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.
Chair: Jill Salberg, Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research
Presenters: Jill Salberg, Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research; Carla Fischer Canessa, Asociación Psicoanalítica de Santiago (APSAN) and the Latin American Institute of Mental Health and Human Rights (ILAS); Andreas Hamburger, International Psychoanalytic University Berlin
Reporter: Noëlle McAfee, Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute
This panel considered the resurgence of authoritarianism as a manifestation of “repetition and denial of historical memory.” The presenters reflected on phenomena of forgetting the history of fascism and denying it even in the midst of its resurgence. While the stated theme was the novel concept of fascist amnesia, the underlying thread was about in whom transgenerational phenomena can trigger failures to think, especially when the content is unbearable.
Jill Salberg (Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research) catalogued recent elements of the resurgence of fascism in the United States but noted that despite having “been here before,” people seem “to have forgotten fascism,” even when it is glaringly manifest in their midst. Salberg drew on various theories to help understand the phenomenon, including Judith Herman’s concept of “episodic forgetting,” Vamik Volkan’s idea of “chosen traumas,” Maurice Apprey’s notion of “errands,” and Abraham and Torok’s theory of how phantoms from a previous generation can become encrypted in the present. All point to the phenomenon of transgenerational transmission of trauma, where the unfinished work or wounds of one generation get passed down to the next.
One key to breaking this transmission, Salberg notes, is survivors bearing witness to what has happened, especially in a way that inhabits the depth and grief at work. Yet this requires more – namely, successive generations engaged in a process of “continuing mentalizing.” Witnessing “needs to be in the service of defying and refusing fascistic amnesia.” We