Massive Identifications

Includes reviews and abstracts.

The work of finding and identifying missing persons is complex and requires the expertise of many people, such as historians hunting through archives, biological anthropologists reconstructing skeletons, and psychologists preparing investigators to interview families of the disappeared. Uniting the voices of 22 experts from around the world, Derek Congram’s collection of original papers centres its attention on those who are engaged in the location, identification, and repatriation of missing persons. The contributors to this timely volume represent multiple disciplines and various fields, including academia, government, and civil service, but are connected by a shared conviction that accounting for the missing is vital for a just society. The chapters concentrate on victims of physical or structural violence, including armed conflict, repressive regimes, criminal behaviour, and racist and colonial policies towards Indigenous persons and minority populations. Some contexts are familiar—morgues, mass graves, and battlefields—while others are surprising, such as schoolyards and a museum in Canada. Although the circumstances of the disappearances vary greatly, Missing Persons illustrates the connections between these disparate contexts. Multidisciplinary in scope, this edited collection is a valuable comparative resource for students, academics, and practitioners in forensic anthropology, anthropological/archaeological ethics, forensic psychology, criminal justice, and human rights.

Collected in this anthology are pivotal papers that elaborate the psychoanalytic and psychodynamic approach to a basic mechanism which was elaborated by both Sigmund and Anna Freud. Other classical references to this mechanism have been included, and it is hoped that theorists and scholars will find them useful. The modern psychotherapist must be sensitive to identification not only as a means of reflecting past internalizations but also of coping with current stresses predicated on what had been useful in the past. There are defenses against identification; there are hidden identifications; there are combined identifications; there are, as well, the more traditional considerations of identification with the aggressor. The clinical and theoretical implications of this will become apparent as the classic papers included in this volume are reviewed and understood.

The members of the Betty Joseph Workshop have provided major contributions to psychoanalytic thinking since the meeting's inception in 1962. This book is a celebration of Betty Joseph's work, and the work of a group of analysts who have joined her to discuss obstacles to psychic change in psychoanalytic treatment. A prestigious line up of contributors present clinical material for discussion on a range of topics including: Supporting psychic change Complacency in analysis and everyday life Containment, enactment and communication. The history of psychoanalysis is one of an ongoing struggle to reach a new understanding of the human psyche and develop more effective methods of treatment. In Pursuit of Psychic Change reflects this tradition - discussions of each contribution by other members of the group provide an in-depth exploration of the merits and limitations of a developing analytic technique, in the hope of achieving true psychic change. All psychoanalysts will benefit from the insights provided into the original and stimulating work of the members of the Betty Joseph Workshop.

An essential reference work for clinicians, psychologists and students.

The silence surrounding the Holocaust continues to prevent healing - whether of the victims, Nazis, or the generations that followed them. The telling of the stories surrounding the Holocaust - all the stories - is essential if we are to understand what happened, recognize the part of human nature that allows such atrocities to occur, and realize the hope that we can prevent it from happening again. Seeking to shed light on the collective silence surrounding the Holocaust in Germany, the contributors offer compelling accounts, histories, and experiences that illuminate the ways in which contemporary Germans continue to grapple with the consequences of the Holocaust. Denial in the older generations, as well as anger and confusion in the younger ones, comes vividly to the surface in these evocative stories of coping and healing. Told from the vantage points both of therapists and of patients, these stories encompass the psychological plight of all those facing the legacy of genocide - from the daughter of a high-ranking Nazi official to the children of Jewish immigrants, from those raised in the Hitler Youth Movement to those born well after the war.