Hungering for Revenge: the Irish Famine, the Troubles and Shame-Rage Cycles, and their Role in Group Therapy in Northern Ireland

Abstract

The authors assert that one may view intractable political violence as a genre of ‘emplotted’ action in which society enacts, writes and organizes its narratives into a symbolic system and a mode of historical explanation and a configuration of group relations, which have a storytelling capacity of their own. We demonstrate that in Northern Ireland there is a constant making and narrating of history and that this repetitive and reciprocal ritual of reliving history is a means of managing a profound psychic trauma and displacement which engenders and entrenches political violence, that profoundly affects therapists and their group members.