ABSTRACT
This chapter describes certain kinds of images, called “phantoms,” that can only be called intergenerational presences, since they first appeared in the aftermath of social catastrophes such as the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. These phantoms come with an underlying story, which the author describes as a phantom narrative. Phantom narratives have a definite structure that shows how the unconscious, working at the group and individual levels, provides, through the medium of a remembered story, political and social contexts within which the individual may find a different kind of containment for these catastrophes. In this way their suffering may be potentially processed psychologically and related to symbolically.
