This thesis is about the children of former Far East prisoners of war (FEPOWs): their memories of childhood, how they fashioned those memories in adulthood, and the relationship between the two. The FEPOW experience reverberated through postwar family life, and continued to shape the lives of participants across the intervening decades. Although a great deal is now known about the hardships suffered by the men, captivity had a deep and enduring impact on their children, but their history is rarely heard, and poorly understood. In Roots of Remembrance I investigate the lives of these children through in-depth interviews, using a psychosocial approach to both interviews and analysis. By tracing intergenerational transmission through the life course, I show that the memory practices of the children of Far East POWs had psychosocial roots in the captivity experiences of their fathers. For some, childhood was coloured by overt physical or psychological trauma; for others, what passed as a ‘normal’ upbringing led later to a pressing desire to discover more about their fathers’ wartime histories. My research demonstrates the need for a more nuanced and holistic approach to understanding intergenerational trauma transmission within this particular group. I argue that participants made creative use of memory practices across the course of their lives to revisit, review and reconstruct their relationships with their fathers, in order to reach an accommodation with their childhood memories. Findings include the value of attachment theory in understanding the associations between childhood experience and later memory practices, the role of the body and other implicit means of transmitting trauma, and the need for a greater awareness of the impact of cumulative and complex trauma within these families. Finally, I conclude that the psychosocial methodology enabled me to access areas of subjectivity and intersubjectivity that might otherwise have remained in the shadows.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-29T13:31:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 PSO - Renato Ferreira de Souza.pdf: 422705 bytes, checksum: 0b76aaae440c4e3112c3ecb4a276edb3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006-10-06 / The developed work intends to contribute for the understanding of an author/character of the social psychology. We analyzed and we added knowledge about George Herbert Mead and the unfoldings of his psychosocial theory. For this purpose we worked in two basic pathways: first, through the social approach of the psychology s history, we confronted Mead s life with moments of constitution of the psychology at his time, placing in projection central aspects of his dialogue not always identified. We correlated the history of Mead with social subjects, politics, economical and scientific of his time; information on what happened in the plan of the interpersonal s relationships at the time he was elaborating his theory, as well as his connections with practices and specific cultural values were mediated. The second path elapses from an incursion that goes through a thematic concerning to the Meadelian s studies, for what we prioritized the sociologists Peter Berger s and Thomas Luckmann s works and of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. It is then intended to contribute to the history of the social psychology and to diffuse the Meadelian s scientific concepts, turning them more accessible to the specialists of the social psychology / O trabalho desenvolvido pretende contribuir para a compreensão de um autor/personagem da psicologia social. Analisamos e acrescemos conhecimento sobre George Herbert Mead e os desdobramentos de sua teoria psicosocial. Para este propósito trabalhamos em duas vertentes básicas: primeiro, através da abordagem social em história da psicologia, confrontamos a vida de Mead com momentos de constituição da psicologia à sua época, colocando em relevo aspectos centrais desta interlocução nem sempre identificados. Correlacionamos a história de Mead com questões sociais, políticas, econômicas e científicas de sua época; informações sobre o que se passava no plano das relações interpessoais ao tempo em que elaborava sua teoria, assim como suas conexões com práticas e valores culturais específicos foram contemplados. A segunda vertente decorre de uma incursão na literatura que perpassa por temáticas concernentes aos estudos meadianos, para o que priorizamos os trabalhos dos sociólogos Peter Berger e Thomas Luckmann e do filósofo Jürgen Habermas. Pretende-se assim contribuir para a história da psicologia social e difundir os conceitos científicos meadianos, tornando-os mais acessíveis aos estudiosos da psicologia social

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