Publications

Traveling Through Time: How Trauma Plays Itself Out In Families, Organizations and Society

“Bullets don’t just travel through skin and bone. They travel through time.” These words were tattooed onto the shoulder of a young woman whose father was shot during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. This wrenching, volatile but also binding truth is the subject of this book. It’s a truth about traumatic experiences that happen to a family, but also to a society, and to the organizations that link these intimate units with the larger context of history and culture. It’s also a truth about the way trauma plays out over time, including between generations. Grounded in Erik Erikson’s “way of looking at things”, the book is a journal of encounters between clinical psychoanalysis and other disciplines, and an inquiry into what might be learned there for both. Sometimes that learning has to do with trauma: the way in which what can’t be emotionally contained, thought about or spoken in one part of a system is passed along, with disorganizing, sometimes heartbreaking consequences, to another. After a reflection on dignity, the book examines intergenerational trauma in families, including Erikson’s. It then illustrates how trauma to organizations slips below the threshold of awareness and yet continues to wear down its members. The final section examines aspects of the larger society, including radicalization, war trauma, the pandemic and cultural healing. What emerges is the sober yet hopeful truth that what people discover by taking their own emotional experiences seriously, though that might markedly differ from what is accepted in the everyday world, is a primary path toward recovery from trauma.
Traveling Through Time is available for purchase through Phoenix Publishing House.

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We Don’t Speak Of Fear: Large-Group Identity, Societal Conflict and Collective Trauma

This book brings together key members of the IDI to present the theory and practice of the important work they do. At its heart, the book holds the idea that, while traumatic experiences may happen to an individual or a family, they also affect society and large-group identity over long periods of time. In that way, trauma plays out between generations and between countries.

The book is divided into three parts: theory, application, and methodology. Trauma is the key thread running throughout and the distinguished contributors investigate healing, dehumanisation, memory, the pandemic, war, terrorism, identity, culture, the law, justice, and religion, among many other fascinating topics. The authors bring in case studies from all over the world, including the United States, Northern Ireland, Russia, Israel, Turkey, Germany, Egypt, and Palestine. To make sense of these, they draw on a wide range of approaches: group relations theory, group analytic theory, psychoanalysis, large-group psychology, psychodynamic theory, psychology, economics, sociology, political science, history, journalism, and the law, to name but a few. This must-read book brings theory to vivid life and brings hope that our fractured world can learn to heal.

We Don’t Speak Of Fear is available for purchase from Phoenix Publishing House.

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Traveling Through Time: How Trauma Plays Itself Out In Families, Organizations and Society

M. Gerard Fromm, Ph.D.

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Finding A Place To Stand: Developing Self-Reflective Institutions, Leaders and Citizens

Ed Shapiro

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Agrafa Journal Features Both IDI Chair Vamik Volkan and Fellow Regine Scholz

Agrafa Journal of Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, March 2014

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Grossgruppenidentitat, schweres Trauma und seine gesellschaftlichen und politischen Konsequenzen

Vamik D. Volkan, DGPT Jahrestagung (2014), translated by Elizabeth Vorspohl

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Lord Alderdice Speech: “If Ireland Can Find Peace, What Chance for Israel?” Ford School (September 2010)

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“Those People Were Some Kind of Solution”: Can Society In Any Sense Be Understood?

Edward R. Shapiro and Wesley Carr (2006)

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