History Dislocated in a Nightmare: Responses to Commentaries

Abstract

It is not a simple matter for analysts across nations, oceans, generations, and schools to be discussing Germans and Jews post WWII. I found the discussions of my paper moving and troubling; they offer powerful teachings on listening to the kind of dislocated traumatic tales that patients carry into analysis, however left me still wishing to return to the power of nationalism and ideology as major forces that shape psychic reality and argue against reducing this realm into the language of family drama and object relations. In reviewing my work with Nyx following these discussions, I suggest that by being “former enemies” to some degree we functioned transferentially as ambassadors of our collective, and of history. Our field teetered between falling under the spell of a tribunal to a reconciliation committee, while we were negotiating the possibility of historical redemption. My way of working with Nyx manifests an underlying assumption that ideology, as expressed through history, is one of the key factors that constitutes one’s psychic reality and is very important to engage with psychoanalytically. With that in mind I discuss some thoughts on why it is so difficult to signify the horrors of mass trauma and suggest some ethical considerations that can help us think about the difference between Wolff Bernstein’s invitations for us to hover on the rim of the Real, Bohleber’s commitment to historical precision, and Faimberg’s way of listening to the transference.

Notes

1. ¹See Margalit’s 2011 work on the ways collective vicarious Nostalgic and Ostalgic operations “remove the shit” from a past world and are morally distorting and disturbing.

2. ²Aporia is a Greek term denoting a logical contradiction. It was used by Derrida to refer to what he called the “blind spots” of any metaphysical argument; a radical state of doubt, impossibility, or perplexity that is revealed in deconstructing a text, the contradiction or impossibility of truth.

3. ³Althusser’s example is when the policeman shouts “Hey, you!” we turn to “answer” that call, locating ourselves relative to the ideology of law and crime.

4. ⁴See Harris (2011), Seligman (2013), and Starr and Aron (2013) on the way the psychoanalytic community is influenced by historical and socio-political forces that dictate what psychoanalysts attend to and theorize about.

5. ⁵See Jessica Benjamin’s (2011) work on mutual recognition between former enemies.

6. ⁶A dilemma taken up beautifully by Derrida (2001) with his concept of Conditional Forgiveness and its obscene affirmation of the sovereignty of the individual from her collective.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Orna Guralnik

Orna Guralnik, Psy.D., is a Clinical Psychologist on Faculty at the Trauma Studies program of the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and at New York University. She teaches and publishes on the topic of dissociation, culture, and psychoanalysis. She was one of the founders of the Center for the Study of Depersonalization at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and recipient of NARSAD, NIH, Wollstein and Harris grants. She is on the editorial board of Studies in Gender & Sexuality and an advanced candidate at the NYU Postdoctoral program in Psychoanalysis