Presentation Announcements by Ruth Lijtmaer (USA)
No Apologies: Unfinished Business and the Pact to Forget
(2022). International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education (IFPE) Conference: Disruptions and Transformations. Chicago, September 15-17.
The author discusses the movie, The Silence of Others (2019), which reveals the epic struggle of victims of Spain’s 40-year dictatorship under General Franco. Filmed over six years, the movie follows the survivors, who continue to seek justice to this day, as they organize a groundbreaking fight against a state-imposed amnesia of crimes against humanity. “El pacto del olvido” (the pact to forget) gave amnesty to people who committed the crimes. No judgments towards them were made because too much time had elapsed for punishment. The pact tried to silence the population so as to not bring up the horrors lived and perpetuated by the government, which created more emotional damage to the victims of the regime. Society as a whole, as represented by the government, supported the victimization, leaving people unable to mourn and depriving them of closure.
How Human are We? Reflections on Malevolence and Paranoid Fantasies
(2022). Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society (APCS) Conference: Totalitarianism and Psychoanalysis: Psychosocial Perspectives on Fear and Anxiety. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, October 20-23.
Given a range of wonderful human traits, including sensuality, walking upright, having language, possessing a large brain, having emotions, strong memory, an ability to dream, an imagination, creativity, curiosity, and the ability to develop a culture, Lijtmaer asks how we can explain the dehumanization of other human beings. How is it that homo sapiens are the only animals capable of cruelty and war?
Dehumanizing the “Other” and Ignoring their Pain (“Dehumanizacion del otro e ignorando su dolor”)
(2022). IARPP Hogar Relacional. Barcelona, Spain, online, November 12.
The function of dehumanization is to override inhibitions against committing acts of violence. When people dehumanize others, they actually conceive of them as subhuman creatures. Only then can the process liberate aggression and exclude the target of aggression from the moral community. Perpetrators of human rights violations have no guilt about their actions. Whether a nation’s enemy is outside its boundaries or inside, the enemy is identified as a source of evil, the cause of the nation’s misfortune. At the core of nationalism lies a rescue fantasy: To relieve the suffering of one’s people, one must identify an enemy and then kill the source of suffering, imagined to be depriving the nation of its proper place in the sun. National violence, however brutal or extensive, always is performed in the name of virtue, rendering killing a manifestation of morality.
Ruth Lijtmaer, Ph.D.
Ridgewood, New Jersey, USA
Email Ruth LItjtmaer