Collective Working Through: The Role and Function of Memorialisation

‘We must understand that there can be no reconciliation without remembrance’.

To begin, I think it would be fair to say that all psychoanalytic treatments not only are, by definition, retraumatising, in that they bring to consciousness painful, repressed experiences of early traumas (both external and/or elaborated in fantasy), but depend on retraumatisation for their therapeutic effect. Though not emphasised in the literature precisely in these terms, the capacity to sustain the rigours of retraumatisation and the ability to symbolise emergent experience doubtless was one of the major criteria for gauging a prospective patient's suitability for psychoanalytic treatment. This view implicitly gave rise to the subsequent refinements and expansion of suitability to include concepts such as parameters, or supportive inventions, until such readiness was achieved. Certainly, in our clinical work with individuals, we assume that working through the retraumatisation simultaneously stimulates and is contained in the psychoanalytic situation by making the unbearable bearable, and thus available for work (interpretation). But when we consider traumas that are both external and shared collectively by a group of people, the conceptual and treatment parallels to the working