IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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dramatization, in contrast with expressive group psychodrama of Jacob Moreno, developed decades earlier. In its various aplications, the individual patient is at the center of the ‘scene’ designed from his/her memories and fantasies; the analyst directs potential auxiliary therapists to participate in the verbal ‘play’/interchange with the patient. This has been shown to have facilitating effect on the emergence of otherwise strongly defended unconscious contents and processes and lead to insight. IV. Bc. Social Violence and Terrorism Kernberg’s (2003) Sanctioned Social Violence describes a spectrum of regressive, malignant, narcissistic-paranoid mechanisms that provide a common (unconscious) matrix for analysis of those aspects of social psychology that sanction violence. Kernberg extends Freud in that he adds the dimension of the dread of consequences of aggression that mobilizes defenses of a narcissistic and paranoid kind. In this type of process of group regression, normal functions and defensive operations are replaced by the broad gamut of primitive defensive operations typical of paranoid-schizoid mechanisms , originally described by Klein. According to Kernberg (2003) and Green (2002b), this uncontrolled powerful regressive potential toward primitive defensive operations centering on splitting to deal with primitive aggression may be the most important evidence of the basic motivational system Freud designated as the death drive , the counterpart of libido. Rice (1969), Green (1969, 2002b), Glass (2008) and Kernberg (1994, 2003) see such unconscious contents and processes operative within individuals, small and large groups, institutions and society. IV. Bd. Historical Trauma, Ethnic Unconscious, and Social/International Crisis Herron (1995) conceptualized the “ Ethnic Unconscious” as repressed material shared by each generation with the next and with most people of their ethnic group. Historical trauma binds together the members of a social group, race, religion or nation, and predisposes them to a rapid regression into a paranoid ideology, paranoid mass movement, fanaticism, ostracizing, and violent attacks upon another political, national or racial subgroup. Volkan (1988, 1999) has provided a fundamental understanding of the interrelationships among historical trauma, identity formation and intergroup conflict. “Other groups” become objects of early splitting, narcissistic and paranoid regression and defenses against them. The lack of a mourning process was identified as one of the etiological factors (Volkan, 1999). The unconscious potential for primitive aggression available in different degrees in every individual may be activated rapidly in regressive group processes. Throughout history, group activated aggression, in turn, may be amplified by the combination of the collective internalization of historical trauma (Papiasvili and Mayers, 2013), and an acute social crisis that disrupts ordinary social structures. Under such conditions, the paranoid polarity of a dominant ideology can emerge and fall on fertile ground.

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