Scientific Meeting: Unwanted Fragments: Silence, Listening and Inhabiting Responsibility | Roger Frie | April 13, 2019

The collective crimes of history cast long shadows. Our attempts to confront and understand the effects of the Nazi period and the Holocaust on the profession of psychoanalysis have emerged out of a silence and silencing of the past. Part of this process involves considering how we, as psychoanalysts and as individuals, exist in relation to historical trauma. We are familiar with the “transgenerational transmission of trauma,” with thinking about history’s victims and their descendants. But how do we understand the legacy of the perpetrators?

Roger Frie responds to this question by considering what it means to inherit unwanted fragments of a perpetrator history. Using his German family’s struggle with memory as a site of inquiry, he examines the process of remembering, its transmission, and dissociation. In a moment defined by chance and circumstance, Frie discovered that his beloved grandfather had joined the Nazi Party. What lurks in the silences that are passed down between generations? How does our collective response to history’s atrocities shape what we know and remember? In the face of today’s resurgence of racism and bigotry, Frie maintains that “history’s call” and the work of psychoanalysis are inherently related. Using clinical vignettes, he considers the moral obligations of memory that cross generations. And in order to address the effects of historical traumas in the present he suggests it is necessary to acknowledge of our own location in history and society.

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Roger Frie is Professor of Education at Simon Fraser University, Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia and Associate Member of the Columbia University Seminar on Cultural Memory. He is Faculty and Supervisor at the William Alanson White Institute in New York and at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles, editorial board member of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Psychology, Psychoanalytic Discourse and former editor of Psychoanalysis, Self and Context. He has written and edited numerous books and is the author most recently of Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility After the Holocaust, which received the 2017 Canadian Jewish Literary Award, the 2018 Western Canada Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the 2018 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature. He is also editor of History Flows Through Us: Germany, the Holocaust and the Importance of Empathy, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Gradiva Award in Psychoanalytic Scholarship.

Learning Objectives: At the end of this program/session/event participants will be able to:

1. be able to recognize the ethical dimension of history and its importance for psychological understanding;
2. recognize links between the intergenerational transmission of memory and silence in relation to historical trauma;
3. be able to identify the psychological dynamics and cultural practices at work in the formation of traumatic memory.

 

^{Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. Open access photo.}

SCIENTIFIC PROGRAM COMMITTEE: Karin Holland Biggs, Ph.D., FIPA. (Chair),  Elizabeth Wallace, MD, FIPA.
For further information please contact Program Chair: Karin Holland Biggs – khbiggs@telus.net