Historical and Cultural Narratives: Confessions of a Diaspora Jew

Abstract

This article blends a complexity sensibility with narrative theory and especially Freeman’s notion of the narrative unconscious to bring into view our historical cultural situatedness and its influence on personal and psychoanalytic identity. Special attention is paid to trauma informed historical narratives that drastically reduce complexity and resort to simplistic and binary distinctions. Drawing from autobiographical memories, the author brings a dialogic interpretive lens to his own historical cultural narrative passed down to him as a postwar Diaspora Jew. We come to see that this narrative is soaked with the trauma of the Holocaust, creating a rigid narrative that ignores complexity, reduces the other to debasing stereotypes, and is closed off to dialogue. The author continues with his lifelong dialogic struggle to transform and maintain a historical cultural narrative that is more complex, more humane, and embodies a deep respect and responsibility for the other, a transformation inseparable from his psychoanalytic growth. The author concludes with a clinical vignette that serves as a sober reminder that the wounds of historical cultural trauma run very deep and that the narratives they spawn are never totally transformed. They remain an underground presence as slumbering ghosts, ready to surface at those moments when we feel frightened or vulnerable.