Paper short abstract:

Exploring the hermeneutic suspicion of trauma-related working through and attachment theory regarding troubled pasts/attachments, ethnographic vignettes from Cambodia and Israel illustrate alternative temporalities incommensurable with foundational and inequitable psychodynamic perspectives.

Paper long abstract:

Despite major strides toward the cultural competency of global and 'local' Euro-Western mental health care, taken for granted foundational psychological assumptions regarding the temporality of wellness and distress continue to constitute and/or sustain inequity. This paper will present two distinctly different psychological perspectives - trauma related working through and attachment theory which if taken together point to psychoanalytic hermeneutic suspicion regarding the past and its lingering traces continues to call upon the distressed to either work through and liberate the self from the traumatic/repressed past or detach from potentially pathological relations with loved ones. In both cases wellness is achieved by means of shifting temporal perspectives first regressively and therapeutically back toward the troubled past and progressively toward the present and future. Findings from two ethnographic studies are presented illustrating the above hermeneutics of suspicion: Cambodian genocide survivors' self-perceptions of Euro-Western psychological working through as incommensurable with present and future focused Buddhist-Khmer worldviews that valorize 'forgetting'; Bereaved Israeli parents who continue bonds with deceased children articulating the incommensurability of attachment/bereavement theory. In both psychodynamic perspectives aim to disclose, analyze and re-narrate the self's relationship with the past and with significant others with whom one shared the past ultimately engendering an altered present and future. The talk concludes considering the way contemporary approaches have or have not 'come to terms with [the field's historic relationship] the troubled past and implications for mental health care that continues to circulate hermeneutics of suspicion refashioning alternative temporalities in the global south and 'at home'.