polity? How to gain closure over a past that bifurcates the nation and establishes (at least) two national histories — history as told by the victims and by the perpetrators, now to be replaced by a history, as Mark Sanders (2003: 79) describes it, not of `bare facts but, at a crucial level, a history judged, and thus shaped, according to norms of universal human rights'. How to engineer through politics the creation of new national selves, no longer pathologically attached to old and circumscribed forms of identification? These are now the critical questions confronting many elites: the overcoming of traumatic memory through various publicly mandated `technologies of the self'. To heal the nation requires the curing of the self. The politics of social repair understands itself largely through a psychologically inflected vocabulary of regret, apology, and forgiveness — the language of reconciliation. ...

"El fantasma comporta un estatuto dual al comienzo del siglo XXI: una evanescencia fascinante que, sin embargo, mantiene su capacidad perturbadora, aun cuando sólo haga uso de ella en ocasiones especiales. Me atrevo a sugerir que esa dualidad del fantasma contemporáneo está directamente relacionada con dos fenómenos. En primer lugar, la consagración a finales del siglo XVIII de la razón moderna a expensas de otros saberes, otras formas de conocer y otras posibles relaciones del saber con el poder. A partir de ese momento, se hace posible señalar ciertos saberes como producto de la superstición, el mito, la ignorancia; todos, la contracara oscura de la razón luminosa. No en vano durante una buena parte del siglo XVIII la razón victoriosa, optimista, se cree capaz de dominar los más íntimos secretos de la naturaleza y de expulsar los más terribles fantasmas de la historia. En segundo lugar, aparece, sin embargo, la necesidad de reubicar las fuerzas inquietantes que acompañaban esos otros saberes, de encontrarles otros espacios menos amenazadores, de domesticarlos. Nacen los teatros de sombras, las cajas fantasmagóricas y otros espectáculos similares. El belga Etienne Gaspard Robert combinaba “experimentos ópticos […] y efectos de teatro para seducir a un público impresionable […] [y generar] un efecto macabro, terrorífico y fascinante a la vez” (en Roca, J. (c) 2007). Fantasmagoría que cada vez pierde más de lo terrible y gana en espectáculo, en muchos casos difiriendo su potencial inquietante. No obstante, como señalan Slavoj Zizek y Jacques Derrida, los desarrollos modernos en tecnologías y telecomunicaciones en vez de disminuir el ámbito de los fantasmas aumentan su poder y su capacidad de asediarnos. Tal vez por eso encuentran un hogar propicio en el cine y —quizá en los momentos más lúcidos, precisamente cuando no pierde su dimensión terrorífica— también en el arte y la literatura. No se explica de otro modo el que algún perturbado — y no lo digo en el sentido patológico, aunque también admite esa acepción— se acercara a los espejos de Óscar Muñoz, para borrar con sus manos los rostros crispados que llegan del más allá. Esto no es un acto ingenuo ni gratuito; al contrario, en un país donde la figura del ‘desaparecido’ constituye una devastadora inscripción rutinaria de lo espectral en lo social, el borrón sólo puede entenderse como una salida desesperada. "

