ABSTRACT

Collecting authoritative contributions, Psychoanalytic, Psychosocial, and Human Rights Perspectives on Enforced Disappearance combines the life experience of victims with the expertise of scholars and practitioners of human rights, psychoanalysis, and artists to compose a picture that renders the complexity of this crime in its legal, psychological, and social aspects.

Victims offer a glimpse into the bottomless despair of those who lose a family member in such a dramatic and torturous way. Academic scholars give a picture of this crime in contemporary world. Experts in human rights law address the progress and limitations of the different standards applied in international human rights law. The psychosocial framework in the context of forensic investigations and reparations encourages the decision-making process of the victims and the elaboration of their personal and collective stories. Psychoanalytic authors address the problems of perpetrators' states of mind, the profound psychological and unconscious significance of torture and the disappearance of people by the State, and the issues of memory and trauma in its multiple meanings, individual, collective, and transgenerational. Art is part of this collective effort to work through, to question, to understand and repair the damages of evil.

The book is aimed at postgraduate students, scholars, and practitioners in politics, psychoanalysis, law, psychology, psychosocial studies, human rights, social work and justice, and related fields.

Title: Psychoanalytic, Psychosocial, and Human Rights Perspectives on Enforced Disappearance

ISBN(s): 9781032320588 hbk / 9781032320571 pbk / 9781003312642 ebk

Available OA content: Chapter 10 and Chapter 13

Licence line: Chapter 10 and Chapter 13 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

part I|45 pages

Enforced disappearance in the contemporary world

chapter Chapter 1|17 pages

Enforced disappearances in the contemporary world

The recent contributions of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances

chapter Chapter 2|14 pages

The curse of ambiguity

The traumatic memory of victims of enforced disappearance

chapter Chapter 3|12 pages

Mourning the disappeared

A personal account

part II|90 pages

Enforced disappearance and human rights

chapter Chapter 4|15 pages

The law in front of the denial of the law 1

chapter Chapter 8|20 pages

The fight against impunity for enforced disappearances

A historical and personal account

part III|98 pages

Enforced disappearance in psychosocial and psychoanalytical perspectives

chapter Chapter 9|16 pages

Memories of enforced disappearance

Psychological need and political aim

chapter Chapter 10|17 pages

Tortured and disappeared bodies

The problem of ‘knowing’

chapter Chapter 11|14 pages

Enforced disappearances and its perpetrators

The psychosis of total loss

chapter Chapter 12|13 pages

“Can You Describe This?”

United Nations officers and the families of the disappeared

chapter Chapter 13|17 pages

Traumatic traces of enforced disappearance through generations

From psychoanalytic theory to a family case study

chapter Chapter 14|15 pages

Names without bodies and bodies without names

Ambiguous loss and closure after enforced disappearance

chapter Chapter 15|4 pages

An art work for the Jardin des Disparus in Meyrin, Switzerland

“Question Mark”