Psychoanalytic, Psychosocial, and Human Rights Perspectives on Enforced Disappearance (PDF)

Collecting authoritative contributions, Psychoanalytic, Psychosocial, and Human Rights Perspectives on Enforced Disappearance combines the life experience of victims with the expertise of scholars and practitioners of human rights, psychoanalysis, and artists to compose a picture that renders the complexity of this crime in its legal, psychological, and social aspects.

Victims offer a glimpse into the bottomless despair of those who lose a family member in such a dramatic and torturous way. Academic scholars give a picture of this crime in contemporary world. Experts in human rights law address the progress and limitations of the different standards applied in international human rights law. The psychosocial framework in the context of forensic investigations and reparations encourages the decision-making process of the victims and the elaboration of their personal and collective stories. Psychoanalytic authors address the problems of perpetrators' states of mind, the profound psychological and unconscious significance of torture and the disappearance of people by the State, and the issues of memory and trauma in its multiple meanings, individual, collective, and transgenerational. Art is part of this collective effort to work through, to question, to understand and repair the damages of evil.

The book is aimed at postgraduate students, scholars, and practitioners in politics, psychoanalysis, law, psychology, psychosocial studies, human rights, social work and justice, and related fields.