Involuntary Dislocation

Home, Trauma, Resilience, and Adversity-Activated Development

Renos K. Papadopoulos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000382822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

Renos K. Papadopoulos clearly and sensitively explores the experiences of people who reluctantly abandon their homes, searching for safer lives elsewhere, and provides a detailed guide to the complex experiences of involuntary dislocation.

Involuntary Dislocation: Home, Trauma, Resilience, and Adversity-Activated Development identifies involuntary dislocation as a distinct phenomenon, challenging existing assumptions and established positions, and explores its linguistic, historical, and cultural contexts. Papadopoulos elaborates on key themes including home, identity, nostalgic disorientation, the victim, and trauma, providing an in-depth understanding of each contributing factor whilst emphasising the human experience throughout. The book concludes by articulating an approach to conceptualising and working with people who have experienced adversities engendered by involuntary dislocation, and with a reflection on the language of repair and renewal.

Involuntary Dislocation will be a compassionate and comprehensive guide for psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, counsellors, and other professionals working with people who have experienced displacement. It will also be important reading for anyone wishing to understand the psychosocial impact of extreme adversity.

Part I
The context – prolegomena

Chapter 1
The epistemological cycle

Contents

Central dilemmas

Epistemology

The epistemological cycle

Figure 1.1 The epistemological cycle

Processing under confusing and discerning complexity

Typical epistemological errors in addressing adversity

(a) Confusion between the events and the experience of events

(b) Confusion between the various overlapping discourses, e.g. legal, ethical, social, political, psychological, spiritual, historical, human rights, economic, etc. and inappropriate domination of some discourses over others

(c) Pathologising those we want to help

(d) Causal relationship between three dimensions: (a) the severity of adversity, (b) the degree of damage inflicted, and (c) the amount of help required

(e) Pathologising the survivors in order to condemn the perpetrators

(f) Confusion between being a ‘victim of circumstances’ and developing a ‘victim identity’

(g) Resorting to what is familiar and oversimplified, in order to explain a complex and painful phenomenon

Concluding reflections

References

Central dilemmas

Several years ago, I was invited to attend a special event to commemorate the Holocaust at the Speaker’s House in the British Parliament building in the Palace of Westminster, London. The centrepiece of this event was a one-woman show, a dramatisation of a book by a Holocaust survivor that had just been published. Following the moving and breath-taking performance, there was a lively discussion among the audience of 50 invited persons, consisting of members of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords, government ministers, and professionals in related fields. During the discussion, a lot of deservedly positive comments were expressed about the play and the performance. Then, unexpectedly, a representative of a prominent humanitarian organisation stood up and voiced his concern about the message that both the book and the play were conveying, char-acterising it as ‘dangerous’. The Holocaust survivor was Zdenka Fantlová, a most remarkable person who was present during the entire event. In her book, The Tin Ring (Fantlová, 2013), she recounts with perceptiveness, unpretentiousness, and clarity her life before the Second World War, her imprisonment by the Nazis in no less than six concentration camps, her horrific experiences in the camps, and her life after liberation. Her story is harrowing as well as full of hope. Both her book and the play represent an astonishing testimony of defiance.

What is almost incredulous, and at the same time greatly inspiring, is her unwavering stance against allowing herself to assume the role of victim. Characteristically, she writes that when she was taken to the first concentration camp, she felt very vividly that she had an actual choice: between either perceiving herself as a victim, acceptance of being and acting as a victim, or seeing herself objectively, as a person who was thrown into this cataclysmic situation, and therefore, all she had to do was to survive. It was at that very point that she made a very conscious decision not to assume the role of a victim. She succeeded in retaining that position for the rest of her life, throughout the unbearable cruelties she endured in the camps, during her subsequent struggles to survive in the post-war years, right up to the present day. She decided to retain her values and dignity, her faith in humanity and love, not allowing the Nazis to break her spirit; and she succeeded! Everything that she said during that discussion, and her overall presence at that event, reflected unmistakably her incredibly firm position of refusing to adopt the identity and role of the victim; and it was, precisely, this tenacious stance that troubled the humanitarian organisation representative who called it ‘dangerous’.

