Ce travail de recherche prend sa source dans mes diverses expériences professionnelles, sur plus de dix ans, en tant que psychologue clinicienne et psychanalyste en formation, exerçant avec des enfants, des adolescents, leurs familles ainsi qu’avec des adultes. Il s’agit d’une clinique particulière puisqu’elle a été recueillie au Liban, un pays qui a une histoire difficile à cerner, ponctuée de guerres et parsemée de violences. Un pays qui est marqué par un système de résonance et d’écho entre les traumas individuels et les rapports aux traumas collectifs. Cette recherche porte plus précisément sur une population bien définie puisqu’elle est exclusivement constituée d’ex-enfants, puis ex-adolescents de la guerre de 1975 à 1991 ayant vécu dans l’ex-Beyrouth-Est, puis devenus désormais adultes. Elle est aussi caractérisée par le fait qu’une fois le travail de la cure est bien avancé, j’ai pu comprendre que j’avais durant mon enfance puis mon adolescence, partagé, des tranches de vie avec mes patients. Ces moments étaient des vécus de guerre traumatiques. En effet, mes patients adultes, les parents des petits en cure et moi-même, nous-nous sommes trouvés aux mêmes endroits, et nous avons vécu aux mêmes moments, seuls, loin des adultes, les mêmes événements de guerre. Il s’agit d’une réflexion qui englobe au final, quatre générations. Je m’interroge sur la qualité du lien qui existerait entre la question des particularités du travail d’élaboration de situations de traumatismes personnels et de traumatismes familiaux au sein de thérapies d’enfants. Mon interrogation porte également sur le type d’intéraction qu’il y aurait entre le trauma spécifique du parent ex-enfant de la guerre et celui du trauma collectif propre à un pays en guerre. Comment ceci se joue-t-il dans la cure et avec le thérapeute de l’enfant (génération 1) né après la guerre ? Je m’interroge, d’une part, sur les modalités défensives des parents (génération 2) et les particularités des traumatismes personnels internes qui survenaient en écho avec des traumatismes familiaux entremêlés et emboîtés aux traumatismes cumulatifs collectifs/sociaux. D’autre part, je me questionne à propos de la psyché parentale qui me semblait figée, envahie, prisonnière d’un « entre-deux intérieur/extérieur-non-humain, fantasme/réalité », aux liens forts et inapparents qui semblaient inexistants mais desquels ils ne pouvaient pas se libérer à l’âge adulte. Je me demande si les enfants (génération 1) nés après la guerre, ne seraient pas pour leurs parents (génération 2), réduits à un symptôme ; symptôme que ces derniers n’auraient pas eu la possibilité de porter durant leur vécu infantile. L’enfant (génération 1) ne serait-il pas le porteur du « clivé parental » ? Je me demande finalement si les parents (génération 2) pourraient avoir accrédité, lors de l’entretien qui fixe le cadre, le contrat muet ou pacte suivant : « nous savons/vous savez ce que nous avons/vous avez vécu dans notre/votre enfance : on le pose là et on n’en parle pas ». Même si ce pacte n’a pas été explicité verbalement, la transmission s’établissait d’une autre manière : au-delà du langage. C’est pour cette raison qu’en confiant leur enfant, ces parents (génération 2) parvenaient enfin et pour la première fois, à confier l’enfant en eux à une personne qui « saurait », qui « serait passée par là » et qui a « les mots pour l’exprimer ». Pour essayer de répondre à mes interrogations, je tente d’introduire et d’expliquer une modalité particulière de vivre le cadre analytique : il s’agirait d’une co-construction, avec le patient d’un cadre. Ce cadre serait comme une piste de danse propice à la mise en place d’une « chorégraphie de la cure » qui permettrait à l’analyste et son patient de « danser avec la cure ». Ceci sous-entend un mouvement de rythmicité, un rapproché, un va et viens nécessaire à l’évolution.... / This research is rooted in my various professional experiences over more than a decade as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in training, dealing with children, adolescents, their families as well as adults. This relates to a particular type of clinical work since the data for this study was collected in Lebanon, a country that has an elusive history, punctuated by wars and scattered violence; a country that is characterized by a resonating and echoing system between individual trauma and collective traumas. This study refers more precisely to a well-defined population, consisting exclusively of former children and adolescents of the 1975-1991 Lebanese war having lived and grown up in the former East Beirut. The study is also characterized by the fact that, once the analytic cure was well advanced, I was able to understand that I experienced, during my childhood and my adolescence, similar shared moments with my patients pertaining to traumatic experiences resulting from the war. In fact, my adult patients, the parents of the children in psychotherapy as well as myself, found ourselves as children and adolescents in the same places, experiencing the same epoche, alone, and away from adults (our parents or teachers), the same violent and destructive war events. This is a reflection that pertains to four generations. I wonder as to the quality of the links that exist between the peculiarities of the elaborative work of personal traumatic experiences and family traumas within the context of child psychotherapy. My interrogations also relate to the possible type of interaction existing between the specific trauma of the parent who is an ex-child (and ex-adolescent) of the war and the collective trauma that is specific to a country at war. I question in part the nature of the defense modalities of parents (generation 2) And the particularities of inner personal traumas that occur as an echo to family’s trauma, intertwined and interlocked with cumulative and collective social trauma. Moreover, I question why the parental psyche seems frozen, as if invaded, a prisoner “in a “no man’s land”, an undefined territory internal/external- non-human, fantasy/reality”, I also wonder about the strong, hidden links that seemed to glue up the members of a family. Those links or particular ways to live the attachment seemed, at first, apparently nonexistent but paradoxically they were extremely present in the sessions. The adults seamed unable to free themselves from this chain. I wonder if the children (generation 1) born after the war, are not, in the parental psyche (generation 2) reduced to a symptom – a symptom that the parents (generation 2) could not have had the opportunity to carry during their own childhood. Therefore, the child (generation 1) would be the bearer of "parental splitting"? I finally question the setting and wonder if the parents (generation 2) may not have accredited during our first encounter the « psychoanalytic » framework with the following dumb contract or agreement: "we know/you know what we/you have lived in our/ your childhood: we leave it aside and we do not talk about it at all. " Although the pact has not been explained verbally, transmission seemed to have been established in a « non-verbal communication. It may be for this reason that, the parents (generation 2) felt sufficiently at ease to try and place, for the first time in their lives, the suffering “child in them” in what they might have felt as being the securing, healing and soothing arms of “someone” who can be there for them; “someone” who has known what they have encountered because he is not a total stranger to their childhood experiences, “someone” who has the words and the capacity to talk about these unpleasant things; someone who may be able to express the “unspeakable experiences” with simple words ....

