ABSTRACT
It is common for the debate and understanding of enforced disappearances to be framed in terms of conscious and instrumental factors. This essay instead explores the unconscious, implicit emotional forces, in both perpetrators and victims that are brought to bear at intrapsychic, interpersonal and societal levels. In particular, the way that enforced disappearance plays upon early life anxieties, for example, those that precede the achievement of narrative memory and the capacity to manage the loss, even temporarily, of primary objects. The psychological, cognitive and emotional developmental processes involved are described and how vulnerabilities and deficits in these developments are exploited by perpetrators as a means of controlling at individual, political and social levels.
