Psychotherapy, Politics and Trauma: Working with Survivors of Torture and Organized Violence

Abstract

Oppression can occur in the family, school workplace and cultural environment, and in the discourses of psychiatry and psychotherapy as well as under overtly repressive political regimes. Therapy with survivors of torture and organized violence is not a special case of therapy in a political context, nor of the need for politicized therapy. It is rather an example where these issues are writ large and where the place of psychotherapy in a general struggle for collective civilization, personal liberation and human rights can be given a particularly sharp focus. Group analysis provides a particularly valuable approach because it recognizes the dialectic between individual and group, and the resonance between different levels of context.