Elizabeth Brothersen & Pilar Amezaga (Eds), Jungian Perspectives on Indeterminate States: Betwixt and Between Borders. London, Routledge, 2020
This chapter addresses the question of the role of migration and terrorism in the making a new Eu... more This chapter addresses the question of the role of migration and terrorism in the making a new European identity. It explores the idea that terrorism and migration are two poles of a complex dealing with crossing physical borders and the making and remaking of identities.
The body and the living space of a group are inhabited by an organized whole: the Self in the individual psychic domain and a group, a culture, a nation in the social realm. Both are symbolically signified and generally stable: crossing their physical borders often implies trauma, suffering and a transformation that reshuffle identities.
Looking at migration and terrorism as two poles of a complex characterized by the experience of bodily violence, clash and meeting of two cultures or groups, concern for security and self-protection throw a new light on them and the processes implied in the making of identity.
Can we think of migrants, both terrorists and asylum seekers, as social carriers of the present European identity, i.e. storage points of generalized emotions, positive and negative? Are migrants moving the boundaries of their and our individual, group and national identities both through threat and empathy, through the violence they are suffering and they are inflicting? Is this interplay what enable us to construct a self-image as Europeans with respect for human rights, but also able to defend self-interest and reject external threats, or contain internal disruptive pressures?
These and other questions are explored in the light of this complex.
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Papers by Monica Luci
The body and the living space of a group are inhabited by an organized whole: the Self in the individual psychic domain and a group, a culture, a nation in the social realm. Both are symbolically signified and generally stable: crossing their physical borders often implies trauma, suffering and a transformation that reshuffle identities.
Looking at migration and terrorism as two poles of a complex characterized by the experience of bodily violence, clash and meeting of two cultures or groups, concern for security and self-protection throw a new light on them and the processes implied in the making of identity.
Can we think of migrants, both terrorists and asylum seekers, as social carriers of the present European identity, i.e. storage points of generalized emotions, positive and negative? Are migrants moving the boundaries of their and our individual, group and national identities both through threat and empathy, through the violence they are suffering and they are inflicting? Is this interplay what enable us to construct a self-image as Europeans with respect for human rights, but also able to defend self-interest and reject external threats, or contain internal disruptive pressures?
These and other questions are explored in the light of this complex.
Monica Luci argues that torture performs a covert emotional function in society. In order to identify what this function might be, a profile of ‘torturous societies’ and the main psychological dynamics of social actors involved – torturers, victims, and bystanders – are drawn from literature. Accordingly, a wide-ranging description of the phenomenology of torture is provided, detecting an inclusive and recurring pattern of key elements. Relying on psychoanalytic concepts derived from different theoretical traditions, including British object relations theories, American relational psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, the study provides an advanced line of conceptual research, shaping a model, whose aim is tograsp the deep meaning of key intrapsychic, interpersonal and group dynamics involved in torture.
Once a sufficiently coherent understanding has been reached, Luci proposes using it as a groundwork tool in the human rights field to re-think the best strategies of prevention and recovery from post-torture psychological and social suffering. The book initiates a dialogue between psychoanalysis and human rights, showing that the proposed psychoanalytic understanding is a viable conceptualisation for expanding thinking of crucial issues regarding torture, which might be relevant to human rights and legal doctrine, such as the responsibility of perpetrators, the reparation of victims and the question of ‘truth’.
Torture, Psychoanalysis and Human Rights is the first book to build a psychoanalytic theory of torture from which psychological, social and legal reflections, as well as practical aspects of treatment, can be mutually derived and understood. It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and Jungians, as well as scholars of politics, social work and justice, and human rights and postgraduate students studying across these fields.