Overview
- Examines the relationship between living and past generations
- Discusses the social and psychological healing of problems that run between generations
- Blends sociological, psychological and psychoanalytic thinking to ask fundamental questions about memory, identity and change
Part of the book series: Studies in the Psychosocial (STIP)
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About this book
This book is grounded in psychosocial research that explores the complex intergenerational transmission of memories within families and the transgenerational social issues that form a part of those memories. The author demonstrates that the organising framework of moving back and forth between inter- and transgenerational processes is key to mapping those relationships leading to the ideas of generational companionship, a multigenerational self and intergenerational mentalisation. Drawing on sociological and psychoanalytic approaches, it provides a framework for thinking about continuity and discontinuity in the lives of individuals and in the longer sweep of the generations. The role and potential for a psychosocial approach in deep-level problem solving is addressed through chapters on psychotherapy and on psychosocial interventions. Social imagination in personal and social healing is a core theme, as is the study of the relationship between creative and destructive forces that playout in human life. The book will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of psychosocial research and psychotherapy as well as in memory studies, history, genealogy and social theory.
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Keywords
Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Nigel Williams has contributed a warm and thoughtfully engaging book; a welcome addition to the expansion of the psychotherapeutic field of enquiry, and to psycho-social understanding of how transgenerational trauma may haunt present generations. … Williams’ text contributes to natality, the birth of hope out of adversity, out of losses reconceptualized, and generational sacrifice honoured.” (Paul Zeal, British Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 38 (4), 2022)
“Williams’ new book on mapping social memory is grounded in a psychotherapeutic and psychosocial understanding of states of disintegration and hauntings … . Mapping Social Memory is a helpful psychosocial introduction to the role of intergenerational and transgenerational memory in oral history work. It emphasises the role of the spoken word but also awareness of the hauntings and the unspoken in social memory, as well as the current academic background to history ‘from below’ and the role of unconscious processes in social life.” (Oral History Society, ohs.org.uk, December, 2021)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Nigel Williams is a psychotherapist, sociologist and academic at the University of the West of England, UK, with forty years’ experience in practice and many years of experience training psychotherapists in psychodynamic approaches to therapy and psychosocial approaches to research. He is co-editor with Anne-Marie Cummins of Further Researching Beneath the Surface (2018).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Mapping Social Memory
Book Subtitle: A Psychotherapeutic Psychosocial Approach
Authors: Nigel Williams
Series Title: Studies in the Psychosocial
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66157-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and Psychology, Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-66156-4Published: 06 March 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-66159-5Published: 07 March 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-66157-1Published: 05 March 2021
Series ISSN: 2662-2629
Series E-ISSN: 2662-2637
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXV, 200
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations
Topics: Clinical Psychology, Memory Studies, Social Theory, Philosophy of History, Personality and Social Psychology, Community and Environmental Psychology