From Metaphor to Interpretation: "Haunting" as Diagnostic of Dissociative Processes. (26th January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Chiovenda, Andrea
• Other Names: Good Byron guestEditor.; Rahimi Sadeq guestEditor.
• Is Part Of: Ethos. Volume 47:Number 4(2019:Dec.)
• Page Start: 489
• Page End: 500
• Publication Date: 2020-01-26
• Subjects: hauntology -- clinical ethnography -- dissociation -- Pashtun; Ethnopsychology -- Periodicals; Personality and culture -- Periodicals; 155.805
• DOI: 10.1111/etho.12257
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0091-2131

Abstract

Abstract: The article is based on the analysis of one psychodynamic interview session the author had with one of his respondents, who had with the author a long‐term, one‐on‐one series of sessions. Positioning the respondent in his sociocultural and political setting (as a Pashtun, male, well‐educated, and middle‐class individual living in south‐east Afghanistan, at a time of great instability and security concerns), the article explores the respondent's recounting of a harrowing and haunting personal encounter. Such exploration is based on a psychodynamic approach that intends dissociation as a functional mechanism the individual employs to fend off an unbearable reality that never passed the stage of unformulated experience. By bringing the dissociative material to a state of conscious conflict, what was previously unformulated, because unbearable, becomes at least thinkable. Such is the development that the respondent reaches during the intersubjective exchange with the author, which shows how a "haunting" experience may index the presence of an adaptive state of dissociation.