Working-through Collective Wounds discusses how collectives mourn and create symbols. It challenges ideas of the irrational and destructive crowd, and examines how complicated scenes of working-through traumas take place in the streets and squares of cities, in times of protest. Drawing on insights from the trauma theory of psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi and his idea of the 'confusion of tongues', the book engages the confusions between different registers of the social that entrap people in the scene of trauma and bind them in alienation and submission. Raluca Soreanu proposes a trauma theory and a theory of recognition that start from a psychoanalytic understanding of fragmented psyches and trace the social life of psychic fragments. The book builds on psychosocial vignettes from the Brazilian uprising of 2013. It will be of great interest to psychoanalysts interested in collective phenomena, psychosocial studies scholars and social theorists working on theories of recognition and theories of trauma.

About the Author
Raluca Soreanu is Wellcome Trust Fellow at the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. She is a practising psychoanalyst, associate member of the Circulo Psicanalitico do Rio de Janeiro and of the Instituto de Estudos da Complexidade, Brazil. She has published on psychoanalytic theory, psychosocial studies and the sociology of creativity.

Reviews

"This book is an important contribution, and much needed, in these frightening times of widespread and increasing state violence. Soreanu's ideas could be put to good use by potentially sympathetic commentators with big megaphones and broad influence, and by groups resisting oppression in their own countries." (Jay Frankel, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 79 (1), March, 2019)

"This work can also be a good introductory text ... .It is one of those rare texts that is both profound psychosocial research and an accessible read for the general public." (Endre Koritar, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, May 07, 2019)

Book Information
ISBN 9781349844128
Author Raluca Soreanu
Format Paperback
Page Count 247
Imprint Palgrave Macmillan
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan