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.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
Qualitative Psychology
Citation
BYFORD, J. and TILEAGA, C., 2017. Accounts of a troubled past: psychology, history and texts of experience. Qualitative Psychology, 4 (1), pp. 101-117.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Acceptance date
2016-02-11
Publication date
2017
Notes
This article may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record. The definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/qup0000047