The Return of the Suppressed and (Palaeo)Balkanology: Vojin Matić, Vladimir Dvorniković i Dragoslav Srejović

Abstract

Numerous researchers into the history and prehistory of the Balkans – Niko Županić, Vladimir Dvorniković, Veselin Čajkanović, Miloje Vasić, Milan Budimir, Miloš Đurić, Vojin Matić, Milutin Garašanin, Dragoslav Srejović – have considered this region as the area in which cultural, linguistic, or material forms never really die out, although they constantly change. In the writings of these authors, an invisible (sometimes historical) thread is established between the past and the present of the Balkans, along which the previously forgotten forms can always come back, and the long suppressed cultural forms can resurface. A distinctive trope is thus constructed, according to which the past of the Balkans is seen as a dark repository of cultural, religious, or psychological contents, emerging again at the times of social crisis – the trope of the return of the supressed. The author here argues that this trope is in its essence psychoanalytical: it belongs to a thought system, a hermeneutics originating in the 1930s, parallel to the (palaeo)balcanological research, among the abovementioned authors. Some authors speak in explicitly psychoanalytical terms, and the text focuses on the three of them: Vojin Matić, Vladimir Dvorniković and Dragoslav Srejović. Vojin Matić was active over a long period from the 1930s to 1990s, and his work establishes a chronological structure of the psychoanalytical influences in the Serbian humanities. His palaeopsychology gave an explicitly psychoanalytical turn to the (palaeo)balkanological thought, in the search for the continuity of the psychological mechanisms towards which a subject can always regress. Karakterologija Jugoslovena by Vladimir Dvorniković marked the (palaeo)balkanological research before the WWII. Conceiving it as an explicitly psychoanalytical study, Dvorniković developed a classical “psychoanalytical vertical” – bottom/down/dark/subconscious, opposed to surface/up/light/conscious, along which the supressed “autochthonous” cultural layers surface. The interest of Dragoslav Srejović for human “behind” the archaeological material naturally led him towards psychoanalysis (or was induced by it). The explicitly psychoanalytical phase of his work is notable (late 1950s and early 1960s), to become a constant tendency of his later theoretical approach. Srejović added to the vertical constructed by Dvorniković the opposition of archaeological/historical time. It is argued here that with all the authors mentioned the psychoanalytical trope of the return of the suppressed is indubitable: the past of the Balkans is described as its dark subconscious, not recognizing time, and therefore able to emerge again into the conscious, the light, the surface.