Trauma and The Relational Dynamics of Life-History Interviewing

Abstract

Practitioners of oral history and life-history interviewing often claim therapeutic benefits for their practice. This article questions these claims especially when interviews involve a traumatic dimension. The repetitive nature of trauma can undermine the best intentions of the oral historian requiring the interviewer to be alert to both conscious and unconscious dynamics of the interview.

Notes

¹Mary Marshall Clark, ‘Fields Notes on Catastrophe: Reflections on the September 11, 2001, Oral History Memory and Narrative Project, in Donald A. Ritchie, The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 257.

²Mary Marshall Clark, ‘Fields Notes on Catastrophe: Reflections on the September 11, 2001, Oral History Memory and Narrative Project, in Donald A. Ritchie, The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 259.

³Mary Marshall Clark, ‘Fields Notes on Catastrophe: Reflections on the September 11, 2001, Oral History Memory and Narrative Project, in Donald A. Ritchie, The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 262.

⁴Mary Marshall Clark, ‘Fields Notes on Catastrophe: Reflections on the September 11, 2001, Oral History Memory and Narrative Project, in Donald A. Ritchie, The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 259.

⁵Jerome Groopman, ‘The Grief Industry’, The New Yorker, January 26, 2004: 36; Arnold A. P. Van Emmerik, Jan, H. Kamphuis, Alexander M. Hulsbasch, Paul M. G. Emmelkamp, ‘Single Session Debriefing After Psychological Trauma: A Meta Analysis, The Lancet: 360 (2002).

⁶Jerome Groopman, ‘The Grief Industry’, The New Yorker, January 26, 2004: 36; Arnold A. P. Van Emmerik, Jan, H. Kamphuis, Alexander M. Hulsbasch, Paul M. G. Emmelkamp, ‘Single Session Debriefing After Psychological Trauma: A Meta Analysis, The Lancet: , 258.

⁷Victor Minichiello, Rosalie Aroni, Eric Timewell and Loris Alexander, eds. In-depth Interviewing: Researching People (London: Routledge, 1992), 112.

⁸Ken Plummer, Documents of Life 2: An Invitation to a Critical Humanism (London: Sage, 2001).

⁹Selma Leydesdorff, Graham Dawson, Natasha Burchardt and T. G. Ashplant, eds. Trauma and Life Stories (London: Routledge, 1999).

¹⁰Selma Leydesdorff, Graham Dawson, Natasha Burchardt and T. G. Ashplant, eds. Trauma and Life Stories (London: Routledge, 1999), 13.

¹¹Selma Leydesdorff, Graham Dawson, Natasha Burchardt and T. G. Ashplant, eds. Trauma and Life Stories (London: Routledge, 1999).

¹²Selma Leydesdorff, Graham Dawson, Natasha Burchardt and T. G. Ashplant, eds. Trauma and Life Stories (London: Routledge, 1999).

¹³Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

¹⁴For an overview of some of this literature and trends see: Bessel A. van der Kolk, Lars Weisaeth, Onno van der Hart, ‘History of Trauma in Psychiatry’, in Bessel A. Van der Kolk, Alexander C. McFarlane and Lars Weisaeth, eds. Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996); Russell Mears, ‘From Neurosis to Trauma’, Meanjin, vol. 63, no. 4 (2004).

¹⁵See for example: Henry Krystal, Massive Psychic Trauma (New York: International Universities Press, 1968); Robert Lifton, Death in Life (New York: Random House, 1967).

¹⁶This is the 1980 definition of traumatic events as described by the American Psychiatric Association. Cited in Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 53.

¹⁷Frank Furendi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age (London: Routledge, 2004).

¹⁸Thomas Laquer, We Are All Victims Now’, in London Review of Books, 8 July 2010: 19.

¹⁹David W. Jones, ‘Distressing Histories and Unhappy Interviewing’, Oral History (Autumn 1988), 49.

²⁰Stephen Sloan, ‘Oral History and Hurricane Katrina: Reflections on Shouts and Silences’, The Oral History Review, vol. 35, no. 2 (2008): 179.

²¹Carolyn Lunsford Mears, ‘A Columbine Study: Giving Voice, Hearing Meaning’, The Oral History Review, vol. 34, no. 2 (2008): 163.

²²Carolyn Lunsford Mears, ‘A Columbine Study: Giving Voice, Hearing Meaning’, The Oral History Review, 169.

²³Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

²⁴Jones, ‘Distressing Histories and Unhappy Interviewing’, 52.

²⁵Bridget Macey, ‘Social Dynamics of Oral History Making: Women's Experience of Wartime’, Oral History, vol. 19, no. 2 (1991): 42–48.