El fantasma comporta un estatuto dual al comienzo del siglo XXI: una evanescencia fascinante que, sin embargo, mantiene su capacidad perturbadora, aun cuando sólo haga uso de ella en ocasiones especiales. Me atrevo a sugerir que esa dualidad del fantasma contemporáneo está directamente relacionada con dos fenómenos. En primer lugar, la consagración a finales del siglo XVIII de la razón moderna a expensas de otros saberes, otras formas de conocer y otras posibles relaciones del saber con el poder. A partir de ese momento, se hace posible señalar ciertos saberes como producto de la superstición, el mito, la ignorancia; todos, la contracara oscura de la razón luminosa. No en vano durante una buena parte del siglo XVIII la razón victoriosa, optimista, se cree capaz de dominar los más íntimos secretos de la naturaleza y de expulsar los más terribles fantasmas de la historia.
En segundo lugar, aparece, sin embargo, la necesidad de reubicar las fuerzas inquietantes que acompañaban esos otros saberes, de encontrarles otros espacios menos amenazadores, de domesticarlos. Nacen los teatros de sombras, las cajas fantasmagóricas y otros espectáculos similares. El belga Etienne Gaspard Robert combinaba “experimentos ópticos […] y efectos de teatro para seducir a un público impresionable […] [y generar] un efecto macabro, terrorífico y fascinante a la vez” (en Roca, J. (c) 2007). Fantasmagoría que cada vez pierde más de lo terrible y gana en espectáculo, en muchos casos difiriendo su potencial inquietante. No obstante, como señalan Slavoj Zizek y Jacques Derrida, los desarrollos modernos en tecnologías y telecomunicaciones en vez de disminuir el ámbito de los fantasmas aumentan su poder y su capacidad de asediarnos. Tal vez por eso encuentran un hogar propicio en el cine y —quizá en los momentos más lúcidos, precisamente cuando no pierde su dimensión terrorífica— también en el arte y la literatura. No se explica de otro modo el que algún perturbado — y no lo digo en el sentido patológico, aunque también admite esa acepción— se acercara a los espejos de Óscar Muñoz, para borrar con sus manos los rostros crispados que llegan del más allá. Esto no es un acto ingenuo ni gratuito; al contrario, en un país donde la figura del ‘desaparecido’ constituye una devastadora inscripción rutinaria de lo espectral en lo social, el borrón sólo puede entenderse como una salida desesperada.

Levy and Sznaider’s positing of a global cosmopolitan memory has negated the reductionism inherent in classifying national memory cultures as homogeneous, globalized phenomena by redefining the interaction between the two as a coalescence of the two elements rather than a superimposition of the global on the national with the attendant eradication of the latter. A survey of countries that have adopted the edicts of cosmopolitan memory, however, indicates that this coalescence can take the form of either a strained dialectic or a relatively easy symbiosis. By examining primarily the interaction between cosmopolitan memory and national memory conflicts in Ireland and Austria, this article aims to ascertain the constituent elements of the national memory conflict which serve to increase or diminish the strength of the influence of global cosmopolitan memory.

Kristeva’s Fiction is a collection of essays about the novels of Julia Kristeva. It includes original and previously unpublished essays by scholars of Kristeva’s work.  It addresses the issue of the relationship between writing and psychoanalysis and it makes a compelling case for reading Kristeva’s fiction as an antidote to the new maladies of the soul.

The drive that initiated this doctoral thesis was the absence of a resource that investigated social trauma’s effect on business ethics; therefore this thesis investigates the relationship between social trauma and business ethics practices aiming to make the first contribution on an academically untouched topic. As in the case of individual psychology, social psychology also examines matters on a case-to-case basis for a clear understanding of the underlying phenomena and complex processes. Hence, considering the past and the current characteristics of Cypriot Turks of North Cyprus, they were chosen as the case study society.

In order to explore social trauma’s impact on business ethics, different disciplines were uniquely synthesized through particular lenses; large group psychology, business-government-society relationship and individual ethical decision-making.

The absence of previous work in this area suggested exploratory, qualitative research to be the optimum approach. Rich primary and secondary data were collected through interviews, observations, photographs and documents. The resulting data analysis and findings contribute to the current body of research on business ethics, social trauma and business-government-society relationship at the empirical and conceptual levels. The key contribution of this research is to substantiate the link between social trauma and business ethics, and the way social trauma causes unethical behaviour through its effect on the institutions and individual-social interaction.

Furthermore, a model of social trauma and business ethics relationship was developed which also provides a framework for potential future research in other social contexts. Even after decades, social trauma can impact on the conduct of business and can interfere with the individual ethical decision-making process in multiple ways; the causes and consequences of this are discussed in depth. The way this impact occurs and its particulars may differ from one large group to another, and this should be noted before the framework is applied to any other society.