The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting: Essays on Trauma, History, and Memory

The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting: Essays on Trauma, History, and Memory brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines that draw on multiple perspectives to address issues that arise at the intersection of trauma, history, and memory. Contributors include critical theorists, critical historians, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, and a working artist. The authors use intergenerational trauma theory while also pushing and pulling at the edges of conventional understandings of how trauma is defined. This book respects the importance of the recuperation of memory and the creation of interstitial spaces where trauma might be voiced. The writers are consistent in showing a deep respect for the sociohistorical context of subjective formation and the political importance of recuperating dangerous memory—the kind of memory that some authorities go to great lengths to erase. The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting is of interest to critical historians, critical social theorists, psychotherapists, psychosocial theorists, and to those exploring the possibilities of life as the practice of freedom.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Foreword, Claude Barbre Acknowledgments Introduction: The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting: Introductory Essay Michael O’Loughlin Part I Ethics of Memory Chapter 1: Is Autonomy Unethical?: Trauma and the Politics of Responsibility Mari Ruti Chapter 2: Troubling Naturalized Trauma, Essentialized Therapy, and the Asphyxiation of Dangerous Memory Michael O’Loughlin Part II Biographical Remnants Chapter 3: Wit(h)nessing the Other’s Trauma: An Exploration of Barbara Loftus’s Painting Through the Work of Bracha Ettinger Angie Voela Chapter 4: In Search of Forgotten Memories after Thirty-three Years: A Journey Home Minh Truong-George Chapter 5: The Sense of Loss and the Search for Meaning Norma Tracey & Graham Toomey Chapter 6: Anglo-German Displacement and Diaspora in the Early Twentieth Century: An Intergenerational Haunting Nigel Williams Chapter 7: Ghosts in the Mirror: A Granddaughter of Holocaust Survivors Reflects the Faces of History Nirit Gradwohl Pisano Chapter 8: Questions Unasked: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma in the Life Narratives of Lithuanian Women Survivors of the 1941 Soviet Deportations. Justina Kaminskaite Dillon & Michael O’Loughlin Chapter 9: They Left it All Behind: Psychological Experiences of Jewish Immigration and the Ambiguity of Loss Hannah Hahn Part III Historical Remnants Chapter 10: The Silence of the Grandchildren of the Civil War: Transgenerational Trauma in Spain Clara Valverde & Luis Martín-Cabrera Chapter 11: A South African Story of Disavowal: Towards a Genealogy of Post-apartheid Empathy Ross Truscott Chapter 12: Spanish Horror as Te(x)timony of Mass Extermination and the Cultural Trauma of Enforced Disappearance Scott Boehm Chapter 13: “Each of Us Bears His Own Hell:” A Window into Venues of Trauma in Central Eastern Europe Reinhold Stipsits Chapter 14: Transmission of Jewish/Israeli Collective Memory as Evident in the Narratives of Israeli Soldiers who participated in The 2006 Second Lebanon War. Naama De La Fontaine & Kate Szymanski Chapter 15: Trauma, Community, and Contemporary Racial Violence: Reflections on the Architecture of Memory Ricardo Ainslie Chapter 16: Managing Collapse: Commemorating September 11th through the Relational Design of a Memorial Museum Billie Pivnick & Tom Hennes Afterword, Marilyn Charles