An earlier version of this essay, titled “Staging the Unspeakable: A Report on the Collaboration Between Theater Arts Against Political Violence, the Associazione Culturale Altrimenti, and 40 Counsellors in Training in Pristina, Kosovo” appeared in Psychosocial Notebook 3 (June 2002), 9-30, in a special issue on “Psychosocial and Trauma Response in War-Torn Societies: Supporting Traumatized Communities through Arts and Theatre.” Psychosocial Notebook is published by the International Organization for Migration.
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Psychology, with its relentless effort to reduce the unknown to the known . . . is the cause of this decline and this terrible loss of energy. . . . And it seems to me that both the theater and we ourselves must have done with psychology.
-Artaud, The Theater and Its Double
In January 2000, I was invited by the International Organization of Migration to participate in their Psychosocial Trauma Response in Kosovo. This project was particularly noteworthy because it attempted to approach trauma intervention in a multi-modal fashion: included were a psychotherapeutic response, a witnessing response (the “Archives of Memory”), and a theater response (“The Body in Exile”). I was invited to participate in the theater response as a theater artist and as a psychoanalyst and also because of my experience with the use of artists’ discourse as a corrective to the therapeutic discourse in addressing the suffering of victims of political violence.
