Edited by two significant contributors to the trauma literature, this book examines the long-lasting personal and multigenerational imprint of Soviet trauma and the ongoing stresses of life after Communism, and promises to be a classic work of value for years to come. Through the voices of East European clinicians from six countries, we learn of their professional lives under traumatic conditions and of their clients' lives, under similar conditions. The clinicians share case studies of clients ranging in age from childhood to late adulthood. Through the course of treatment, the psychopathologies resulting from living under oppressive conditions became clear. These effects are so powerfully widespread that the clinicians themselves discover that in order to treat their clients they must also explore and understand their own traumatic past. First-person narratives are interspersed with psychological theory and techniques, providing a full, rich understanding of the experience. Newly sensitized by international terrorism, we are now more aware than ever of the impact of a pervasively traumatic climate. Studying trauma in the Soviet era, has much to teach us regarding the fears of today. This book will be of interest to psychologists, historians, social psychologists, readers in political science, and mental health professionals at all levels, particularly those who work with individuals who have suffered trauma from political oppression or genocide.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Westerners watched those who had survived the era of Soviet trauma emerge into what we hoped would be the exhilarating light of freedom. What we have witnessed, however, is a slow and painful process of progression and regression, of hope and disillusionment, of unexpected psychological barriers: invisible walls that block the progress we had hoped for. In Beyond Invisible Walls, East European therapists, themselves, draw a compelling picture of the waves of trauma that their people endured, the institutions of trauma that remained well after Stalin's era, and their impact on survivors and their families. They describe the psychological remnants of those years: walls that confine people by unconsciously preserving old adaptations to political terror, walls that divide one part of the mind from another, and walls that rise between one generation and the next. These therapists' stories allow us a striking glimpse into how patients' trauma evokes the therapists' own wounds; how both speaker and empathic listener find their way to a healing process, how the two begin to dismantle these invisible walls.
