\u201c\u2026what was most important was to sit closely beside the survivors and to “listen and receive this,” as if it were part of you and that the act of taking and showing that you were available was itself playing some useful role<\/em>.\u201d \u201cHelen Bamber was both a founding member of Amnesty International and one of the first counselors to enter the concentration camps after the war. Her goal was to encourage survivors of torture and horror to somehow convert their trauma into stories and thereby find some release from their mute and immutable paralysis. In Bergen-Belsen, Bamber encountered ‘impossible stories’ which had to be told. She describes this narrative paradox-of telling the untellable. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually,\nBamber realized that what was most important was to sit closely beside the\nsurvivors and to “listen and receive this,” as if it were part of you\nand that the act of taking and showing that you were available was itself\nplaying some useful role. A sort of mourning beneath and beyond tears: “it\nwasn’t so much grief as a pouring out of some ghastly vomit like a kind of\nhorror.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIf\nwe possess narrative compassion we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.\nThe loving is in the healing, in the cathartic balancing of what Joyce called\n“identification with the sufferer” and knowledge of “the hidden\ncause.” We might say, in conclusion, that narrative catharsis, performed by\na listener-narrator, offers a singular mix of empathy and distance, whereby we\nexperience the pain of other beings -patients, \nstrangers, victims- ‘as if ‘ we were them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Cathartic\nhealing involves the narrating of past wounds both as they happened and as if\nthey happened in this way or that. And it is precisely this double response of\ntruth (as) and fiction (as if) that emancipates us from our habitual protection\nand denial mechanisms. One suddenly experiences oneself as another and the\nother as oneself- and thereby begins to apprehend otherwise unapprehendable\npain. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Note:\nThese are extracts from Richard Kearney\u2019s chapter, \u201cThe hermeneutics of wounds\u201d\nin the 2018 book \u201cUnconscious Incarnations: Psychoanalytical and Philosophical\nPerspectives of the Body\u201d, edited by Brian W Becker, John Panteleimon\nManoussakis, and David M Goodman, pp. 29 -36.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201c\u2026what was most important was to sit closely beside the survivors and to “listen and receive this,” as if it were part of you and that the act of taking and showing that you were available was itself playing some useful role.\u201d Richard Kearney on Helen Bamber \u201cHelen Bamber was both a founding member of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":408,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404\/revisions\/408"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bodystory.co.za\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Richard Kearney on Helen Bamber<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n