Les disparitions forcées et la torture à notre époque : un point de vue de la psychologie analytique [Enforced Disappearances and Torture Today: A View from Analytical Psychology - Torture survivors and the unthinkable: A hyper-present body in the therapeutic process]

In those very rare cases, some people happen survive to the atrocities of abduction, imprisonment and torture and even manage to get psychotherapy; this meeting with the therapist presents special characteristics. At an initial phase of therapy and for a long time, words generally fail in transmitting the core of patient’s experience. Such survivors have generally a tormented body in which individual and collective violence, hate, anger, guilt and shame are painfully inscribed, and the level of dissociation is so high that they have dispossessed bodies, deprived of an agent, but that keeps significant details of the traumatic experiences. Body countertransference becomes the only viable route for a therapist to make contact with a survivor’s experience, through an embodied encounter, a sort of body to body communication. The centrality of the body in the therapy of torture survivors suggests that the body is the unintentional receiver and container of massive political atrocities, and for this reason, the site where, in case of gruesome social violence, the possibility of the social ‘knowing’ is stored and can be regained. Thus, when we come to the enforced disappearances, the powerful determination of being able to find the disappeared’s remains in family members, which corresponds to the certainty of a truthful version of what happened, does justice to the importance of the body as a last witness to what happened, beyond any possible manipulation.