Evidently, the perceived ‘danger’ was that Zdenka’s resolute defiance and steadfast resilience would somehow mask and minimise the horrific nature of the Holocaust and its devastating consequences. The concern was that Zdenka’s invincible spirit comes across so convincingly and dominantly that it can create the grotesquely erroneous impression that the Holocaust did not have, necessarily, negative effects. Hence, the perceived danger was that people would think that the Holocaust’s impact depended on how individuals responded to it, leading to a relativisation of its horrific nature. Admittedly, Zdenka’s extraordinary response to the ineffable perils and suffering may not be typical of what we are used to encountering in such survivors. Instead of becoming a broken person, marked for life by visible and invisible wounds, there she was, standing upright and unbroken, full of vitality in her nineties, radiating calm resilience, and optimism, and with an unquenchable zest for life. Moreover, she conveyed all this without any sense that what she had achieved was anything extraordinary. She presented her life and struggles not with any heroic pretensions or overtones but, instead, with human ordinariness and humility.

The humanitarian professional explained his concern, clarifying that Zdenka’s message could undermine educational campaigns to teach younger generations about the evils of the Holocaust, and also it could hamper appeals for financial support in response to other humanitarian crises, in general. His explanation has its own logic. In order to be effective, campaigns to alleviate the predicament of the survivors of any forms of mass calamities need to publicise the people’s plight and the destructive nature of the calamities, and not the resilience of those who survived these calamities. Consequently, such campaigns invariably project images of desperate and vulnerable victims who require urgent assistance for their very survival. Persons like Zdenka do not fit into these categories of broken people, as they do not convey helplessness and they do not evoke pity, concern, or an urgent need to be protected; on the contrary, such persons evoke admiration and, thus, would tend to be deemed as harming the campaigners’ main aims, by projecting messages that can be perplexing.

This concern is understandable but, at the same time, it poses painful dilemmas and raises difficult questions with far-reaching consequences. On the one hand, Zdenka’s inspiring example undeniably has a most potent educative value in its own right, which should not be ignored or underestimated. On the other hand, admittedly, this type of example does not fit the usual pattern of what is used to mobilise people to donate funds for the assistance of victims of atrocities or other types of adversities and humanitarian disasters.

Therefore, there is a genuine dilemma about how we (as practitioners and humanitarian workers) approach, how we position ourselves in relation to these types of adversity and its effects, and then how we communicate these perspectives to others: to those affected by the adversity, to potential donors, to our collaborators, and to the wider public. Do we focus on the strengths or on the weaknesses of those affected, on the contributing factors and wider context, or on the specific, actual destructive acts on their own, on the complexities of the phenomena, or on a simplified and easily understandable formulation of them, on explanations of causes and effects or on testimonies of the human experiences?

These and many other dilemmas emerge whenever we are involved in any aspects of addressing the aftermath of people experiencing severe forms of adversity, especially when our aim is to reach out to provide help for the adversity survivors. The type of selective emphasis we adopt is crucial and decisive, and it will define all our subsequent stances and actions. However, this selection is not always the product of an entirely conscious choice.

Undoubtedly, when we plan an intervention or design a campaign, we need to make many conscious choices about the selection of our aims, strategies, methods and techniques, desired outcomes, wider impact, etc. However, all these considerations depend on another choice that is much more fundamental, less noticeable, and precedes all the other choices. This choice is about which formulation we use that dictates how, precisely, we construe (in the first place) the very phenomena we are dealing with. It is the outcome of this choice that will affect the way we address the type of dilemmas that our discussion of the Zdenka incident illustrates.

Ultimately, how much choice do we have about this choice? What wider contexts and factors affect the way we end up ‘choosing’ these selective emphases on the phenomena we perceive? How much of the humanitarian professional’s alarm about Zdenka’s ‘dangerous’ message represents a wider inclination in society, i.e. a tendency to expect to see tangible evidence of suffering before they provide humanitarian support?

My argument here is that the selective emphasis that shapes the basic assumptions of our endeavours occurs imperceptibly and with almost no conscious input from us.

