Email this article Wulf Kansteiner / Harald Weilnböck
Provincializing Trauma? A Case Study of Family Violence, Media Reception, and Transcultural Memory
(Abstract)
Full-length article in: JLT 6/1 (2012), 149–176.
Literary and Media Interaction Research (LIR) seeks to understand what people actually do – mentally – when they interact with fictional or non-fictional narratives that they consider emotionally engaging and meaningful. How does a media consumer, while watching/ reading such a narrative, unwittingly engage with important biographical experiences and address personal developmental challenges? And what does this mental media-biographical work imply for the person’s further real-life conduct, both in individual and societal terms?
LIR methodology is an innovative qualitative-psychological research strategy which combines biographical and media-experience interview techniques with narratological analyses of media texts. LIR researchers engage with three potentially conflicting dimensions of human interaction and mental activity: (i) a person’s actual behaviour in particular biographical situations, (ii) her/his subjective experiences at the time of the events, and (iii) subsequent narrative emplotments of the events in an interview situation. For these analyses, LIR research relies on social science methods of hypotheses formation and contrastive comparison. The narratological text analysis – sensu Malte Stein – (1) provides a systematic linguistic assessment of the media narrative’s informational focus, comprehensiveness, and verifiable inconsistencies, (2) consults psychological resources in order to develop explanations for these inconsistencies, and (3) determines what interaction potentials the media narrative holds in store for its consumers.
LIR thus follows a threefold analytical protocol: The biographical analysis identifies a person’s particular developmental challenges. The media experience analysis demonstrates how that person engages with these challenges in the course of his/her mental engagement with a personally selected media text. And the text analysis determines whether and in which way the person responds to the media narrative’s specific interaction potentials.
LIR is based on the assumption that people engage in more or less conscious media-biographical work whenever they consume narratives and that studying that interaction provides important insights into the ways in which everyday culture fosters or impedes processes of psychological development on an individual and collective scale. By integrating methods of psycho-dynamic and clinical psychology, reader/viewer research, and narratological text analysis into one overarching research design, LIR contributes to the fields of empirical literary studies, media psychology, qualitative reading/media reception research, and the didactics of history and literary/media studies.
LIR focuses on readers’ personal challenges and their developmental and social repercussions. Therefore, events involving the victimization of individuals and groups and experiences of emotional stress, violence, and psychological trauma often assume a particular relevance in the course of LIR research. In the end, we hope to be able to identify ways in which the consumption of media narratives strengthens psychological resilience, facilitates self-reflexive strategies of historical remembrance, and thus supports mental health and sustainable psychological development both on an individual and a collective level. In our opinion, that objective requires historicizing and revising deconstructive concepts of cultural trauma that apodictically valorize the trauma experience and obstruct empirical research about the multiple interdependencies between experiences of psychological stress and activities of media consumption and other forms of cultural interaction.
The LIR case study presented here focuses on a young Muslim woman who moved from Kosovo to Austria at age seven. The case raises the intriguing question if the complex social factors, which shape the experiences and responses to violence of intercultural migrants, require significant revisions of the conceptual schemes that we employ to study such interactions. Do these multiple encounters, if studied sensibly and sensitively, set into motion the kind of adjustments in Western style research methods that historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has described in his own attempts to ›provincialize‹ Western intellectual traditions? More specifically, do different perceptions of violence mediated in dissimilar culture settings call into question traditional notions of psychological trauma?
The analysis of the biographical interviews conducted with 25 year old Mila revealed that, as a result of migrating to Austria and experiencing considerable inner family stress and violence, she came to follow a partly unconscious biographical interaction principle which may be described as follows: Mila pursues the prevention or compensation of instances of injustice and violence in talented and energetic ways while regularly overstretching her personal resources and overburdening others.
In following this underlying psychodynamic behavioural-structural rule, Mila developed a range of personal skills which facilitated her integration into Austrian society and allowed her to attain a considerable degree of educational and professional success. At the same time, a reconstructive biographical analysis demonstrates that Mila continues to deal with developmental challenges which in psychodynamic terms are best described as autonomy-dependency-conflicts. These were caused by early parentification and high levels of emotional stress. For Mila, this predicament entails a fragility of boundaries and personal stability that obstructs her pursuit of important personal goals.
Mila’s personal developmental challenge thus consists of achieving a greater degree of self-detachment and personal autonomy which psychodynamically corresponds to the task of working through the domestic stress and violence that she experienced throughout her childhood. The subsequent narratological analysis revealed that Mila had chosen a film containing interaction potentials directly relevant to her developmental challenge. But the analysis of the media experience interview also demonstrated that she avoided taking full advantage of these developmental opportunities and failed to engage mentally with crucial aspects of her biographical challenge in the course of the media interaction.
The ›provincializing‹ repercussions of this case study turned out to be minimal. The information Mila provided in the non-therapeutic setting of the biographical and media interviews did not appear to exceed the interpretative reach of the available analytical repertoire. But the case study helps identify excellent opportunities for empirical and interdisciplinary research in the humanities. The systematic comparative analysis of biographical, textual, and interactive narrative data, launched from a psychodynamic methodological perspective, provides important new insights into media reception processes. The research results should prove particularly useful in didactic contexts and demonstrate in concrete terms that the humanities – while describing and analysing cultural processes – can play a decisive role in helping students identify sustainable paths of personal development, foster psychological and political resilience, and support peace-building initiatives within contemporary intercultural societies.
2012-02-20
JLTonline ISSN 1862-8990
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How to cite this item: Abstract of: Wulf Kansteiner / Harald Weilnböck, Provincializing Trauma? A Case Study of Family Violence, Media Reception, and Transcultural Memory. In: JLTonline (20.02.2012) URL: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/articles/article/view/477/1195 A Persistent Identifier can be found in the PDF-Version of this article. |