Wounds of Silence: Legacies of Genocide and Racial Violence (Hardback or Cased Book)

What does it mean to pursue the comfort of daily life alongside legacies of profound injustice? What are the ethical demands that histories of atrocity place on us, even if we did not participate in them? These are the kind of questions that lay at the heart of this book, which explores the nature of silencing, accountability, and the obligations we have to each other as individuals and as a society.

Award winning author and psychoanalyst Roger Frie travels to sites of atrocity to meet with descendants of survivors and perpetrators of the Holocaust in Germany, the Indigenous genocide in Canada, and the legacy of lynching in the United States.

Wounds of Silence melds survivor testimony, history, and personal reflection with a wealth of illustrations and psychological insights. The book is fundamentally cross-disciplinary and deals with the following areas: memory studies, genocide studies, trauma studies, Holocaust studies, psychosocial studies, and psychoanalysis. The stories and lessons that the author shares will remain with readers long after they have finished.

This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what is involved in confronting silence and indifference, engaging in reparative acts of memory, and working towards racial justice in the present. At a time when authoritarian governments use silencing to quell dissent and dictate how the past is remembered, this book serves as a warning, a plea for tolerance, and a recognition of human rights.

Roger Frie is University Professor of Psychoanalysis and Education at the University of Vienna, Affiliate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, and Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He also teaches at the William Alanson White Institute and the NYU Postdoctoral Program of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in New York. He is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst as well as a historian and social philosopher and author most recently of Edge of Catastrophe: Erich Fromm, Fascism, and the Holocaust (Oxford) and Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust (Oxford).