Testimony Psychotherapy for Genocide Survivors: Providing a Common Ground Between Treatment and Prevention of Human Rights Abuse

Abstract

Testimony psychotherapy is a brief individual psychotherapeutic method for working with survivors of state-sponsored violence. First described by a group of Chilean mental health professionals who were working with survivors of political violence during the Pinochet dictatorship it was further described by Agger and Jensen in their work with refugees in Denmark and with Holocaust survivors. All groups report that testimony functions both in private and in public realm as a means for individual recovery and a means of bearing witness to historical truths.Although testimony approach is not strictly a clinical intervention, many have noted that it offers the survivor clinical benefits. This observation was confirmed in our study of testimony psychotherapy with survivors from Bosnia and Herzegovina.As part of research activities of the 'Project on Genocide, Psychiatry and Witnessing' of The University of Illinois at Chicago, dr Stevan Weine and I conducted a pilot clinical trial of testimony psychotherapy, at the same time creating oral history archives, and creating awareness in the community of Bosnian refugees of the importance of documenting the survivors' narratives. In this work we were functioning as witnessing professionals, committed to helping individual survivor's recovery, but also to addressing the social and historical tragedy of genocide.. Because we saw testimony work from an interdisciplinary perspective, we also sought to create testimony documents that would move outside of the psychotherapeutic dyad and make connections with others in the scholarly, human rights, artistic, and survivors' communities.