Accounts of a troubled past: Psychology, history, and texts of experience.

Abstract

The article considers the contribution that discursive psychology can make to the study of accounts of a troubled past, using, as relevant examples, testimonies of Holocaust survivors and confessions of collaboration with the secret police in communist Eastern Europe. Survivor testimonies and confessions of former informants are analyzed as instances of public remembering which straddle historical and psychological enquiries: they are, at the same time, stories of individual fates, replete with references to psychological states, motives and cognitions, and discourses of history, part of a socially and institutionally mediated collective struggle with a painful, unsettling, or traumatic past. Also, the examples point to two different ways in which archives are relevant to the study of human experience. In the case of Holocaust survivor testimony, personal recollections are usually documented in order to be systematically archived and made part of the official record of the past, while in the case of collaboration with the security services, it is the opening of the 'official' archives, and the fallout from this development, that made the confessions and public apologies necessary. The article argues that discursive psychology's emphasis on remembering as a dynamic, performative and rhetorical practice, situated in a specific social and historical context offers a particularly productive way of exploring the interplay between personal experience and the institutional production of historical knowledge, one that helps to address some of the challenges encountered by psychologists and historians interested in researching accounts of troubled past.

The Moral Career of a Suspected Legionary: Psychological Language in the Securitate Archives

“…They enable us to study facets of human experience that are both biographical and historical. 11 This article looks at some of the constitutive properties of informer notes on Vaman and Securitate operatives' responses as "active texts" 12 and cultural means of accomplishing psychological and moral actions. We conceive of the production of informer notes and other documents of the Securitate as constitutive of a network of practices in the service of state control.…”

Reconsidering post-war narratives of involvement in Nazi violence

“…Jovan Byford usefully suggests in relation to survivor testimonies that 'the analysis of testimony as discourse might help illuminate the complex interplay between individual and collective remembering which lies at the core of testimony both as a historiographic source and a commemorative form.' 15 By outlining some of the underlying 'socially and culturally shared assumptions' 16 in encounters with the side of the persecutors, which shape these accounts, I will argue that oral and visual narratives constitute cultural and historical artefacts of the period, and the socio-political contexts and discourses in which they were co-produced. As such, they can add to the scholarship not only or primarily on the Nazi period, but also and especially on the post-war dynamics and processes which have shaped them.…”

Alternative pathways to activism: Intersections of social and personal pasts in the narratives of women’s rights activists.

“…Engagement with archives can challenge existing psychological knowledge and shift the center by revealing the experiences and values of people and institutions that are otherwise outside the mainstream. Tileagã and Byford (2017) in their editorial in that particular issue argue that archival material does not restrict qualitative researchers in their choice of methods; in fact the use of critical methodological approaches when engaging with the archives enhances the usefulness of the archives in the process of uncovering subjugated knowledge. Qualitative researchers have suggested, and in some cases exemplified, combining archival studies with discursive psychology (Lester, 2014), rhetorical analysis (Byford & Tileagã, 2017), and the critical incident technique (Belmonte & Opotow, 2017).…”

“…Tileagã and Byford (2017) in their editorial in that particular issue argue that archival material does not restrict qualitative researchers in their choice of methods; in fact the use of critical methodological approaches when engaging with the archives enhances the usefulness of the archives in the process of uncovering subjugated knowledge. Qualitative researchers have suggested, and in some cases exemplified, combining archival studies with discursive psychology (Lester, 2014), rhetorical analysis (Byford & Tileagã, 2017), and the critical incident technique (Belmonte & Opotow, 2017). In the current study, we contribute to this range of methods by using a qualitative thematic analysis technique (Braun & Clarke, 2013) to make sense of an oral history archive which includes the narratives of women’s rights activists.…”