In this book, Amir explores how collective catastrophe transforms human thinking through psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literature, arguing that preserving the capacity for thought amid trauma is both a clinical discipline and an ethical practice of resistance.
The book develops original psychoanalytic concepts for understanding trauma's impact on individual and collective life. Opening with Virginia Woolf's The Death of the Moth, it examines how truth becomes fragmented when communities no longer share common realities, introducing concepts like "broken links" to describe psychic disintegration and "Guardianship from Above and Below" to analyze solidarity's transformation. It challenges the revenge-versus-forgiveness dichotomy and explores poetry and dreaming as forms of symbolic restoration, concluding with an original theory of psychoanalytic writing using oceanographic metaphors.
This book is essential for scholars and clinicians in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, trauma studies, philosophy, ethics, and memory studies. It engages researchers in conflict studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, political psychology, cultural studies, and literary studies. Practicing psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and mental health professionals will find vital conceptual frameworks for understanding collective catastrophe's effects.