Memory, Trauma and the Spirited Life: Remembering and Identity

Memory, Trauma and the Spirited Life offers a unique understanding of memory’s role in developing as a person, in navigating the course of life, and in mitigating emotional pain.

This book develops the idea that memory, by what it endows, requires work of us that entails responsibility: to the self, the other, to the planet and to the living and the dead. Discussing the concept of memory and what it provides from the ancients to the present, Burrell draws on such writers as E. M. Forster and Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, Tzvetan Todarov and Edward Said, as well as Susan Rubin Suleiman and Paul Ricoeur, to explore the operation of cultural and collective memory, trauma, otherness and the possibility for forgiveness.

By means of richly detailed clinical vignettes, the author provides a psychoanalytic perspective to illustrate the transformative power of memory in coming to terms with the past, thereby making it essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in practice and in training, as well as those with interests in history, literature, identity, the treatment of trauma and the question of hope.