Memory, Trauma and the Spirited Life: Remembering and Identity

Memory, Trauma and the Spirited Life offers a unique understanding of   memory’s role in developing as a person, in navigating the course of   life, and in mitigating emotional pain.

This book develops the   idea that memory, by what it endows, requires work of us that entails   responsibility: to the self, the other, to the planet and to the living   and the dead. Discussing the concept of memory and what it provides  from  the ancients to the present, Burrell draws on such writers as E.  M.  Forster and Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, Tzvetan Todarov and  Edward  Said, as well as Susan Rubin Suleiman and Paul Ricoeur, to  explore the  operation of cultural and collective memory, trauma,  otherness and the  possibility for forgiveness.

By means of  richly detailed  clinical vignettes, the author provides a  psychoanalytic perspective to  illustrate the transformative power of  memory in coming to terms with  the past, thereby making it essential  reading for psychoanalysts and  psychotherapists in practice and in  training, as well as those with  interests in history, literature,  identity, the treatment of trauma and  the question of hope.