Browsing by Subject "Victimhood"

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    From psychoanalysis to cultural trauma: narrating legacies of collective suffering
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2021-07-29) Perez Baquero, Rafael; Filosofía
    This paper aims to offer both an interpretation and a critique of theepistemological foundations underlying one of the most recentapproaches to trauma studies: cultural trauma theory. After theFirst World War, the founding father of psychoanalysis, SigmundFreud, inquired into whether his diagnostic of “traumaticneurosis” could shed light on how collectives deal with unsettlingexperiences and memories. Throughout the intervening decades,Freud´s insights into collective trauma have attracted the interestof scholars from various disciplines within the humanities andsocial sciences, from literary studies to historiography, memorystudies, and, finally – the focus of this paper – cultural and socialtheory. By underlining the ways in which the proponents ofcultural trauma theory – Jeffrey Alexander, Neil Smelzer, PiotrSztompka, Bernhard Giesen, and Ron Eyerman – have reframedFreudian ideas regarding the transmission of legacies of collectivesuffering, the paper considers whether the notion of trauma canbe extended to the analysis of cultures and societies. It exploresthe ambivalent relationship between psychoanalysis andcontemporary cultural trauma theory to disclose the theoreticalassumptions and weaknesses of the latter
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    Re-framing the Spanish Civil War as ‘Cultural Trauma': When responsibilities get blurred after violence
    (University of Bucharest, 2019) Perez Baquero, Rafael; Filosofía
    The aim of this article is to address to what extent some institutional form of remembering the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) as a collective trauma could be considered an instance of Jeffrey Alexander and Neil Smelzer´s notion of ’cultural trauma‘. Or to put it in other words, in which sense the notion of cultural trauma may cast a new light on one of the different ways in which the Spanish Civil War was remembered and retold during the transition to democracy (1977-83). Spanish society remembered the war as a collective trauma, so painful that it encouraged society to promote a ‘pact of oblivion’ toward victims of Francoist repression. According to this traumatic memory, the Spanish Civil War was a ‘fratricidal struggle’, whose outbreak was a consequence of the tensions that underlie Spanish history. It led to the blurring of distinctions between victims and culprits because both sides were considered equally responsible. Therefore, everyone could claim the ownership of suffering. However, this representation did not fit in with the historical records; it was a consequence of the social influence of some ‘memory makers’ that developed new narratives and re-defined the ownership of suffering. Because of this divergence between the historical record of the war and society’s traumatic memory of it during the transition to democracy, I would like to analyse the possibility of studying the nature of the latter by means of the concept of cultural trauma. After all, Alexander´s critique of psychoanalytical insight into collective trauma could be useful when analysing traumatic historical experiences where it is not clear whether the traumatic nature of those memories come from the events themselves or from the cultural frames that attributed significance to those events.