At the last minute, I decided to attend the IPA presession workshop on COVID and Trauma facilitated by Nancy Goodman. In retrospect, I wondered whether my ambivalence was defensive, knowing that life during COVID has altered previously held magical assumptions around collective caretaking and responsibility. This latest round of the Delta variant with the intensive outbreak of new rounds of polarization have further eroded what now seems like fanciful considerations.
So it is with deep satisfaction that I report on my reactions to this workshop. Overall, it felt like a group witnessing of analytic cases and subsequent discussions about the impacts of traumatic conditions worldwide. This reaction served as a counterweight to what has been referred to as ”disorders of humanization” (Peskin, 2012, p 193). The cases presented showed in the analytic work, where the analysand, over time came to rely on his or her mind to understand the reality of the experienced trauma. As important, the analysands in these examples came to trust that they would also be believed by their analysts. In our group there was a parallel process where individuals expressed their own traumatic experiences, with the confidence that it would be confirmed and held in a profoundly sensitive Winnicottian manner. What set the stage was the beginning presentation by Arlene Kramer. She provided a primer of intergenerational transmission of trauma with a litany of its psychological consequences. Rather than starting with a Holocaust narrative, long researched and known by psychoanalysts, he spoke in depth about the longstanding history of trauma experienced by the Chinese people. With this beginning, Goodman bypassed any hierarchical status around grief where “more highly-ranked mourners may appropriate another’s grief by claiming a stronger sense of entitlement, conferred by felt … .social standing” (Peskin, 2019, pp 477). Starting with this case reinforced what I intellectually knew about the cruelty of such rankings as well as the reality that trauma is ubiquitous, whether acknowledged by society or not. It is like “No ethics can claim to exclude a part of humanity, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that humanity is to see”. (Agamben, 1999, pp 63-64) Kramer talked about the devastating impact of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on on her analysand. External success was at risk of being derailed by devastating repetitive acts paying homage and keeping alive the catastrophic history of earlier familial generations. Remembering allowed, over time, a shift away from real and fantasized self and family destructiveness. This presentation opened up a floodgate of participant reactions from around the world: Germany, Mexico, Panama, Peru, South Africa, Russia, and the United States to name a few.
In the afternoon, Felipe Matamala presented his work on people who suffer political trauma. He too stressed the importance of serving as a witness to transform the traumatic experience. Joanna Galimony demonstrated her analytic use of photographic images. One could see the infant pain of her analysand in a photo, overriding what initially appeared as an idyllic Madonna/baby union. Day two began with Ira Brenner drawing on his work with Holocaust survivors. He began with his family history, which recalled my own. When growing up, I felt like there was a veil of “impossible understanding” with “too much and not enough dialogue” leaving no opening for a more believable narrative. Brenner’s comparisons with the 1930’s in Germany were chilling, He underscored the close proximity between real and constructed contamination, traumatic images appropriated by abusers, and projections onto created “others”.
Day two of the workshop closed with a presentation by Luisa Masina. She talked about the corporeal absence she had to face with remote work, where she mourned the lack of, in her words, “the flesh and blood” of in person sessions. Her case, of profoundly disturbing proportions, rendered us mute: described by one participant as a group metabolization process on her behalf. Throughout the two days, participants openly expressed what they had internalized. The free-floating discussions encased the group in what felt like a protective permeable boundary, holding us and allowing a digestion of its contents. There were moving testimonies throughout the two days. I felt a surreal intimacy as well as an aliveness, similar to what I sometimes experienced in the “here and now” experiences of group relations conferences. It resided at a somatic level, where words seemed unnecessary and inadequate to convey what was happening. Nancy Goodman’s leadership through her collaborative, non-intrusive stance created a framework in which this could be held. I feel intellectually and emotionally richer for attending this workshop and am grateful that IPA made this possible.
References
Agamben, G. (1999). Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive. New York, NY: Zone Books
Peskin, H. (2012) “Man is a Wolf to Man: Disorders of Dehumanization in Psychoanalysis” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 22 190-205.
Peskin, H. (2019). “Who has the right to mourn?: Relational deference and the ranking of grief”.
