Narratives of Trauma and Recovery

Collective and individual traumas are often described as "beyond words", the point in which language loses its ability to depict reality. While facing the unspeakable, psychotherapy and the arts often take a similar stand, trying to transform chaos into a narrative, in search of a meaning. In this course, we will use an interdisciplinary approach to better understand trauma and recovery. We will draw from evidence- based theories dealing with collective trauma and the construction of traumatic narratives. We will then explore the ways in which literature and visual arts struggle to represent collective and individual trauma. While focusing on prominent art works, we will outline the artistic and psychological mechanisms used by artists to enable processing and recovering.