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Accounts of a troubled past: psychology, history and texts of experience

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-07, 13:33 authored by Jovan T. Byford, Cristian TileagaCristian Tileaga
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.

Publisher

© American Psychological Association

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

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

ISSN

2326-3598

eISSN

2326-3601

Language

  • en