²⁶Mark Klempner, ‘Navigating Life Reviews: Interviews with Survivors of Trauma’, The Oral History Review, vol. 27, no. 2 (Summer–Autumn, 2000): 71.

²⁷Erin McCarthy, ‘Is Oral History Good for You? Taking Oral History beyond Documentation and into a Clinical Setting: First Steps’, The Oral History Review, vol. 37, no. 2 (2010).

²⁸McCarthy, ‘Is Oral History Good for You?’, 159.

²⁹Kolk et al., ‘History of Trauma in Psychiatry’, 53.

³⁰Ghislaine Boulanger, Wounded By Reality (New York: Routledge, 2007), 44.

³¹Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 68.

³²Wendy Rickard, ‘Oral History – “More Dangerous than Therapy”?: Interviewees’ Reflections on Recording Traumatic or Taboo Issues’, Oral History (Autumn 1998): 42.

³³Wendy Rickard, ‘Oral History – “More Dangerous than Therapy”?: Interviewees’ Reflections on Recording Traumatic or Taboo Issues’, Oral History (Autumn 1998): 42.

³⁴Alison Parr, ‘Breaking the Silence: Traumatised War Veterans and Oral History’, Oral History (Spring 2007), 69.

³⁵Klempner, ‘Navigating Life Reviews’, 82.

³⁶Klempner, ‘Navigating Life Reviews’, 70.

³⁷Felman and Laub, Testimony, 91.

³⁸Felman and Laub, Testimony, 91.

³⁹Sean Field, ‘Beyond Healing: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration’, Oral History (Spring 2006): 34.

⁴⁰Sean Field, ‘Beyond Healing: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration’, Oral History (Spring 2006): 34.

⁴¹Sean Field, ‘Beyond Healing: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration’, Oral History (Spring 2006), 40.

⁴²Sean Field, ‘Beyond Healing: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration’, Oral History (Spring 2006), 39.

⁴³Field is following in the footsteps here of Dominic La Capra and Saul Friedlander: Dominic La Capra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998); Saul Friedlander, ‘Trauma, Memory and Transference’, in Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed. Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Attwood urges Australian historians to work through their counter-transference relationship to the dispossession of Indigenous Australians. Bain Attwood, ‘The Australian patient: Traumatic pasts and the Work of History’, in Psychoanalysis Down-under, issue 78, (2006).

⁴⁴Sean Field, ‘Beyond Healing: Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration’, Oral History (Spring 2006): 39.

⁴⁵Sean Field, ‘Disappointed Remains: Trauma, Testimony, and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, in Ritchie, The Oxford Handbook of Oral History.

⁴⁶Michael Roper, ‘Analysing the Analysed: Transference and Counter-Transference in the Oral History Encounter’, Oral History (Autumn 2003): 24.

⁴⁷Michael Roper, ‘Analysing the Analysed: Transference and Counter-Transference in the Oral History Encounter’, Oral History (Autumn 2003): 27.

⁴⁸Michael Roper, ‘Analysing the Analysed: Transference and Counter-Transference in the Oral History Encounter’, Oral History (Autumn 2003).

⁴⁹Field, ‘Beyond Healing’, 34.

⁵⁰Roper, ‘Analysing the Analysed’, 21.

⁵¹Adam Phillips, ‘Close-ups’, History Workshop Journal 57, 2004, 142.

⁵²Dominic La Capra has investigated the ways historians can repeat and pass on traumatic memories in La Capra, History and Memory After Auschwitz (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998).

⁵³Karl Figlio, ‘Oral History and the Unconscious’, History Workshop 26 (Autumn 1988), 121.

⁵⁴Mary Marshall Clark, ‘Resisting Attrition in Stories of Trauma’, Narrative, vol. 13, no. 3, 2005, 297.

⁵⁵Ronald R. Lee & J. Colby Martin, Psychotherapy after Kohut: A Textbook of Self Psychology, London: The Analytic Press, 1991, 106.

⁵⁶Field, ‘Beyond Healing’, 37.

⁵⁷Rickard, ‘Oral History – “More Dangerous than Therapy”’, 46.

⁵⁸Field, ‘Beyond Healing’, 39.

⁵⁹Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1971), 116.

⁶⁰The classic work on this is Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990). See also Valerie Yow, ‘Ethics and Interpersonal Relationships in Oral History Research’, The Oral History Review vol. 22, no. 1 (Summer 1995); Katherine Borland, ‘“That's Not What I Said”: Interpretative Conflict in Oral Narrative Research’, in Rob Perks and Alistair Thomson, The Oral History Reader, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2006); Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrycki, ‘Only Human: A Reflection on the Ethical and Methodological Challenges of Working with “Difficult” Stories’, The Oral History Review vol. 37, no. 2. (Summer-Fall 2010); Alistair Thomson, Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women Across Two Countries (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2011).