Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Volkan looks at how groups are influenced in a very profound way by traumatic and distant historic events. Time collapses between the distant past and the here-and-now. The community adopts symbolically significant ‘chosen traumas’. The leaders are also symbolically important and become invested with enormous power in communities where there is violence, which is why he calls the book Blind Trust.
Your next choice is Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes by James Gilligan.
As I was working in Northern Ireland, trying to understand why people from both sides felt their community had been disrespected and humiliated, I met a forensic psychotherapist called Estela Welldon, herself a distinguished author, who told me that my ideas were just like those of her American friend James Gilligan. He is a professor of psychiatry who had been responsible for institutions for the criminally insane on the east coast of the United States and he discovered that these men, when they did some terrible thing in a psychotic state, didn’t believe that they were doing something wrong. They believed they were righting a terrible wrong that had been done to them, but doing so in a psychotic way. They believed that what they were doing was actually exacting justice albeit in a terrible and horrible way.
Estela arranged for me to meet with James Gilligan and when we talked it became clear to me that what he saw in the case of individuals was similar to what I saw with whole communities. We have kept in touch and exchanged papers, but this book was profoundly important to me because its message is: ‘Don’t try to deal with such violence as a moral question of good and evil. It is like a public health matter which is hugely damaging to our society locally and globally.’ We don’t deal with cancer as a moral problem and when we begin to see violence in this new way it opens up all sorts of new channels to deal more successfully with violence, as he has demonstrated.
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As Leader of Northern Ireland’s Alliance Party, Alderdice was a key negotiator of the Good Friday Agreement and went on to be the first Speaker of the Northern Ireland Assembly. He was until recently President of Liberal International, the world-wide federation of Liberal political parties, and he is currently the Convenor (Chairman) of the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords.
