This article by Jon Blend and Roz Carroll was originally published in the Journal of Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England volume 51.
Abstract
This article describes the use of improvised enactments as a vehicle for exploring refugee journeys of flight from danger. Drawing on our backgrounds in psychotherapy, theatre, musicianship, and authentic movement, we devised a series of events each incorporating a semi-structured journey. We used guided instruction, improvisation with props, and silent, meditative movement. The journeys were conducted in five stages or scenes. Participants chose either to bear witness or be involved as protagonists. Events concluded with a group de-roling ritual, followed by a processing of experiences using drawing and writing and sharing of responses and reflections. Our impression across all these events was that the experience of journeying had a profound and healing effect.
This article[i] focuses on the development and use of a method for exploring transgenerational trauma through semi-structured improvised enactments. The authors, Blend and Carroll, evolved this approach out of a series of workshops and then live group events focusing on the legacy of the Shoah and refugee experiences of flight from persecution. Witnessed Improvised Diaspora Journey Enactments (WIDJE) draws on many established practices from psychotherapy, groupwork and the arts. The combination of elements is critical: we use the structure of a journey, within the context of survival-driven diaspora, which is enacted by participants with other participants acting as witnesses. Witnessing provides containment and recognition of the stories that unfold. We include elements of improvisation within a semi-structured format.[ii]
As teachers of psychotherapy we developed this approach to facilitate understanding of transgenerational and collective trauma both for trainees and experienced psychotherapists working with Jewish and other refugee clients. Our method takes into account the complex processes involved in evoking memories, and reconstructing and creating representative stories. It is essential to hold this in a context which also bears witness to the emotional journeys, past and present, of refugees. We are not trying to reproduce in a literal way the journey of the Kinder by train and boat; these experiences are well documented. Our work was focused on a range of refugee journeys – some existing in intergenerational memory, others visible in current news coverage. The aim here of using a symbolic journey is to breathe air into history and to create an experience that can put participants in touch with both what is and isn’t discussed and/or documented.
Beyond words: The legacy of the Shoah
As psychotherapists we work with individuals and with groups, exploring personal, familial and community stories. Many clients come with Shoah related histories. These days there is increasing interest in and understanding of transgenerational trauma, ie. wounds passed down from parents to children usually, and to subsequent generations. This can include the impact of collective trauma – horrific events on a large scale affecting a wide group. As Erickson puts it: “By collective trauma…. I mean a blow to the basic tissues of life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality”.[iii]
The devastating events leading up to and including the Holocaust had a major impact on family life during the Nazi era. Hundreds of thousands of families could no longer function as before i.e. living at home maintaining their traditions, income and status. Families were forcefully evacuated by the Nazis, interned or put to death; others were subjected to harsh conditions: hunger, disease and hard labour. The events seriously impaired the capacity of the persecuted survivor parents to care emotionally and economically for their young.[iv]
The key psychobiological effects of traumatic experience are hyperarousal and dissociation, and over the long-term depression and chronic anxiety.[v] Dissociation is an automatic protective response to trauma, which separates off unassimilable experience leaving it “frozen…shrouded …by an anaesthesia”.[vi] Many among the survivors developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the years after the war, due to the prolonged duration of their trauma.
Parenting after the Holocaust was affected by survivors’ strong desire to normalise life. Many quickly married and procreated, seeking to continue the Jewish race and thereby deny a posthumous victory to Hitler. Some of these relationships suffered, however, as spouses affected by trauma encountered difficulties with intimate relations. Constraining effects of neighbour hostility and pervasive anti-Semitism also led to social alienation and distancing, prompting many parents to conceal their Jewishness. Many survivors experienced apathy, emotional distance, aversion to change, intense anxiety and paranoia. These processes created what is known as the “conspiracy of silence” or the “double wall” phenomena.[vii] The children of Holocaust survivors could not understand what lay behind this wall of silence. Nonetheless they could pick up unvoiced familial tensions and pain related to missing relatives who were unaccounted for. Instead what was transmitted to subsequent generations was an experiential void.[viii]
In a major piece of research entitled “Trauma and the Continuity of Self: A Multidimensional, Multidisciplinary Integrative Framework”, Yael Danieli interviewed a sample of 422 adult children of survivors with a 3-part inventory assessing multigenerational legacies of trauma.[ix] What emerged from the survivors’ adult children were reports of the intensities of parents’ adaptational styles that were then classified as ‘victim’, ‘numb’, and ‘fighter’ post-traumatic responses. Nanette Auerhahn and Dori Laub theorized that the parents would displace their own repressed grief onto their children.[x] These children often have absorbed their parents’ emotions and cannot differentiate these from their own feelings. This is experienced in adulthood as “unexplainable grief.”[xi]
The word trauma has its roots in the early Greek “titrosko” meaning “to wound”. There is an associated word “rubido” which carries two meanings: to “rub in” to the wound and to “rub out” or erase.[xii] So trauma is experienced as being both “pierced” and “erased” by the enemy. Those in flight also take part in the erasing process themselves to avoid being conspicuous and therefore in danger. In a diaspora situation culture is often maintained secretly under difficult circumstances through worship, food and music.
In her book Memorial Candles Dina Wardi talks about her experience of children of Holocaust survivors.[xiii] Often one child in the family is designated to memorialize dead relatives and carry on the family legacy. This transmission is unconscious, rarely spoken of; being named after a murdered relative often carries with it a heavy psychic burden. “Memorial candle” children often took the role of scapegoats for the family, assuming the burden of their parents’ unmourned losses. At the same time this unconscious endowment serves as a link to the trauma his or her parents endured. The search to uncover the root of the suffering and to whom it belongs often brings people in to therapy.
