TY - JOUR A1 - Schweidson, Edelyn T1 - The Silence from a Petrified Past JF - International Forum of Psychoanalysis, Oslo (Scandinavian University Press) Vol. 7 (No. 2, July 1998), pp. 113-119. N2 - Patients traumatized by events beyond the limits of human experiential endurability often reveal a shattered self with no continuous personal core. These events seem to have occurred without a witness, possibly because their inhumanity caused the subject to disappear while the events were taking place. Such patients suffer from their sudden emergence of dissociated sets of memories which seem to have registered the entire circumstances of the trauma in a frozen state. The therapist's interventions seem to have no impact at these moments. This may be so because there is a self other than the patient's that is present at a scene which belongs to a past that never ceases to recur. These reenactments of past traumatic events reveal a self condemned to disbelief whenever testifying to an inhuman situation devoid of any subjectivity. Vignettes from the psychoanalytic treatment of a patient who suffered from traumatic ?memories? will illustrate the points above. The testimonies of homeless children and of Holocaust survivors also point to this silencing of voices wounded by an inhuman past. Questions regarding the ethical dimension of psychoanalysis and its witnessing to present day injustices as opposed to silencing them ? are addressed. Y1 - 1998 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schweidson, Edelyn T1 - From the perverse pact to universal conflicts JF - International Forum of Psychoanalysis, Oslo (Scandinavian University Press) Vol. 14 (2005), pp. 21-27. N2 - We psychoanalysts – as split subjects – are not immune to charismatic leaders who preach violence against selected targets depicted as the cause of all evils. Freud, in Group psychology and the analysis of the ego, alerted us against such leaders, who can manipulate by transforming us into an uncritical mass. This would be the social equivalent of the perverse pact in repressive desublimation between the superego and the id at the expense of the ego: the latter is put to sleep, and the superego exhorts the id to do violence and regress. Socially, these perverse pacts often take place with the superego represented by charismatic leaders who foster identification with themselves, put the egos of their audiences to sleep through manipulation and thus address an amorphous mass that they can direct towards violence and destruction. An event in which such a phenomenon apparently occurred will be discussed to show how urgent it is to revisit psychoanalytic writings on these matters in order to withstand the temptation to be herded by manipulative leaders. This will certainly protect psychoanalysis and allow for its transmission. It is up to us to exercise the critical analysis that psychoanalytic tools equip us for so that we can detect such summons to perverse pacts and denounce them. Y1 - 2005 ER -