Coetzee's own experience of living in apartheid South Africa provides the backdrop for novels infused with sardonic irony and rich metaphoric systems. In modes of metafiction that emphasize the destructive and violent nature of language, he optimizes his unique oeuvre to interrogate global, national and domestic power relations. This dissertation relies on psychoanalytical theories that examine microstructures of power within the individual, and in his domestic domain. Each of Coetzee's chief protagonists carries a secret related to a dysfunctional mother/son relationship. This hampers their psychosocial dynamics, their masculinity and sexuality. As they respectively strive toward an elusive new life they confront patriarchal power structures that speak on behalf of individuals, '[whose] descent into powerlessness [is] voluntary' (Coetzee 2007: 4-5). Coetzee's constructed white males perform their several identity roles in milieux that span divergent phases of colonial history. His critique points to white patriarchal hegemonic ideological discourses that bespeak the self/other dichotomy in a postcolonial world where the language of dominance supports an oppressive status quo. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

This dissertation is an Investigation into the Tuareg involvement in violent conflict in the Sahara and the Sahel of North Africa from a sociological psychological perspective of unmet human needs. The research begins by establishing the structure and texture of the sociological, psychological, and emotional life patterns of their existence when not involved in violent conflict. This is followed by an examination of the pathology of Tuareg social structures that are engaged in intra and inter communal violence as perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. The first part of the research establishes normal conditions of the sociological life cycle and highlights natural areas of conflict that arise from exposure to rapid and/or external changes to their physical and social environment. The second part establishes parameters of expected damage from trauma, extended conflict, and failure to adapt to rapid environmental, social and political changes. The research methodology relies on a case study format that uses collaborative ethnography and phenomenological inquiry to answer the research questions and validate propositions made from existing literature and pre]existing research. The research questions focus on aspects of the sociological structure and failing psychological and emotional needs that are relevant to the subjectfs involvement in violent conflict. The research propositions are in part shaped from existing knowledge of tribal sociological structures that are related to the Tuareg by ethnicity, environment, and shared psycho]cultural attributes. The expected contribution of this research is the development of an alternative praxis for tribal engagement and village stability operations conducted by the United States Special Operations Command.

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Recent calls from progressive, subaltern and postcolonial geopoliticians to move geopolitical scholarship away from its Western ontological bases have argued that more ethnographic studies centred on peripheral and dispossessed geographies need to be undertaken in order to integrate peripheralised agents and agencies in dominant ontologies of geopolitics. This thesis follows these calls. Through empirical data collected during a period of five months of fieldwork undertaken between October 2014 and March 2015, it investigates the ways through which an Indigenous community of the Canadian Arctic, Tulita (located in the Northwest Territories' Sahtu region) represents geopower. It suggests a semiotic reading of these representations in order to take the agency of other-than/more-than-human beings into account. In doing so, it identifies the ontological bases through which geopolitics can be indigenised. Drawing from Dene animist ontologies, it indeed introduces the notion of a place-contingent speculative geopolitics. Two overarching argumentative lines are pursued. First, this thesis contends that geopower operates through metamorphic refashionings of the material forms of, and signs associated with, space and place. Second, it infers from this that through this transformational process, geopower is able to create the conditions for alienating but also transcending experiences and meanings of place to emerge. It argues that this movement between conflictual and progressive understandings is dialectical in nature. In addition to its conceptual suggestions, this thesis makes three empirical contributions. First, it confirms that settler geopolitical narratives of sovereignty assertion in the North cannot be disentangled from capitalist and industrial political-economic processes. Second, it shows that these processes, and the geopolitical visions that subtend them, are materialised in space via the extension of the urban fabric into Indigenous lands. Third, it demonstrates that by assembling space ontologically in particular ways, geopower establishes (and entrenches) a geopolitical distinction between living/sovereign (or governmentalised) spaces and nonliving/bare spaces (or spaces of nothingness).