Windows of Faith: Collective Resistance and Creative Process in Mourning the Disappearances in Kashmir

ABSTRACT

Reviewing psychoanalytic psychotherapist Shifa Haq’s book In Search of Return: Mourning the Disappearances in Kashmir, Willow Pearson Trimbach illuminates windows of faith embodied through mourner-survivors’ collective political resistance and creative work. Haq presents and situates the stories of three mourner-survivors and their families in the context of militarized violence and collective trauma in Kashmir, advancing the psychoanalytic theory of mourning as she recognizes and shines a light on memorializing remembrance and the imagination of the petitioning unconscious.

KEY WORDS:

• collective resistance
• creative work
• disappearances
• faith
• Ukraine
• Kashmir
• refugees
• Freud
• mourning
• trauma
• political terror
• collective trauma
• political trauma

Notes

1. Vamik D. Volkan in an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia and an emeritus training and supervising analyst at the Washington-Baltimore Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the emeritus president of the International Dialogue Initiative.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Willow Pearson Trimbach

WILLOW PEARSON TRIMBACH is director of clinical training and associate professor of the Clinical Psychology Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. A psychologist, psychotherapist, and music therapist, she has a private practice in Oakland, California (drwillowpearson.com). Dr. Pearson Trimbach is also a singer and songwriter, with six albums of original music and a seventh album of Tibetan Buddhist songs of realization (lionessroars.org). She is co-editor and contributing author of The Spiritual Psyche in Psychotherapy: Mysticism, Intersubjectivity and Psychoanalysis, published by Routledge in 2021. Correspondence: [email protected].