Trauma, history, and mourning: Working through the violence

Abstract

This paper aims to examine the dynamics of acknowledging certain traumatic events and the processes of social representation – and historicization – of the traumatic violence towards working through the past. In view of this, the major circumstances, tensions and limitations to the comprehension of what characterizes the structural meaning of trauma in its psychological and sociocultural level will be considered. It is therefore here required to contemplate inquiries on the theoretical implications of the psychoanalytical concepts of working through, trauma and mourning over the effort of representing and overcoming a past violence experience. Turning points of such issues are the connections between trauma and the possibilities (dilemmas) of the narrative representation. Such concerns are crucial to understand the debates about the comprehensive efforts of explaining and representing some of the most urgent inquiries concerning the making of historical meaning and the consolidation of a society defined by the long-lasting and permanent effects of traumatic past injustices. These aforementioned questions – inasmuch as representing a threat to the meaning and to the deed itself – and the demands for the representative recognition of the violence and the suffering, whose terms need to be mediated, confronted and comprehended as a cultural process of collective memory, are crucial for understanding the debates about the memory of the violence and its alleged transformation and recovery.