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Trauma in the Contemporary World: Working-through Collective Wounds

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Venue: Birkbeck 30 Russell Square

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The symposium aims to create a space for an interdisciplinary conversation on the psychic transmission of trauma, on collective trauma and social mourning. While some voices argue that the notion of ‘trauma’ is overused and overstretched, we will explore the ways in which crucial aspects of both psychic life and social life can be formulated precisely as a trauma theory. What kind of metapsychological revisions are needed for a trauma theory for the contemporary world? What is the place of psychic splitting in making sense of social trauma? Or, in other words, what is the connection between the life of psychic fragments and the life of social fragments? How can we understand scenes of reliving the trauma, which take place in the streets and in the squares? How are institutions (including the state) implicated in social mourning, or, on the contrary, in its interruption? By asking these questions, we aim to illuminate the ways in which a revised trauma theory that takes into account the collective dimension of life is also a social theory.

The second part of the symposium will be dedicated to a discussion of Raluca Soreanu's recent book "Working-through Collective Wounds: Trauma, Denial, Recognition in the Brazilian Uprising" (Palgrave, 2018). Soreanu argues for a phenomenology of psychic splitting, where we can follow, in a collective frame, what different psychic fragments do, or what becomes of their social life.

Organised by Raluca Soreanu (r.soreanu@bbk.ac.uk) & Stephen Frosh (s.frosh@bbk.ac.uk)

Supported by the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research (BISR), the Psychoanalysis Working Group at Birkbeck, and The Wellcome Trust

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