Psychotherapy and collective transgenerational trauma
A commonality in many diaspora experiences are occurrences for which words do not seem adequate. Clients come to psychotherapy often with uncertainties around their identity, feeling something is wrong but not being able to articulate what it is. When children of displaced immigrants grow up in a different culture from that of their parents, tensions and loyalty conflicts arise. There is often a push to assimilate and a contrary pressure to maintain past traditions of the family of origin. When in, addition, families have endured trauma/severe hardship, the stories of this pain go into silos. Accordingly psychotherapists need to be able to work sensitively with a client who may be suffering from what has happened before they were born. Clients may not have directly experienced trauma, but they may nevertheless be “haunted” by their forbears’ experiences, both known and unknown.[xiv] Research by Danieli and others further reveals that the “conspiracy of silence” applies also to therapists, who for many reasons may not pick up on references to collective and/or transgenerational trauma.[xv]
As psychotherapists we understand that trauma is held in the body[xvi], in collective memory, in rituals and in objects, icons and artistic representation. These create multiple access points to memory, to imagined scenarios, to stories recounted, and fragments of history.
People often ask how we can work with transgenerational themes when there may be very little actual known detail of parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ lives. In fact there are quite a variety of ways of invoking, inviting, and feeling into stories of our relatives’ lives.[xvii] The arts can play a pivotal role in this because they carry multi layered symbolic meanings and speak to unformulated “knowing in the bones”. For example, there are moments in anyone’s lives when history breaks through- a chance encounter, a sudden connection with a film or a novel, or a piece of art, gives a new perspective. It’s a change in perception – a detail or memory that had a hollow or undefinable meaning suddenly finds a resonance, and is now redolent with meaning and/or feeling.
Others ask “how do we know the true nature of what our forbears encountered?” In a factual sense that is hard to answer. Yet our emotional responses to shards of information about our histories, imperfect and incomplete though this knowledge may be, nonetheless carry validity. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, reflecting on the experiences of those who know little of their actual past, advocates “trying on” different narratives of events. This is similar to the way that an actor tries on clothes or shoes to feel into a character. He calls this process “cloaking”. As Phillips observes, who could say that what appeared to “fit” wasn’t in some way a “truth” for that person?[xviii]
What brings us to this work?
In contemporary relational psychotherapy, the therapist’s own history and subjectivity is considered to be always implicitly present, whether directly acknowledged or not. As therapists and authors with our own histories of refugee and diaspora backgrounds, we have a particular interest in intergenerational and transcultural stories.
Jon’s mother Martha Blend was a Jewish refugee from Austria who came to the UK via the Kindertransport route in 1938. The full significance of her experience was concealed throughout his childhood. However, following the fiftieth anniversary Reunion of Kindertransports in 1988, Martha wrote a book about her experiences.[xix] At the same time, Jon began exploring his heritage during sabbatical travels in Borneo. In 1989 a Christian tribeswoman in Sarawak introduced him to the writings of Victor Frankl.[xx] Jon was moved to visit the JEATH War Museum, formerly a Japanese prison- of-war camp. This commemorates Allied POWs who, from 1942-1943, laboured under the direction of the Japanese constructing the Thai- Burma ‘Death Railway Bridge’ over the River Kwai. Here he learnt about the diaspora experiences of the camp’s survivors. On returning to England he joined other Jewish social workers with continental origins researching their heritage, later contributing to a social work manual on Jewish issues.[xxi]
Around this period publication of much eye-witness and survivor testimony began to take place in response to genocides from across the globe, breaking what Danieli refers to as the ‘Conspiracy of Silence’ between survivors, their families and wider society.[xxii] Jon later attended conferences concerning the Holocaust and participated in a group exploring ‘asymmetric dialogue’ between Germans and Jews.[xxiii]
Roz Carroll grew up with an awareness of being the daughter of an Irish immigrant and feeling a strong affinity for the culture and literature of Ireland. Over the years she has recognised the split between her inner identification with Irishness and her embeddedness within, and assimilation to, British life. Her father’s book about his Irish diaspora experience also challenged the unacknowledged impact of evacuation, a second diaspora, on children sent out of London during World War Two.[xxiv]
Roz’s interest in the Holocaust started whilst working on kibbutz in the1980’s. Later she trained at the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy which was started by German psychotherapists Bernd Eiden, Jochen Lude and Rainer Pervoltz. She was profoundly influenced by the way Germans and Jews came together as trainees and trainers in emotional encounters and deep dialogue to seek connection and understanding of their mutual histories.
Evolution of the format
We met in 2003 and started teaching together in 2007 at Terapia, a Child Psychotherapy Training. In 2015 we ran an experiential weekend workshop for therapists called “Naming the Beast: Addressing Collective Trauma and its Aftermath” at The Minster Centre, an Adult Psychotherapy Training organisation. Using arts-based exercises we supported participants to explore aspects of identity relating to their transgenerational history. We developed a safe space for them to connect to and understand themes of shame and anxiety within a context that drew on the concepts of “piercing” and “erasure”. What followed was a movement-based exercise to help participants explore their internalised “perpetrator” as well as their identification with helplessness in a “victim” position. After time to process, we ended with a commemorative ritual involving the placing of stones.
