From Politics to Poetry

Abstract

Violent and dangerous socio‐political dynamics affect each individual powerfully. This is particularly true after profound trauma, such as the pogroms of Europe, the most disturbing being the Holocaust or Shoah. Trauma such as this can be internalised and preserved in symbolic form for generations. Many psychodynamic theorists describe how traumatic repetition can continue across generations unless the trauma is integrated or transformed in some way. One important way to integrate trauma is through poetics. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and others provide the foundations for the contemporary work of Russell Meares, who shows that metaphor and imagery are vital to the integration of traumatic experience. The psyche is structured around associative and imaginative process and responds best to poetic communication and relationship. As daughter to both Russian Jewish and German emigrants/immigrants, the author has experienced remnants of the dynamics of the pogroms and the Holocaust in the internal dynamics of her own family. As well as describing some of this story, she crafts her own present‐day response to the emotionality of this experience by speaking in a poetic voice.