PubMed · 8809291
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V Morrone. 1996. Project, process, and change.. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02733048
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This paper argues that the authentic voice of suffering can be denied to people with serious illness. Anguish and expressions of grief are sometimes replaced by joviality. Amid suffering, voices of anguish become strange inner voices that challenge defences of cheeriness and so are avoided, go unheard or are ignored. Bolstered by the everydayness of ward events and hospital life, suppression, repression and denial mean that people with serious illness can suffer without a voice. Listening to others requires the ability to listen to one's own inner voices and recognize how they might guide exchanges. By avoiding conducting conversations in ways dictated by our own fears, worries and fantasies we can listen, and in doing so allow shifts in awareness. Silent suffering can change to expressive suffering allowing a person to reach an autonomous self and so an authentic voice. The seriousness of a situation can be grasped and so life appreciated for what it is. Decisions can be made, business finished and relationships esteemed or otherwise. Through the format of brief therapeutic conversations, listening has a role to play in helping people with serious illness discover their autonomous and authentic voice. The discussion concludes with the suggestion that the need for throughput and roles and tasks demanded on nurses in general settings limits time and resources, and so liaison mental health nursing has a role to play. A specialist practitioner might offer conversational therapies, support nursing and medical staff and teach psychological concepts, thus contributing to an environment in which uncertainty is tolerated.
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Human personality contains three layers of identity: the collective, the familial, and the individual, intra-psychic. All three have been directly traumatized and damaged in Holocaust (Shoah) survivors and indirectly through overt and covert transmission in their children. Survivors and the second generation usually contain a few of these identity components in a state of fragmentation, which become central in the therapeutic dialogue between therapists and the patients. When the therapist belongs to the same traumatized population there exists a unique complexity of an a priori countertransference. Sharing the same traumatogenic reality that the patient seeks to alleviate through therapy poses unique difficulties and challenges for the therapist. In working with survivors, pre-war intra-familial traumatizations are of little significance in the face of the massive traumas and death suffered in the Holocaust. In the case of the second generation, "ordinary" developmental impairments and difficulties cannot be fully understood without knowledge of the parents' war experiences and the resultant family atmosphere. Thus, every therapist has to examine both his knowledge and especially his responses not only about the Shoah as a massive trauma but the specific war history of both parents families. Self-knowledge and awareness are necessary to a far greater extent than usual if one is not to be shocked or surprised into acting out. The depth and degree of openness which therapists need when dealing with Holocaust survivors and their children are at least as important as clinical skills.