The Social Unconscious

"אי אבדה הדרך הברוכה /
אי אבדה הדרך אל הכפר /
הדרך בה רציתי לשוב בחזרה"
(יורם טהרלב)
"Where is the lost blessed road /
Where is the road to the village  /
The road of my return"
(Yoram Teharlev)

In 2007, an Israeli prime-time musical TV show presented a Palestinian singer performing an all-israeli song expressing a yearning for a lost village and a wish to return home. Sharp-sighted viewers recognized how this reframing had exposed a highly explosive political content, that was in fact there all along. The political provocation seemed unintended, and was later covered up by the producers.
Why and how is it that when trying to take the main road, we find ourselves returning again and again to roads we had tried to avoid? This is the case with the issue located at the center of this paper: Despite the efforts of silencing the traces of the Palestinian Nakba out of our conscious collective memory, the Israeli public sphere is in fact saturated with signs of this traumatic event. The repressed is doomed to return.
The paper suggest an inovative use of psychoanalytic concepts in order to understand this silencing as a process of social repressing. it will be suggested that in regards to the Nakba, perpetrators' trauma can be recognized alongside the primary Palestinian trauma – a conceptualization that helps to understand the bases of such repression process .In contrast to a "chosen trauma", perpetrators' trauma is usually a denied collective trauma, sizzling in the social unconscious and tied to a repressed guilt.
Several such "traumatic social symptoms" will be introduced in the paper, based on fascinating examples from the Israeli culture – both the material culture and the symbolic culture. Other source of examples stems from the author's experience as the facilitator of a unique study-and-reflection group, in which the Jewish-Isreali participants had faced this uncanny materials and tried to work through them together.

"Bu makale Erbil’in metinleri bağlamında, edebiyatın toplumsal ve siyasal olanla bağlarını irdeleyerek metin ve tür ilişkisini ele almayı deneyecektir. Erbil’in metinleri edebiyat tarihindeki pek çok türü iç içe geçirerek toplumsal ve siyasal yaşama müdahale eder. Bu müdahale, dilin sürekli yenilenmesiyle, sınırlarının sürekli genişlemesiyle birlikte hareket eder. Hakikati arayan bir yazarın kılavuzluğunda yeni bir dil ve anlatım geliştirilir. Erbil’in dili, hakikati dile getirme arzusuyla devralınan yerleşik ve egemen dil yapısını kırarak türsüz bir dili açığa çıkarır. Bu bağlamda yazıda, Erbil’in dilinin bilhassa toplumsal ve siyasal hakikatle ilişkisine odaklanılarak türsüzlüğe nasıl imkân tanıdığı açımlanacaktır."

The aim of this paper is to add to existing work on the theme of power, emotion, and organizational learning. The study was undertaken in Kazakhstan, where tensions between old and new regimes provide an environment that is rich in emotion and power/politics; and offer an opportunity to study the interplay between emotion and power during individual and organizational attempts to learn. The social unconscious is used as a conceptual frame to identify underlying dynamics that impact on organizational learning. The empirical study illustrates a social fantasy concerning the fear of mistakes and its consequences. This fantasy is sustained through blaming and punishing the people who make mistakes, and through feelings of internalised embarrassment and guilt that are enacted through interpersonal relations of shaming and being ashamed. Our contribution to knowledge arises from employing a concept (social unconscious) that has not been used to study organizational learning within a socia...

For decades, an essay of the same name by the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler was decisive for the relationship between historical science and psychoanalysis, at least within Germany and on a theoretical level - with the fatal consequence that Wehler's argumentation was guided by the highly contestable assumption of an exclusive relationship between psychoanalysis, which allegedly proceeds purely in terms of individual psychology, and historical social science, which is primarily interested in collective diagnoses, which considerably impeded the dialogue between the disciplines. Yet an alternative theoretical model was already available at the time Wehler's essay was published: Norbert Elias's sociology of figuration, which was strongly influenced by psychoanalysis and group therapy, could have shown social science-oriented historical research a way to investigate the network of relationships between individual and 'collective' psychological processes without artificial dichotomies. Admittedly, Elias's theory of civilization, for its part, does not sufficiently take into account the moment of a collective or social unconscious. Therefore, after a critique of Wehler's critique and an appreciation of Elias's model, this essay is devoted to those approaches that attempt to explore and conceptually define a supra-individual unconscious.

"The Road to the Village":
The Israeli Social Unconscious and the Palestinian Nakba
Efrat Even-tzur
Abstract:
This presentation tackled the paradox that is inherent in the attempts to silence the Palestinian Nakba: Despite massive effacement efforts, the traces of this mass violent event have remained all-pervasive in Israeli culture and national collective memory. Several silencing practices were described and discussed from a Freudian perspective, as instances of collective repression of anxiety provoking material. Furthermore, it was suggested that as far as the Nakba is concerned, this repression might be the result of collective perpetrator trauma on the national level. Finally, the presentation offered several intriguing examples of "social traumatic symptoms", which were understood as signs of the return of the repressed. According to LaCapra, collective post-traumatic symptoms serve as obstacles to the formation of just and responsible societies. Thus, the presentation concluded with a discussion of the socially therapeutic value of a psychoanalytic analysis and its potential contribution to long term processes of collective working through of mass violent events.