Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practice

Description

Demons in the Consulting Room: Echoes of Genocide, Slavery and Extreme Trauma in Psychoanalytic Practiceisthe second of two volumes addressing the overwhelming, often unmetabolizable feelings related to mourning, both on an individual and mass scale. Authors in this volume explore the potency of ghosts, ghostliness and the darker, often grotesque aspects of these phenomena. While ghosts can be spectral presences that we feel protective of, demons haunt in a particularly virulent way, distorting experience, our sense of reality and our character. Bringing together a collection of clinical and theoretical papers, emons in the Consulting Room, reveals how the most extreme types of trauma can continue to have effects across generations, and how these effects manifest in the consulting room. Essays in this volume consider traumas that have affected multiple generations of people, such as the Holocaust, experiences in the gulags, and the experience of slavery. Authors here consider the clinical challenges of working with the demonic force in severe childhood abuse and the effects of serious and prolonged physical injury and illness. Inevitably, there is in such difficult clinical work, the combined effects of hauntings in the analysts and in patients and often in the surrounding culture. In this book, distinguished psychoanalysts explore the myriad forms of ghosts and the demonic, which interfere and disrupt the endlessly difficult psychic work of mourning. It will be of interest to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as social workers, family therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists. emons in the Consulting Room ill appeal to those specializing in bereavement and trauma and, on a broader level, to sociologists and historians interested in understanding means of coping with loss and grief on both an individual and larger scale basis. Demons in the Consulting Room- Front Cover Demons in the Consulting Room Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of figures Author biographies Introduction The Consulting Room The culture and the community Note Bibliography Clinical Chapter 1: Ghosts in the consulting room: reluctant ancestors “Ghosts”: An explanation Trauma and desymbolized somatic ghosts (Re)Enactment as yours, mine and ours: interpsychic-intersomatic transmission of ghosts All hell broke loose Notes Bibliography Chapter 2: The Dybbuk: it’s me or him The “bad” father and the tender witness Your heart must not be soft It’s me or him Without your clothes Excess and containment, longing and shame Conclusion Note Bibliography Chapter 3: Occupation: a ghost story So why is this a ghost story? Conclusion References Chapter 4: Repressed ghosts and dissociated vampires in the enacted dimension of psychoanalytic treatment Introduction Two spectral metaphors Ghosts and vampires in folklore and analytic treatment Specific traumas and the vampire metaphor The enacted dimension: the scene of the action The intergenerational transmission of a Holocaust vampire: the case of Ann Summary and conclusion Coda Notes Bibliography Chapter 5: Do we find or lose ourselves in the negative? Abstract What is coming The case: what is represented What’s in clear (sight) Treatment history The image: What we do see The Showing The Enactment Knowing the difference between life and death The body brings terror Discussion Being together not coming together Summary Notes Bibliography Community & culture Chapter 6: The past is the presence between us: psychoanalysis and the specter of the Shoah Bibliography Chapter 7: Ghosts and the sexual boundary violation: the limits of an idea Intimate Public 1 Public 2 References Chapter 8: Basic uncertainty and totalitarian objects Bibliography Chapter 9: The presence of the past: transmission of slavery’s traumas Trauma The slave’s subjectivity The dead mother Transmission Bibliography Chapter 10: Wounded stories Derrida’s silence Inabilities to mourn The electorate in the graves Debt to the dead Uninvited guests Notes Afterword References Index