Abstract
This is a book about trauma. In the last section, on the Culture of Forgiveness, Urlic begins with statistics about the number of wars since 1945. There has not been a year without a war or conflict. War is ubiquitous and part of the human condition. The more we learn and try to understand, the more we have to deal with the fallout. The fallout is human suffering. This is a book that tries to clear a space to reflect. It uses the tools of our trade as psychotherapists to think about how to treat this human fallout.
The authors are learned, so they explore the literature on abuse, victimhood, bearing witness, the impact of war and the concept of forgiveness, in a way that adds depth to their arguments. The book is divided into three sections; each section is subdivided into three chapters with each author focussing on one of the topics. The first chapter in each section discusses the meaning of victimhood, vengeance or forgiveness. The second chapter in each section then applies the discussion to the psychotherapeutic treatment of patients in either one to one or group therapy. What is more complex, but refreshing and challenging, is the third chapter in each section, which deals with the social context. I was impressed by this, but it was also the most difficult section as I found myself caught up in moral, ethical and political perspectives that sometimes harmonized with my own, but sometimes grated.
The authors have also created a text on how to work from an intersubjective, relational perspective. They acknowledge and make good use of psychoanalytic frameworks, but see them as essentially isolating the individual from relationships because so much is understood as taking place within the individual psyche. Trauma impacts on the individual, not only through penetrating inner defences but also because in damaging the individual, it also damages relationships with others, crucial to our sense of ourselves. Traumas are also the product of a social context, which makes it necessary for all of us to bear some responsibility for what has happened. This responsibility is taken up by the authors through their academic selves, their selves as clinicians and also their personal historical selves. True to their intersubjective perspective, they make themselves present through including, when relevant, a little about their own histories and motivations for writing this book. The effect on me was to make me intensely aware of my own participation as a reader.
Perhaps the power of the book—and it is a powerful book—is also linked to this last point. Each of the authors has first-hand experience of war. The Israeli authors experience themselves as currently living in a state of war while Ivan Urlic bases much of his section on his work in Croatia while the war was going on during the 1990s.
I urge you to read this book for yourselves, but true to my duty as a reviewer, I will summarize a little of the content. Each of the authors emphasizes the value of groups for people suffering from trauma, and in particular, the work in Croatia does focus on homogenous groups of soldiers traumatized by war.
The first section by Avi Berman talks about the creation of victimhood and then explores the seduction, the grievance and the sense of power or control that can reside in the development of a victim self. It seems that the ‘victim’ takes up a permanent position of apparently being ‘done to’ while repressing what the victim-self can be ‘doing to others’. In this chapter the power of identifying with the aggressor becomes vividly exposed. What then happens when societies take on the construct of a victim-self?
The second section by Miriam Berger is on vengeance. Using an intersubjective perspective, she reformulates the wish for vengeance as a wish for the suffering to be heard and the victim to feel that they matter to important others. She suggests that denial of such feelings leads to numbness and emptiness but when these feelings are acknowledged—although crucially not acted upon—they can be experienced as a communication of the pain suffered. The listener, either a group or a chosen other, can then bear witness and the possibility of a fuller person can then re-emerge.
The third section by Ivan Urlic on forgiveness is the most complex and often contradictory. He does not agree with Miriam Berger’s view on the need to acknowledge vengeful feelings but does very usefully present a lot of research material on PTSD. He looks at the evidence for what helps people to rebuild their lives and deconstructs the concept of forgiveness in thoughtful ways. The need to mourn was mentioned earlier in the book but Urlic explores aspects of mourning in more detail and also the need to relate again to a moral world. He is interested in the disturbing effect of the work on clinicians, and this section offers many clinical examples to illustrate his points. The long-term aim seems to be reconciliation, which Urlic also examines in depth.
All three sections underline the importance of longer-term therapy to allow people the safety to deal with these very unsafe feelings. It also shows the complexity of recovery. Being able to come to terms or let certain experiences go does not mean they have gone. When new challenges arise, as they must, if life is to be lived, then these traumas may well reappear but at least there will be an understanding or memory that it will be possible to survive the pain.
This is a really important book by three very experienced and thoughtful clinicians.
A brief mention about editing. It is very important that a publishing house such as Novinka should publish such a book in English but it must be possible to employ good editors. The final section needed quite detailed editing at times to clarify the meaning of complex sentences.