Featuring contributions from a wide array of international scholars, the book explores the variety of representational strategies used to depict female traumatic experiences in texts by or about women, and in so doing articulates the complex relation between trauma, gender and signification.
Recovering Boarding School Trauma Narratives: Christopher Robin Milne as a Psychological Companion on the Journey to Healing is a unique, emotive and theorised narrative of a young girl’s experience of boarding school in Australia. Christine Jack traces its impact on the emerging identity of the child, including sexual development and emotional capacity, the transmission of trauma into adulthood and the long process of recovery. Interweaving her story with the experiences of Christopher Robin Milne, she presents her memoir as an exemplar of how narrative writing can be employed in remembering and recovering from traumatic experiences. Unique and powerfully written, Jack takes the reader on a journey into her childhood in Australian boarding school convents in the 1950s and 1960s. Comparing her experience with Christopher Robin Milne’s, she interrogates his memoirs, illustrating that boarding school trauma knows no boundaries of time and place. She investigates their emerging individuality before being sent to live an institutional life and traces their feelings of longing and loneliness as well as the impact of the abuse each endured there. As an educational historian, Jack writes in a ground-breaking way from the perspective of an insider and outsider, revealing how trauma remains in the unconscious, wielding power over the life of the adult, until the traumatic memories are recovered, emotions released and associated dysfunctional behaviour changed, restoring well-being. Engaging the lenses of history, life-span and Jungian psychology, feminist and trauma theory and boarding school trauma research, this book positions narrative writing as a way of reducing the power of trauma over the lives of survivors. Personal and accessible, this book will be essential reading for psychologists and educational historians, as well as students and academics of psychology, sociology, trauma studies, ex-boarders and those interested in the life of Christopher Robin Milne.
A comprehensive guide for the clinical practitioner. The authors draw from a wealth of empirical research as well as numerous case studies to provide a deep understanding of the experience of infertility and how to help guide patients through the process.ùMary P. Riddle, PhD, The Pennsylvania State University, World Campus --
This book provides a comprehensive compilation of essays on the relationship between formal experimentation and ethics in a number of generically hybrid or "liminal" narratives dealing with individual and collective traumas, running the spectrum from the testimonial novel and the fictional autobiography to the fake memoir, written by a variety of famous, more neglected contemporary British, Irish, US, Canadian, and German writers. Building on the psychological insights and theorizing of the fathers of trauma studies (Janet, Freud, Ferenczi) and of contemporary trauma critics and theorists, the articles examine the narrative strategies, structural experimentations and hybridizations of forms, paying special attention to the way in which the texts fight the unrepresentability of trauma by performing rather than representing it. The ethicality or unethicality involved in this endeavor is assessed from the combined perspectives of the non-foundational, non-cognitive, discursive ethics of alterity inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, and the ethics of vulnerability. This approach makes Contemporary Trauma Narratives an excellent resource for scholars of contemporary literature, trauma studies and literary theory.
A powerful personal narrative of recovery and an illuminating philosophical exploration of trauma On July 4, 1990, while on a morning walk in southern France, Susan Brison was attacked from behind, severely beaten, sexually assaulted, strangled to unconsciousness, and left for dead. She survived, but her world was destroyed. Her training as a philosopher could not help her make sense of things, and many of her fundamental assumptions about the nature of the self and the world it inhabits were shattered. At once a personal narrative of recovery and a philosophical exploration of trauma, this bravely and beautifully written book examines the undoing and remaking of a self in the aftermath of violence. It explores, from an interdisciplinary perspective, memory and truth, identity and self, autonomy and community. It offers imaginative access to the experience of a rape survivor as well as a reflective critique of a society in which women routinely fear and suffer sexual violence. As Brison observes, trauma disrupts memory, severs past from present, and incapacitates the ability to envision a future. Yet the act of bearing witness, she argues, facilitates recovery by integrating the experience into the survivor's life's story. She also argues for the importance, as well as the hazards, of using first-person narratives in understanding not only trauma, but also larger philosophical questions about what we can know and how we should live.
