Contenu du sommaire : Violence de masse

This article examines the symptoms of individual and collective narcissistic suffering in contemporary malaise. It also looks at the recurrent effects of the non-symbolized and split traces resulting from the great traumas and genocides of the twentieth century. The trans-generational effects and their mechanisms of transmission are highlighted. Lastly, it discusses how group conditions in therapeutic and remembrance methods can support the treatment of suffering linked to the unconscious transmission of past collective traumas that preceded the subject.

In the perspective developed by René Kaës, the subject is above all the subject of the group. The subject's narcissistic foundations, like the feeling of the continuity of the self, which is proven over time, are derived from different narcissistic contracts. However, in the context of a social and political disaster, such as genocide, the contracts in question are profoundly undermined. The traumatic past is therefore the subject of an inter-subjective remembrance process, based on a polyphonic narrative that mobilizes various voices of absent third parties, in order to historicize events. Using a case study that focuses on the story of a Jewish orphan who was hidden during the Holocaust, before becoming the subject of a perverse control contract, we attempt to show to what extent the work of remembrance helps to restore narcissistic contracts.

This article aims to highlight, using a specific example, the interferences between personal suffering, social phenomena, and political choices. Since Turkey's invasion of Cyprus in 1974, several hundred persons are still considered to be missing in action. Despite the recent exhumations of bones linked to a number of these missing persons, their mourning processes are still incomplete. This article highlights how the disrupted mourning of Greek Cypriot missing persons relates to a series of unfinished mourning processes that are more general in nature, for the most part concerning the collective trauma of the invasion and its aftermath: the families of missing persons take on the role of being in “mourning,” to the benefit of the community and political strategies.

Based on her experiences with survivors of the Rwandan genocide, the author attempts to show that groups who have experienced extreme violence—such as genocide or mass murder—are confronted with the question of transmission and the need to find appropriate forms for this transmission. Constructing a representation of the events that took place requires the use of structures and people outside of the group concerned, who will act as support during the time needed to reconstruct the destroyed group containers. All groups who have experienced violence therefore need an exogenous third party, to escape the silence and avoid the deadly confinement to which the commemoration of violence might condemn them.

Adopting a psychoanalytic perspective, this article provides a reflection on the post-genocide period and the feeling of shame among survivors in the context of mass murder in Rwanda. From a theoretical standpoint, it reflects on how genocidal violence attacks the ties of filiation and the work of psychological transmission to pass on a traumatic heritage through generations. I draw upon the clinical case of a young woman with a Tutsi mother and Hutu father, who is in exile after fleeing Rwanda and who consulted for depression. The analysis highlights the freezing of affects and the effects of talking it out in psychotherapy by pointing out how one shame can conceal another.

This article attempts to understand how the experience of being a Jewish child hidden in France during the Occupation is transmitted between generations. After reflecting on the unique experience of these Jewish children, we analyze a clinical research case in order to reveal the specific processes at work in transmission. First, we identify a painful experience that is accompanied by a contradictory transmission of life drives and thoughts about death. Second, we consider the fact that hidden Jewish children represent a very specific generation with a unique experience. The discussion is structured around several different issues including filiation, the transmission of a crypt and a complex trans-generational heritage, and the constraints on transformation and narration.

During social disasters (Kaës, 2009), the collapse of social meta-frameworks destabilizes meta-psychological formations, which are the conditions both for psychological life and for its transmission. In a situation of political exile, in which way and how are these formations weakened, in the transmission of metapsychic guarantors and especially, the identificatory contracts? These questions are explored here in the case of descendants of Chilean political exiles living in Switzerland. This article focuses on the way affiliations are reshaping in the transmission while in exile. Our findings show the uniqueness of the subjectivation of heritage and the diversity of the movements of transmission to the new generation. However, they highlight in particular that support on the group level encourages the reconstruction of the meta-psychological guarantors, thus supporting the transmission process. Conversely, when this dimension is missing, the transmission of negativity is perpetuated and becomes embedded.

In this article, the author identifies the ways in which traumatic “containeds” are passed from one psyche to another and from one generation to the next. From this angle, the difference in scale between mass violence and intrafamily drama is reduced, but it is at the individual level that further examination can be made. The death drive is active from the beginning, in the form of frustration, anxiety, and destructivity; it is so severe that it must be removed immediately. The author provides a clinical example whose melancholic nucleus underpins theoretical developments. Projective identification involving a receiver object, and at best a transformer, is at the heart of involuntary and beneficial, but unconscious, transmission. In these pathological cases, the contained is not correctly transformed, which makes it toxic for the next generation. Projective identification can be essentially intra-psychic, or inter-subjective, or even trans-subjective. The pathological case is then carried forward to the next generation and developed using a universal psychological resource, which allows containeds, particularly traumatic ones, to pass from one psyche to another in spite of interpersonal distance, be it spatial or temporal.

In a context of social violence and great precariousness, contemporary migratory flows lead us to reconsider our care methods and, in particular, the individual setting. Potential traumas due to forced migration leave us with a complex clinical picture in a transcultural context. By presenting an original device—Photolangage®—that uses image mediation with a group of asylum seekers, we will attempt to show how the use of group therapy and image mediation can be beneficial for reactivating the associative and affect-representation processes and for exploring the underlying traces of trauma linked to social and collective violence.

Young refugees experience traumas, exile, and sometimes even the loss of their family. To overcome these difficulties, they need to be surrounded and supported by reliable adults, be they members of their family or of the host society. Particularly during adolescence, traumatic experiences and cultural differences can lead to misunderstandings or adjustment difficulties between these young people and the adults around them. The latter, whose personal and/or cultural reference points have been shaken up, may lose their “adult” skills, their “parental functions,” and fail to adequately take care of the young refugees. Using clinical examples, this article will discuss young refugees' needs in terms of “adult functions” and the identity-related tribulations that they can experience when faced with an adult world that struggles to accommodate them.