The next event was a workshop on ‘The Legacy of the Shoah’ for a Psychotherapy & Politics Conference on ‘The Body Politic’.[xxv] Our biggest concern in preparation for the workshop was the risk of dissipating intensity through too much generalized ‘talking about’. We had only 90 minutes which was not enough time for each person to tell their story as a narrative. We decided it was important to keep the focus on what was felt in the body, to help participants gather elusive fragments of buried experience or find embodied association to this powerful historical event. Our workshop was accordingly tightly structured and, in the first half, mostly non-verbal. We opened with listening to the song ‘A Hill of Little Shoes’[xxvi] which reflects on seeing the painful image of a mound of childrens’ shoes at Auschwitz and what this symbolises.[xxvii] We used a movement exercise to help participants orient to the themes.
Then we invited them to take two pieces of paper from a child’s leather satchel, which contained many slips with evocative fragments of prose. The task was to resonate and respond, adding words of their own. Each person in a group of three contributed a short phrase to make a simple haiku. Each group ‘performed’ their haiku to the circle. Our aim in using this ‘cut-up’ method was to introduce the element of chance and to allow something to be created that was not solely personal. What emerged from this process was a feeling that was intimate, disturbing and profound.
It is interesting to reflect on who was drawn to our workshop. Many of the participants were Jews, often with a continental history that included their forebears escaping from terror. We also noticed a number of non-Jewish therapists resonating deeply with their clients in mind and their own histories of displacement, war, and fear.
Diaspora Journeys
At this time, in 2015, the media focus was frequently on harrowing scenes of displaced refugees in flight pouring across borders in search of safety. We started to think about diaspora journeys involving flight from terror and how we might develop this into an enactive and reflective process for groups.
We drew on our interest in previous major diaspora journeys, for example those undertaken by displaced people in the aftermath of the First World War. Data from different countries suggest that at least 10 million people were displaced either internally or as a result of fleeing across an international frontier. European literature of the period after this is redolent with images of fear, loss, dislocation, yearning, betrayal, decadence, anomie, and spiritual suffering.
World War Two also led to major upheaval, relocation and exile; many Jews including the Kinder, have described their journeys in books and personal testimony.[xxviii] The Reunion of Kindertransports, organised by Bertha Leverton in 1989, provided one such focal point encouraging voices that had hitherto remained silent to speak out their diaspora experiences. In addition Associations of Jewish Refugees (AJR) sprung up around the globe; in some places their ‘second generation’ counterparts (ACJR) came into being too for the ‘Kind of the Kind’ and their descendants, so to speak.
Many of the original Kinder’s journey from home to station to boat to arrival followed a clearly marked route to safety. We had a particular interest in the less-told stories of others whose refugee journeys were of a different nature. Journeys involving, for example, flight across mountains and rivers, navigating hazardous border crossings which presented challenges to body and soul for people of all ages and capacities. We wanted to include journeys of flight made by previous generations who had fled from pogroms and other genocidal threats. We planned to keep the journey generic in order to include refugee stories from global diaspora.
Diaspora triggered by danger– as opposed to economic migration – has always been and continues to be a global phenomenon. In our work we are mindful of other diasporas including those from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.[xxix]
Witnessed Improvised Diaspora Journey Enactments
In 2016 we offered the opportunity to explore refugee experience through enactment to three groups of counsellors and therapists: the Association of Jungian Analysts (26th July), participants at the Confer Conference on “The Psychic Impact of War and Terrorism”[xxx] and a group of male Haredi counsellors- in -training. We deliberately chose groups of professionals with their own personal support structures. We were aware that the material explored this way experientially carried a charge that could potentially trigger buried memories or overwhelm people through their identification with the trauma.
Our aim in these evenings was to invite participants to feel into the experience of being displaced, becoming a refugee and travelling with uncertainty. As therapists experienced in working with trauma we paid close attention to building safety in order to contain the evocative material we were exploring. One aspect of this involved inviting approximately a third of those present to act as silent witnesses (about which we will say more later). As facilitators we prepared in great detail our directions to the group so that the structure itself was part of the containment. This included having people speak minimally and in character and de-roling when the journey finished. At some stages we participated in the enactment, at other times we gave explicit instructions as directors of the process. Each evening concluded with a group process to share and listen to others’ experience.
What follows is a composite of the three different events.
The structure of the journey
Taking the archetypal refugee story, one of flight from danger with an uncertain ending, we decided to set up the journey in five “movements”. We used headings to frame the scenes and themes:
- The village /Shtetl
- Crossing mountains, rivers, forests
- Around the camp fire with stories and song
- In Limbo/ Sheol
- Aftermath
These represent both stages of the journey and distinct states of mind:
- the disruption of the known
- challenge and adversity
- recuperating and re-affirming
- disorientation, confusion
- facing what’s happened and future uncertainties
Setting the Scene
We used simple props to set the scene – rivers made of swathes of material, mountains fashioned from free-standing flip charts covered with sheets, and orange and red scarves used to make a “fire”. Props included an old-fashioned camera and tripod, maps, torches, old personal documents, precious items and religious icons, suitcases, real cooking utensils, and dried food. We chose simple instruments made of wood, skin, gut – the kind that might be found in a village.
Whilst participants were arriving at the venue, we played music from a variety of cultures that evoked uncertainty, confusion, yearning and heartache.[xxxi] These included:
- Homeless by Ladysmith Black Mambazo – “Many dead tonight, it could be you. And we are homeless, homeless”.[xxxii]
- Pache Leili– Roshi Nasehi- a haunting Farsi love song punctuated by dystopian percussion.[xxxiii]
- Mein Rue Platz (My Resting Place) – a Yiddish song by acapella group Vocolot.[xxxiv]
- Chand/The Moon -Garam Masala – a hypnotic poem recited in Hindi and English with clarinet and sitar accompaniment.[xxxv]
The enactment began with the group listening to the opening bars of an instrumental recording- Long Road out of Eden.[xxxvi] This begins with the sound of desert wind, followed by plaintiff tones from an ancient flute. A bell tolls. With the participants now in touch with the sombre mood, we introduced the enactment and gave instructions for the first scene.
The Enactment
We began by inviting participants to draw lots for roles (baker, scribe, farmer, religious leader, disabled elder etc) taking paper slips from a hat. Encouraging each to fully embody their role we then focused on establishing a moment of celebration in a village life. The “local photographer” (Roz) gathers everyone for a picture. As she raises her hand to activate the (imaginary) flash unit, suddenly – boom! – there’s a major disturbance. A shepherd (Jon) runs in shouting warnings of danger and the need to flee at once. This was completely unexpected: chaos and confusion ensues as everyone grasps the situation. Some props are on hand. The shouted instructions are ‘Take what you need and move fast- NOW!’
The next scene involved travelling at night through unknown and treacherous territory. We had already set out the environment using props to make rivers, mountains, and obstacles for the groups to navigate. Lights were switched off and we gave out torches. In two of these events we used several rooms, including corridors to create the sense of an epic journey. People had to huddle, squeeze through gaps, and help each other over obstacles. We wanted to create a sense of urgency and uncertainty. Drama arose spontaneously as group members wrestled with conflict over who should make decisions, whether to go back for a missing family member, and over shortage of food. In one group there was strong challenge between “believers” and “unbelievers” regarding the status of the religious leader’s entitlement to lead the flight.
The camp fire scene provided an opportunity for the group to recover slightly. We introduced poetry, prose and song to deepen the connection to refugee themes. The readings represented many diaspora experiences: stories of pain, heartache, and loss from Syria, France, Somalia, Austria, Poland and Pakistan. Participants drummed or sang folk songs in mother tongue, some were bitter, others achingly beautiful. There was a tension between those wishing to sing more, and rest, and those anxious to move away for fear of encroaching danger. The group moved on in uneasy silence as dawn rose.
We called the next stage “Limbo”. The Torah also refers to a place called ‘Sheol’which Kabbalists view as a stopping point for all souls on their journey from this world to Olam Habah: the next world. It is often connoted as a place of uncertainty, often of high anxiety and dread.
Here is an excerpt from our directions:
“Stop moving. We’re now in limbo. This is a space between worlds… You can’t go back … You don’t know what lies ahead…
What does it feel like? What have you lost?
What do you notice if you listen to your body ? Steady your breath… Notice if your heart is beating fast or slow… Which way does your body want to move ?
Notice the angle of your head, the shape of your mouth… What is going on in your feet?
What are your hopes and fears?
Now open your eyes… look around… Notice where others are in this – who are you connected to? Who are you prepared to give energy to, or not?
Close your eyes, go back into your body, let your breathing deepen
What story is emerging? Whose story might you be taking on?
Hold onto the images even if they are uncomfortable.”
These prompts were delivered whilst a music piece entitled “Reminiscence” was playing in the background. The piece begins with ascending notes on the violin resembling a series of haunting cries…. These cries help move the participants into the new unknown territory, the place of “Limbo”. Here the quality of participants’ movements, guided by our words and the music, becomes slow, heavy and weary. People hang their heads, avert their gaze, reflecting the sorrow and mixed feelings that appears to pull them almost literally toward the ground.[xxxvii]
In reality we know this state of Limbo/Sheol can persist for months or even years as people are unable to find refuge and are held in camps or forced to travel on and on. Even when relative safety is reached this is not “a place like home”.[xxxviii] This creates a prolonged crisis that opens questions of faith, of meaning, of failure, of possibility, of fear and hope.
The fifth stage we titled “Aftermath”. Here we are slowly bringing participants out from their deep internal state into “the new reality”. We played Arnalds Letters of a Traveller (2015) to facilitate this.[xxxix] Here the smooth cello conveys a devotional sense like the sound of a “bracha” uttered slowly through exhaled breath. The experience of this phase, for some, is like waking from a dream. Participants re-orient and are encouraged to reconnect with each other simply, though gesture and glance. Some participants embraced, others remained on their own.
Our thinking here was to enable a gentle return after a long inner journey. To aid the transition we rolled out long rafts of wallpaper into the communal space. Participants and witnesses drew intently. Some made marks with pastels on their own, working side by side; several interacted with others co-creating a kaleidoscope of images, words, symbols and poems. The emerging result was an impactful montage containing beauty and pain. We invited everyone to walk around the artwork slowly, taking in the images and words.
We completed the return by taking everyone, including witnesses, through a process of de-roling. The first phase was physical: shaking off the tensions in the body, freeing up breathing and feeling the floor under their feet. Then we asked each person to say out loud their true identity. For example, “I was the doctor in this enactment. I am not the doctor, I am Aaron, a student”; “I was a witness to what took place. I am not a witness any longer – I am Jane, a teacher and therapist”.
“After Such Knowledge”[xl]
Next we gathered together, sitting in a circle. In this final stage we maintained the emphasis on mindfulness, spaciousness, and speaking from the heart. The atmosphere was hushed and respectful as participants began to share their experiences. The pace of speech was unforced and people spoke simply and in a deeply emotionally connected way. Many shed tears or seemed profoundly moved.
Participants reflected on how taking part in the enactment resonated with their lives, their family history and/or the history of the clients or community they worked with. For reasons of confidentiality we have changed names and identifying details. The following typify some of the responses:
- Chaim vowed to break a ten-year silence with his brother.
- Aileen was moved to find motifs in her family’s history that linked with others’ diaspora stories.
- Avram expressed remorse for discounting his grandparents suffering.
- Astrid shared her vulnerability as she recognised how precarious her ancestor’s lives had been. Her mother could so easily not have survived.
- Nkosi talked of finding commonality between his family story and white diaspora experience.
- Janusj suddenly understood his parents’ decision to emigrate from war-torn Europe to Australia, “we’ve never spoken about their lives back then”.
For some these dawning recognitions were profound and incontrovertible, for others there were tentative or disturbing discoveries. A common reflection within the group was of being the sole person who consciously identified with their families’ story (Wardi’s “memorial candles”). Many expressed relief to be with others and able to share, thus undoing the “conspiracy of silence”. Some found resolution for questions thus far unanswered, whilst for others the questions – and real intergenerational dialogue – were just beginning. Counsellors and psychotherapists’ gained a deeper understanding of their own and their clients’ ancestral experience. Many commented on the sense of wonder, grace and connection to others…and themselves.
We ended with a poem (see below) and by lighting candles to acknowledge and mourn familiar and hidden losses. We had a sense that people were departing in peace having journeyed through adversity together and survived.
Key aspects of the methodology
The Field holds the stories
We can understand what arose in these enactments in terms of responses to ritual, music, dramatic structure, and conscious intention. In addition we understand the process in terms of what is called ‘Field’ phenomena.[xli] Psychotherapist Francesetti[xlii] describes this as “an atmosphere that impregnates spaces and can appear and disappear, or remain stably present –like a musical ground note – in a given context. It is …a co-created perceptive phenomenon”.[xliii] He adds, “The Field is the actualization in the here and now of the there and then”.[xliv]
The Field includes everything in the room at a particular moment including all the participants’ own process and intergenerational histories, the contextual set up (music, props etc) and the conditions (including conscious and unconscious wishes and intentions). The Field is also shaped by current events (the news in 2016 focused on closed borders, capsizing boats, and refugees in a desperate search for a new home).
The Field both shapes and is shaped by improvisation. For example, one participant drew the lot of “a disabled man” and a rich story emerged around this, and how the community might meet his needs. In the Limbo scene, in one of the groups, when the word “freeze” was used in the instructions, the whole group instantly dropped to the floor. Various conflicts arose spontaneously: two mothers fought over a bag of dried food, scrabbling for the remains when the bag burst. The Field is constantly in flux and can shift dramatically as the balance of conditions changes. Whilst there were similar themes and feelings in each of the enactments, the emergence of these particular mini-stories was specific to each event, and what different participants, different buildings’ space, smell, lighting, and other elements evoked.
The role of witnesses
We drew inspiration for the use of witnesses from our respective experiences of Authentic Movement and Playback Theatre. The witnesses acted as a container[xlv], adding safety by their quiet attentive presence and “a relational home for …..the unspeakable, the inexpressible and the overwhelming”.[xlvi] This contrasts with the one of the defining criteria of collective trauma, which is the experience of the world as an unresponsive bystander.[xlvii]
Authentic Movement is a discipline developed with a focus on embodying both individual and collective consciousness.[xlviii] This form of group work involves witnesses acting as a containing circle for participants who move with their eyes closed, tuning into their inner sensations, images and impulses. Afterwards, the movers may draw or write and then there is a clear framework for putting words to what has been experienced. The mover talks first, aiming to verbalise their own phenomenological process. The witness responds by owning the subjectivity of his experience through phrases like “I saw….I imagined….I felt….I heard”.
Witnessing of a different kind occurs in Playback Theatre, a nonscripted, spontaneous drama medium rooted in storytelling and the oral tradition.[xlix]
A form of community theatre, it draws inspiration from Psychodrama, American ‘Stand up’ and Eastern ritualized theatre. In a Playback performance a troupe of actors and a musician work with a mediating Conductor to instantly ‘playback’ stories volunteered by an audience, without recourse to props or staging. The cast, with a little dramatic licence, attempt to portray faithfully key aspects of the scenario or dilemma being addressed. In Authentic Movement and in Playback theatre, the making of eye contact at the end of the movement or drama is part of the ritual, and underlines the importance of recognition, “I see you”.
Typically we invited a third or more of participants to act as witnesses. Many were grateful for being given the choice. We encouraged them to feel – and to share in the discussion at the end – their emotions, perceptions, associations and images.
Music as mediator
Music played a vital part in the enactments, helping with the containment of difficult feelings, with embodying and holding mystery, and with continuing to support people in a meditative state. It’s ability to build connection and facilitate entry into altered states has been well documented elsewhere.[l] Throughout the enactments the music assumed a range of functions.
Some of the recorded music was chosen to support the process of crossing the threshold from everyday reality into another world. Sounds of an ancient middle Eastern flute and a deep, tolling bell from ‘Journey out of Eden’ set the atmosphere. The music invited the groups to step back in time, enabling participants- both protagonists and witnesses – to explore historical landscapes whilst connecting with their personal ‘felt sense’.[li] In certain moments participants appeared to respond in synchronization, resonating with and orienting to the music and to each other. This temporal locking effect of music is known as ‘rhythmic entrainment’.[lii]
Later, music making provided opportunities for self-expression around the campfire. Up to this point several of the participants had not voiced or otherwise expressed their experience. ‘Musicking’[liii] together with reading aloud and listening to accounts of other diaspora encounters, broadened the group’s awareness of and connection with a range of flight experiences undertaken across the globe. On several occasions spontaneous drumming, playing and singing arose.
At key points in the drama recorded music served to keep people immersed in the unfolding story without the distraction of words, both sustaining and deepening feeling. One participant spoke of how Arnalds’ desolate music seemed to pull at the heart like a slow musical shiver.[liv] His musical motifs- some spartan, some hopeful – returned variously in higher or lower registers introducing new images. These reverberated then fell away suddenly, evoking for the listener parallel journeys through hazardous winding paths and uncertain terrain.
Movement
The structured scenes of the journey invited different kinds and qualities of movement. Initially some participants struggled to hold the tension between responding to instruction and finding their own way into the emerging improvised story. On two occasions we invited actors from local Playback Theatre Companies to help move the action on and heighten the sense of group vitality in role.[lv]
In the first two sections (The Shtetl and Crossing Rivers, Mountains and Forests), the action is quick, at times confusing, and highly charged. This changes to the sense of arduous travel over difficult terrain, which involved crouching, reaching, pushing, climbing and searching. The Campfire scene provides a pause during which the villagers could rest briefly. Some tried to sleep, some cooked, some comforted children. Others kept watch.
In the Limbo stage there is another distinct shift. We gave instructions to shape the choreography, explicitly directing protagonists towards stillness and going deep into bodily experience. Here we wanted to encourage participants to tune into internal movements, fragments of association or memory, and subliminal images. We invited them to close their eyes and to become aware of their sense of interconnectedness in time and space. This was an invitation to enter a state of liminality.[lvi]
The balance of “staying with” unfolding moments and yet also moving through semi- structured scenes was designed to help participants maintain fluidity and connect deeply with what was emerging without getting stuck or lost in the process.
Synchronicity, Liminality and the Right Hemisphere of the Brain
The key elements of WIDGE – improvisation, entrainment through music, close attention to body sensation, images and movement, witnessing, ritual and dramatization – are largely non-verbal. This is crucial for shifting to a right hemisphere dominant state, which enables “a greater capacity for openness, curiosity, associated thinking, making links, making whole”.[lvii] As psychotherapists we know that talking can actually get in the way of deeper connection to one’s story. Psychiatrist McGilchrist has argued, drawing on current neuroscience, that “activation of the right hemisphere broadens our field of perception, enabling us to experience……something other than what we already know”.[lviii] And further “virtually all aspects of the appreciation of time, in the sense of something lived through, with a past, present and future, are dependent on the right hemisphere”.[lix]
This right-brain activation also enhances awareness of and sensitivity to the Field, enabling participants to experience resonance in certain moments, a heightened feeling of recognition, akin to Jung’s idea of synchronicity.[lx] The introduction of chance elements – the drawing of lots, the use of “cut-up technique”, the inclusion of objects (satchel, identity papers, old cooking utensils) and music – become prompts for free association, creating meaning that is synchronous with that which is implicitly known of a person’s story.
Every Crossing is a Pilgrimage…
From a trauma perspective, for the Kinder and other refugees, its not just the sudden loss of a home, community and country that leaves a long term and transgenerational wound. The journey shakes the survivor community to the core, disrupting family networks, identities and bonds. Harsh choices have been made and have to be lived with. The experience can feel like an assault on the senses and the soul. There is a suspension of all known boundaries and ways of being, often for very long periods. [lxi] Whilst refugees may outwardly appear to have adapted, outsiders “paid no heed to the canker within”.[lxii]
So what is needed for healing is a “relational home” in which dissociated experience can be recognised and/or transmuted and processed? As Francesetti puts it: “A pain that does not find a relational home will be transferred from generation to generation in different but always faithful ways, until it finally finds a clearing it can inhabit in a relationship”.[lxiii]
The WIDGE method recognizes that re-visiting a story or an archetypal journey does not always involve new factual information. However the experience may nonetheless lead to new awareness of the impact of a personal transgenerational story. What is different about doing this in a group context is the opportunity afforded to explore this with others who are similarly affected. People come together in a common space where they can risk feeling vulnerable yet also experience feeling understood, with minimal need for words. What was apparent for many participants following these enactments was an opening up of psychic spaces they had formerly been unaware of or unable to articulate. These related to losses, shame, loyalty binds and gaps in the family narrative.[lxiv] In liminal moments of heightened “communitas”[lxv] it felt as though we were relating to each other on a profound, even soulful level.
To recapitulate: we paid particular attention to creating safety, aiming this work at those who already had worked with their histories in psychotherapy. We were especially keen to broaden the understanding of the impact of collective trauma for psychotherapists. As we get further away from the direct history of the Holocaust it behoves us as a society to take good care of those carrying collective trauma, of whatever generation and refugee descent.
We concluded each evening with the reading of a poem: “To Speak of Distance” by Ruth Padel.[lxvi] Her evocative lines seem to sum up the archetypal nature of the diaspora journey:
To speak of distance and the sanctuary lamp,
something you have to do or find
and a darkness to escape. Never mind
rumours of an immigration gate. Revamp
the passport. Speak of hope, that anchor bird,
born on the site of loss, with a thousand
resistance strategies frosting her wings
like mica charms or ancient pilgrim songs
embossed in the Book of Psalms. The task
is to assimilate, to move between languages –
in your case Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek –
and map your journey to the shrine.
Every crossing is a pilgrimage. The hard thing
is to pass: harder still to fold those wings
and drop the mask. Just do it. Translate old words
into new. Through cliffs of fall
and fields of black basaltic lava, take
fresh bearings for the crossing-place.
This is the exodus. Here are the moon and sun
appearing upside down or double. Here are stats
in satellite positions never seen before
struggling for their music to be heard.
Notes
[i] This article is based on our talk “Improvisation as Representation: Diaspora Stories Re-enacted” given at the symposium The Kindertransport 80 Years On: Critical Approaches to Kindertransport Research and Historiography held 22 – 24 January 2018 in the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at University College London (UCL).
[ii] Jo Salas Improvising Real Life (20th Anniversary Edition): Personal Story in Playback Theatre (New York: Tusitala Publishing, 2019); Rod Paton Lifemusic: Connecting People to Time (Dorset: Archive Publishing, 2011).
[iii] Kai Erickson, A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters (NY: Norton, 1994), 154.
[iv] Julia Chaitin, “Facing the Holocaust in generations of families of survivors: The case of partial relevance and interpersonal values”. Contemporary Family Therapy, 22(3), (2000) 289-313.
[v] Allan Schore, Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self. (New York: Norton, 2003); Rachel Yehuda , Boaz Kahana, Steven Southwick and Earl Giller. “Depressive features in Holocaust survivors with posttraumatic stress disorder” Journal of Traumatic Stress, 7(4),1994), 699-704.
[vi] Gianni Francesetti, “Transmission and transformation of psychopathological fields between generations’’ in Gestalt Therapy with Children: From Epistemology to Clinical Practice. Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb, Nurith Levi and Andrew Williams eds. (Italy: Instituto di Gestalti HCC, 2016), 217.
[vii] Yael Danieli, Psychotherapist’s participation in the conspiracy of silence about the Holocaust. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1(1), 23-42) 1984; Daniel Bar-On, Fear and Hope: Life-Stories of Five Israeli Families of Holocaust Survivors, Three Generations in a Family. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
[viii] Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors. (USA: Penguin Books, 1979).
[ix] Yael Danieli, International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York: Plenum, 1998).
[x] Nanette Auerhahn and Dori Laub, “Intergenerational memory of the Holocaust’. In Yael Danieli, ed. International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York: Plenum Series on Stress & Coping, 1998), 21-41.
[xi] Natan Kellermann, “Transmission of Holocaust trauma – An integrative view” Israel Journal of Psychiatry, 64(3), (2001 ) 256-267.
[xii] Renos Papadopoulos, personal conversation, 2010; Renos Papadopoulos, (ed.) Therapeutic Care for Refugees. (London: Karnac, 2002).
[xiii] Dina Wardi, Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust. (London: Routledge, 1992).
[xiv] Clara Mucci Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma (London: Karnac, 2013); Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière History beyond trauma. (New York: Other Press 2004).
[xv] Yael Danieli “Psychotherapist’s participation in the conspiracy of silence about the Holocaust”, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1(1) (1984), 23-42; M. Gerard Fromm, Lost in Transmission: Studies of Trauma Across Generations (London: Karnac, 2011); Emily Kuriloff, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2014).
[xvi] Roz Carroll, ‘The Blood-dimmed Tide: Witnessing war and working with the collective body in Authentic Movement’ in the Journal of Psychotherapy and Politics International. 13, 3 (2015) 194–208.
[xvii] Burt Hellinger Love’s Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships. (Zeig, Tucker & Theisen Inc 1998)
[xviii] Adam Phillips, personal conversation (High Wycombe CAMHS, Buckinghamshire, UK 1997)
[xix] Martha Blend, A Child Alone (Middlesex: Valentine Mitchell,) 1995/2008.
[xx] Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. (Beacon Press. Boston, MA 2006).
[xxi] Jon Blend et al, Jewish Issues in Social Work & Social Care: A Resource Pack for Educators and Practitioners. (University of Northumbria at Newcastle) 2000
[xxii] Yael Danieli, ‘Psychotherapist’s participation in the conspiracy of silence about the Holocaust’. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1(1), 23-42.1984.
[xxiii] Daniel Bar-On, Tell Your Life-Story: Creating Dialogue between Jews and Germans, Israelis and Palestinians. (CEUP. Hamburg: Koerber). 2004 (In German).
[xxiv] John Ronald Carroll, Luck of the Irish: a Saga of an Irish Family Arriving in England Just as World War II Is Declared. (Bloomington: Xlibris 2012).
[xxv] Organised by PCSR, held in London May 2015.
[xxvii]Barry Coope, Jim Boyes & Lester Simpson (vocals) A Hill of Little Shoes. On CD As If… (No Masters, Lyrics Pete Atkin & Clive James) 2010.
[xxviii] At time of writing The British Library has collated 1,818 sound recordings pertaining to Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust.
[xxix] Peter O’Neill and David Lloyd (eds.) The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-currents of the African and Irish Diasporas (Palgrave-Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2009); Noel Brehony, (ed). Hadhramaut and its Diaspora (Library of Modern Middle East Studies I.B. Tauris, 2017); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, U.S. Duke University Press, 2017).
[xxx] Confer 9th -10th December 2016. Tavistock Centre London.
[xxxi] To respect Haredi culture wherein it is not customary for men to listen to womens’ singing, instrumental music only was used on that occasion.
[xxxii] Ladysmith Black Mambazo (1999) Homeless (LBM own version). On CD Peace & Love. Compilation by Marks & Spencer PLC, London.
[xxxiii] Roshi Nahesi and Graham Dowdall: Roshi featuring Pars Radio. Pache Leili (Track 8) On CD: 3 Almonds and A Walnut. (Made in England. Produced by Gagarin 2013).
[xxxiv] Vocolot, featuring Linda Hirschhorn.) Mayn Rue Platz/ My Resting Place (1911 lyric by Morris Rosenfeld) On CD: Behold! (CD Baby 1977).
[xxxv] Garam Masala / Samia Malik Chand /The Moo. On CD: The Colour of the Heart. (Debut CD produced byArts Council of England 1998).
[xxxvi] The Eagles. (Track 1). Long Road Out of Eden. On CD :Long Road Out of Eden. Producers; Richard Davis, Stueart Smith, Scott Crago and Bill Szymczyk. (Polydor Recordings, Portland, Maine, 2007).
[xxxvii] Bert Hellinger, Love’s Hidden Symmetry: What Makes Love Work in Relationships. (Zeig, Tucker & Theisen Inc.,1998).
[xxxviii] Renos Papadopoulos (ed.) Therapeutic Care for Refugees (London: Karnac, 2002).
[xxxix] Ólafur Arnalds & Alice Ott . Track 8. On CD: The Chopin Project. (Mercury Classics, Made in the EU 2015).
[xl] This is the title of Eva Hoffman’s book After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York, Public Affair 2004) exploring the historical, psychological and moral implications of the second-generation experience and examining the subterranean processes through which private memories of suffering are transmitted.
[xli] Kurt Lewin, Field Theory of Social Science: Selected Theoretical Papers (ed. Dorwin Cartwright) (New York USA, Harper & Brothers, 1951).
[xlii] During the years we were facilitating these enactments, we were not familiar with Francesetti’s article “Transmission and transformation of psychopathological fields between generations” (reference below). However he captures so beautifully both the theory and the practice of working with Field phenomena in intergenerational work – though he is not writing about group enactments – that we draw on his words here.
[xliii] Gianni Francesetti “Transmission and transformation of psychopathological fields between generations’’ In Gestalt Therapy with Children: From Epistemology to Clinical Practice. Margherita Spagnuolo Lobb; Nurith Levi, Andrew Williams (eds) Instituto di Gestalti HCC Italy, 2016), 220.
[xliv] Francesetti, “Transmission and transformation”, 221.
[xlv] The concept of ‘containing’ is based on Jung’s idea that the therapy process can be likened to an alchemical container in which the ‘chemicals’ are the thoughts and feelings of both patient and analyst which have to be held safely. Carl Gustav Jung, The Psychology of the Transference. Collected Works (Vol 16) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1946).
[xlvi] Francesetti, “Transmission and transformation,” 217-18.
[xlvii] Jessica Benjamin Beyond Doer-done to: Recognition theory, intersubjectivity and the Third. (London: Routledge 2017) 235.
[xlviii] Janet Adler “Who is the witness?” Contact Quarterly, 1(12 (1987).), 20–29.
[xlix] Jo Salas’s Improvising Real Life: Personal Story in Playback Theatre’ (edn.3, USA, Tusitala publishing, 1993).
[l] Gary Ansdell, How Music Helps – in Music Therapy and Everyday Life. ( UK: Routledge 2015); Helen Bonny Music and Consciousness. (Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers, 2002) ; Rod Paton, Lifemusic: Connecting People to Time (UK: Archive publishing, 2011).
[li] Eugene Gendlin, Focusing (New York: Bantam Books 2007).
[lii] Michael Taut, Gerald McIntosh and Volker Hoemberg “Neurobiological foundations of neurologic music therapy: rhythmic entrainment and the motor system”. Frontiers in Psychology 5: 1185 2014, accessed 18 February 2015.
[liii] Jon Blend, “I Got Rhythm: Music –Making in Therapy with Children and Adolescents” in The International Gestalt Journal, 32, 2 Spring 2009) 165- 181; Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1998).
[liv] Ólafur Arnalds and Alice Ott. Tracks 4, 7, 8: Reminiscences; Written in Stone, Letters to a Traveller. On CD: The Chopin Project. (Mercury Classics, Made in the EU 2015).
[lv] We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Playback actors Andi Haase, Tara Jafar, Dvora Liberman, Dan Skili and Thelma Sharma who helped with the enactments.
[lvi] In anthropology, liminality (from the word limen, meaning threshold) is the quality of disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet began the transition to the staus they will hold when the rite is complete. Victor Turner ‘Liminal to liminoid in play, flow and ritual: an essay in comparative symbology, Rice University Studies 60 (3): 53-92 1974
[lvii] Iain, McGilchrist The Master and his Emissary, (New Haven: Yale University Press 2009) 27
[lviii] McGilchrist The Master, 40
[lix] McGilchrist The Master, 76
[lx] Carl Gustave Jung ‘Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle’, in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 8. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1952).
[lxi] Judith Herman, Trauma & Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books 1992; 2015)
[lxii] Martha Blend, Unnamed poem in The Art of Dis/ appearing: Jewish Women on Mental Health Leah Thorn (ed.) (London: Inspire productions2000) 13.
[lxiii] Francesetti, “Transmissions”, 9.
[lxiv] Dinah Wardi Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust. (Routledge: London and New York, 1982).
[lxv] Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974) 273-4
[lxvi] Ruth Learning to Make an Oud in Nazareth (London: Chatto & Windus, 2014), 47