A distinguished group of analysts and critics offers a compelling look at what literature and the new approaches of theoretical disciplines bring to the understanding of traumatic experiences such as child abuse, AIDS, and the effects of historical atrocities such as the Holocaust. "These essays offer fresh approaches on the subject of trauma from both a psychoanalytic and contemporary theoretical point of view".--Alan Bass, Ph.D., psychoanalyst.
Boarding School Syndrome is an analysis of the trauma of the 'privileged' child sent to boarding school at a young age. Innovative and challenging, Joy Schaverien offers a psychological analysis of the long-established British and colonial preparatory and public boarding school tradition. Richly illustrated with pictures and the narratives of adult ex-boarders in psychotherapy, the book demonstrates how some forms of enduring distress in adult life may be traced back to the early losses of home and family. Developed from clinical research and informed by attachment and child development theories ‘Boarding School Syndrome’ is a new term that offers a theoretical framework on which the psychotherapeutic treatment of ex-boarders may build. Divided into four parts, History: In the Name of Privilege; Exile and Healing; Broken Attachments: A Hidden Trauma, and The Boarding School Body, the book includes vivid case studies of ex-boarders in psychotherapy. Their accounts reveal details of the suffering endured: loss, bereavement and captivity are sometimes compounded by physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Here, Joy Schaverien shows how many boarders adopt unconscious coping strategies including dissociative amnesia resulting in a psychological split between the 'home self' and the 'boarding school self'. This pattern may continue into adult life, causing difficulties in intimate relationships, generalized depression and separation anxiety amongst other forms of psychological distress. Boarding School Syndrome demonstrates how boarding school may damage those it is meant to be a reward and discusses the wider implications of this tradition. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, Jungian analysts, psychotherapists, art psychotherapists, counsellors and others interested in the psychological, cultural and international legacy of this tradition including ex-boarders and their partners.
Publicly speaking about sexual violence is a challenge. As humans, we tend to deny things that bring us discomfort. Especially talking about rape during conflict and war. People tend to struggle in finding ways to share the indescribable. Because the images and ideas associated with rape are so intense and disturbing, opportunities to create change and awareness through dialogue are a challenge at best. This cloak of silence, however, is what keeps rape and sexual violence alive and ominous. My ongoing work in the field as a therapist has brought me the opportunity to listen to war rape survivors' experiences. I have thus far heard over 200 accounts, which is a number steadily increasing. These brave women and girls allowed themselves to share with me something terrifying and previously unspeakable. Many have held on to their pain in silence, alone. They shared their humble beginnings, their ideals; and their stark realities during and following their rape, as well their aftermaths, and their healing. So many survivors have made the conscious choice of speaking out and being visible, even if they come from cultures that may be less than supportive to women who are the victims of sexual violence. Before I began work within the field of rape and sexual violence awareness, I was like many other people living in my own comfort bubble. Back then, I was insulated by my values. I pursued my ideas without a deeper understanding of the complexity of war rape survivors' physical, emotional and social experiences, as well as the complex trauma that they were struggling with. Working with war-rape survivors quickly popped my comfort bubble. I realized my own tendency to deny sources of discomfort. I started to confront myself with the overwhelming reality that war-rape survivors face every single day. Listening to survivors' experiences and working with them as they address their trauma confronted me with the realities that rape survivors face, that their healing process starts from within, mentally and physically, but must continue outward, repairing their bonds and trust within their families, communities, and cultural institutions as well.
LaTanya McQueen's essays offer a bold examination of the weight history, both personal and societal, places on our present moment. And it Begins Like This is a book brave enough to challenge our accepted notions of the past to put black women in their rightful place, in the forefront of the ongoing struggle for dignity and equality. It's a book that is both moving and absolutely necessary.