Stolen Identities, Suspended Lives. Embodied Active Imagination in Clinical Work with Victims of State Terrorism

Each collective trauma holds its own particularities and forms of horror. When the violence is exerted by the government responsible for the care of the population it is termed state terrorism. The traumatic experience and its subsequent negation create a profound dissociation between two narratives: the explicit, which conceals the true facts, and the implicit, which remains unconscious and unbridgeable. In the gap between the two, life becomes suspended. From a Jungian perspective, this can be understood as the interruption of the process of translation and integration (terms that I will explore in some depth) from implicit sensory phenomena to an explicit representational narrative. This profoundly affects the development of the ego-self axis. In turn, it creates a special challenge for analytic technique that calls for new ways of listening to, and meeting the patient in, that non-verbal, unrepresented territory. Drawing upon clinical material, an embodied perspective of Jungian clinical work is offered to show how the inclusion of the body of patient and analyst enables access to the non-represented, though implicitly encoded, traumatic affective memories stored in the somatic unconscious.