Introduction

How do human rights law and psychoanalysis understand what happens during and after an enforced disappearance? How does society attempt to redress such crime? How should reparation be shaped depending on the meaning attributed by the victims and the different phases of this process for individuals and society ? What does it mean, from an individual and social point of view, to promulgate laws that ensure impunity to perpetrators? Why is it so difficult for the relatives of the disappeared persons to consider the possibility, and maybe, at a later stage, surrender to the evidence that their beloved ones may never come back? What does this mean in their lives, and what does it mean for society? To reply to these and other questions, the editors, a formerhuman rights officer who became psychoanalyst and a psychoanalyst who researched and studied human rights, invited contributions from experts in both fields of psychoanalysis and human rights, academics, clinicians, practitioners, artists and most valuably from relatives of persons who disappeared. The interdisciplinarity and multiplicity of perspectives included in the book aims at filling a gap in the existing literature on enforced disappearance and contributing to the understanding of such a complex crime and the consequences on the victims and society at large.