Collectively Speaking: The Many Meanings of Naming and Sharing Group Trauma

Abstract

This commentary on Kathleen McPhillips’s (this issue) “‘Unbearable Knowledge’” paper looks at implications for theory of the model she uses to analyze collective trauma. While affirming the model’s robustness, it is suggested that it has both theoretical and political ramifications that need to be further spelled out. The commentary ends with several questions regarding the leap from individual to collective trauma. These include the importance of maintaining a steady appreciation of multiplicity, which is foundational to relational psychoanalytic theory; second, the need to appreciate the complexity of dismantling a collective dissociative defense; and finally, the significance of spontaneity in healing.

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Notes on contributors

Sally Swartz

Sally Swartz, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She is a member of the University of Cape Town’s Psychology Department, and is Training Faculty in the clinical psychology master’s program. She is a member of the Cape Town Self Psychoanalytic Psychology Group and offers courses and supervision in the area of relational theory. She has published widely in the fields of colonial psychiatric history, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy in South Africa. She is author of Homeless Wanderers: Movement and Mental Illness in the Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century (University of Cape Town Press, 2015).