Nostalgia for a Reconciled Future
Scenes of Catharsis and Apology in Israel and Australia
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14970893 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Juliet Rogers (0000-0003-0304-5266, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 252-270 |
| Publication date | 2011-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Griffith Law Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1038-3441 • E-ISSN: 1839-4205 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/10383441.2011.10854698 |
| OpenAlex | W1972365040 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 2 |
Catharsis has become a key concept in facilitating the healing of nations and individuals after trauma. It is implicitly required of people who testify before nation-building trials and truth commissions, and it is desired of the audience to nation-building events. Catharsis is intended to facilitate the nostalgic promise to produce the reconciled nation in the future. Catharsis, however, was abandoned in psychoanalysis because of its short-lived effects and the tendency for subjects, as Freud describes it, to ‘fall ill’ again in similar ways. This tendency is because, despite the heightened emotional appearance of catharsis, the inner conflict of the patients is not resolved. In this article, I discuss the role of catharsis in the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and in the recent Apology to Australia’s Indigenous people, and consider how the very demand for catharsis can foreclose prematurely on possibilities for tolerating the crucial conflicts that emerge in projects of nation-building and reconciliation, specifically when those conflicts involve the assuming of incommensurable positions – such as that of perpetrator and of victim
Aesthetics · Catharsis · Indigenous · Political science · Project commissioning · Psychoanalysis · Publishing · Sociology · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Philosophy · Psychology
| Citations per year | 0.45 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2021 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |