ABSTRACT
Several years ago a client, whom the author will call Ben, came into treatment because of a disabling depression that had been untouched by medication. Ben had found some relief and self-understanding in transactional analysis psychotherapy. In psychotherapeutic work, psychoanalysts seek, they welcome, they need their histories. As therapists, they build their understanding and their compassion for their clients and groups in part through learning their histories. In preparation for the author's work in Romania, he read a number of historical and sociological works about Eastern Europe after World War II. Paul Connerton, a social anthropologist and expert in cultural memory, has written an article on "Seven types of forgetting," describing different forms of "forgetting" at the social and cultural levels. Repressive erasure is characteristic of totalitarian regimes whose determined efforts are to eliminate any evidence and reference to the earlier political and social order in the glorification of the new.
