Psychoanalytic, Psychosocial, and Human Rights Perspectives on Enforced Disappearance

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.

"This outstanding collection weaves its intricate threads to connect human rights work with psychoanalysis. To call it ‘interdisciplinary’, though correct, is far too dry. The commitment of those who work in the field of human rights rests on the most profound depth psychological motivations. And psychoanalysis, at its base, is committed to freedom. The crime of enforced disappearance presents a challenge at every level. This book is an amazingly vibrant response."Andrew Samuels, author of The Political Psyche "Really important work on the critical link between psychology and human rights. Both disciplines are about healing, much needed to counter the scourge of enforced disappearances."Volker Turk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights"This vital new volume both witnesses the suffering and discusses the psychopolitical meaning of the immense human rights violation of disappearing human beings. Assembling an array of authors who are impressively knowledgeable and deeply implicated in this story, Bianchi and Luci's book is a much-needed contribution to the recognition and understanding of one painful and unfortunately representative recent and contemporary political repression."Jessica Benjamin, psychoanalyst and author of Beyond Doer and Done To: Recognition Theory, Intersubjectivity and the Third"In the 1970s, mothers and grandmothers in Argentina looked for the disappeared, fought for the right to the truth, and obtained the adoption of the International Convention. This book, in a profound juridical and psychological analysis of enforced disappearances, shows the sophistication needed to address, from the point of view of victims, relatives, perpetrators, lawyers, and psychotherapists, a crime that unfortunately is still being committed in many countries of the world."Federico Villegas, former president of the Human Rights Council, ambassador of Argentina to the United Nations

Maria Giovanna Bianchi, PhD, is an analytical psychologist and psychotherapist. She worked for almost three decades as a United Nations Human Rights Officer. Monica Luci, PhD, is a Jungian and relational psychoanalyst, and lecturer in Refugee Care at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies of the University of Essex.