You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86, 311-333, 2005
The author attempts to situate the specificity of torture - understood as the product of political violence and of totalitarian states - within the historical framework of the concept of trauma in psychoanalysis. When the mind and social ties are simultaneously affected, the intrapsychic and transpersonal aspects of the suffered damage intertwine in a complex and unique web. The author aims to dismantle the notion of victim, considering it both stigmatizing and inaccurate. The goal is not just to identify the after-affects and the disabilities suffered by those affected by torture, but also to integrate their experiences and their narratives into a life project. Rather than individual psychopathology, this essay reflects upon those phenomena of suggestion and hypnosis that are at work in human groups under ordinary conditions and that are exacerbated under social crises, following the Freudian axis developed in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
International Journal of Psychoanalysis 86, 775-799, 2005
In this paper, the author works with the awareness that perversion is a socially, historically and theologically loaded term, at the same time as it may be the latest frontier in psychoanalysis, both clinically and in relation to contemporary art and culture which emphasize the perverse. Positioning itself against tendencies to deny the existence of a category of ‘perversion’ or, inversely, to abuse it for the power that accrues from the act of diagnosing, she also points to other liabilities in the history of the treatment of this term, such as the narrowing down of perversion to the exclusively sexual domain, or, alternatively, the over-extension of it to polymorphously erotic practices that enhance sexual excitement. The paradoxes of perversion and the