In situations when people experience severe forms of adversity, the predominant tendency is the one epitomised by the humanitarian professional’s expressed concern. It seems that this typical tendency consists of three distinct components that form a compact package: (a) our eagerness to help the survivors, (b) our partial perception that focuses only on their vulnerability, and consequently, (c) our exclusive emphasis on the survivors’ helplessness when we present their predicament to others. Moreover, according to the argument here, this tendency is not an act of deliberate choice; it is dictated by other processes that give form to our basic preconceptions of these phenomena, and it is the dynamics of these processes that this book will endeavour to explore.

What can be ascertained now, in this chapter, is that this usual tendency is fairly problematic, and it is the product of a dilemma that we (as not only practitioners and humanitarian workers but also members of the general public) are hardly even aware of. In our keenness to emphasise the abominable nature of certain human rights violations, we tend to present the survivors exclusively as ‘victims’ who, we claim, were scarred severely, even irrevocably. However, by doing so, we are in danger of victimising them further by pinning them down into that role and by bestowing on them a victim identity, with lasting detrimental effects. The dilemma is that if, instead, we emphasise the achievements of their survival and resilience, there is another ‘danger’, in minimising the enormity of their suffering and, thus, failing to provide the appropriate support they may require. In the latter case, there is an additional ‘danger’ that, unwittingly, we may convey a message that minimises the seriousness of the adversity, the evil nature of the human rights violations they had suffered. These dilemmas are real; they cannot be ignored, and the difficulty is that most often we are not even aware that such dilemmas exist. Instead, almost automatically, we opt for one perspective or the other, as a result of wider discourses that shape us, rather than based on our own judicious deliberations.

Hence, before we explore further the realities and effects of such adversities, it is imperative to note that, in addition to the multiplicity of difficulties involved in working with the causes, nature, effects, and aftermath of such calamitous situations, there is still another category of difficulties that often are particularly hazardous because they are, mostly, invisible and unnoticeable while, at the same time, decisive in determining the direction of our overall involvement. This category of difficulties refers to the implications of the ways we form our very primary perceptions of the adversity phenomena we are addressing.

It is a tragedy that these situations tend to impose this constraining polarisation, forcing us to choose between either the one or the other cluster of perceptions without appreciating that, in reality, both packages include valid and important elements. Therefore, what is required is to develop an appropriate framework that allows us to appreciate the complexity involved in these situations. This framework would be the product of a reflective position that examines both conceptualisations and the context within which each one is articulated.

At this point, it is important to note that these dilemmas have been examined, directly or indirectly, in the context of various academic and professional perspectives, e.g. media studies, communication, social psychology, management, sociology, dimensions of humanitarianism (organisational, political, economic, psychological, etc.), cultural studies, visual arts, etc., and under several themes, e.g. ‘politics of pity’ (e.g. Chouliaraki, 2004, 2010, 2012; Hutchison, 2014; Wilkinson, 2014), ‘pain of others’ (e.g. Razack, 2007; Rothe, 2011), ‘distant suffering’ (e.g. Boltanski, 1999; Ibrahim, 2010), ‘humanitarian visual culture’ (e.g. Moore, 2016; Zucconi, 2018), ‘humanitarian communications’ (e.g. Orgad & Seu, 2014; Seu, 2013, 2015; Seu & Orgad, 2017), etc.

Most of these themes will be addressed in subsequent chapters in this book. This chapter focuses on a specific facet of these topics, which deals with the mostly imperceptible dynamics that form the very presuppositions one has of such emotionally laden phenomena. This is the perspective of epistemology.

Epistemology

The processes involved in how anyone conceptualises phenomena are informed by one’s epistemology. Without going into details that would lie beyond the scope of this book, it would suffice to clarify that epistemology assists us to understand, inter alia, how we acquire what we know, how our conceptualisations of what we know are formed, how these conceptualisations affect the way we approach tasks, and how we understand our role in relation to them. In short, epistemology is ‘the philosophical inquiry into the nature, conditions, and extent of human knowledge’ (Sosa et al., 2008, p. ix). Epistemology (from the Greek word episteme, meaning knowledge) helps us to ...