Josette Garon

Bio: Josette Garon is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 24 citations.

Skeletons in the closet

Abstract: How can familiarity with Ferenczi's theory of trauma help us hear the constraints imposed by family secrets on the traumatized child in the adult who addresses himself to us? We focus our elaboration on the concept and the fate of the trans‐generational alien transplant as well as the splitting that occurs over time as disavowal takes on different shapes and forms as it courses through the generations. In the first generation it takes the shape of an object of negation, in the second, denial and in the third generation, family secrets can be foreclosed. Three clinical vignettes will help us see what may become of these traumatized children summoned to silence and how our own counter‐transference can interact with or against disavowal.

Deep Nation: Australia's Acquisition of an Indigenous Past

Abstract: Prehistoric archaeology has done little to debunk the idea of the timeless/traditional Aborigine because the virtual merging of the discourses of archaeology and heritage locked Australian archaeology into a form of essentialism. Various means were being used to decrease the visibility of living Aboriginal people in the landscape and various other means were being employed to enhance the visibility of the archaeological remains that were replacing them there.

Quo Vadis Judicial Reforms? The Quest for Judicial Independence in Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract: This article examines judicial reforms in the new member states of the EU in a comparative perspective. It explores the interactions between domestic and European actors in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria and explains why the EU has had a differential impact on the way the principle of judicial independence has been implemented nationally. The differential impact of the EU is explained by considering both the nature of EU conditionality and the relationship between the judiciary and the political actors at the domestic level. The comparison reveals that the power of the EU is greater when tensions at the domestic level between judicial and political actors increase.

Captured Commitments: An Analytic Narrative of Transitions with Transitional Justice

Abstract: How can outgoing autocrats enforce promises of amnesty once they have left power? Why would incoming opposition parties honor their prior promises of amnesty once they have assumed power and face no independent mechanisms of enforcement? In 1989 autocrats in a number of communist countries offered their respective oppositions free elections in exchange for promises of amnesty. The communists' decision appears irrational given the lack of institutions to enforce these promises of amnesty. What is further puzzling is that the former opposition parties that won elections in many countries actually refrained from implementing transitional justice measures. Their decision to honor their prior agreements to grant amnesty seems as irrational as the autocrats' decisions to place themselves at the mercy of their opponents. Using an analytic narrative approach, the author explains this paradox by modeling pacted transitions not as simple commitment problems but as games of incomplete information where the uninformed party has "skeletons in its closet"—that is, embarrassing information that provides insurance against the commitments being broken. The author identifies the conditions under which autocrats step down even though they can be punished with transitional justice and illustrates the results with case studies from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.

Enduring Mothers, Enduring Knowledge: On Rape and History

Abstract: Different terms are used to describe the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Faimberg (1988) speaks of the telescoping of generations to explain an unconscious identification process occurring across generations, thereby thickening a history that—at least in part—does not belong to the patient's generation. Kestenberg (1990), writing about the second and third generation from the Holocaust, speaks of transposition to describe the situation in which there is reliving, without conscious awareness, of the experience of another generation as though it were one's very own experience. What is clear is that when there is silence and absence, the past repeats in the present, and the victim—as well as future generations—are burdened. Grief and intolerable pain cannot be hidden, not from the victim, nor from the generations that follow.

Working Obliquely with Children

Abstract: Two case vignettes are presented to illustrate an approach to working with children that, following Mannoni (1999), the authors term “oblique.” Key attributes of this approach, loosely patterned on Lacanian technique, are then explored. Among these are the need to create an anxiety-free space in which the demand of the child can emerge, use of the analyst's unconscious as receptor for the child patient's unconscious, adoption of a limp posture by the analyst to allow the reanimated unconscious of the child to act upon the analyst, and a recognition of the value of techniques such as squiggle and progressive mirror drawing in offering the kind of blank canvas that provides a receptive space in which the child may inscribe her or his unconscious. The paper concludes with the claim that approaches such as this offer a riposte to societies in which the increased academic and social expectations placed on children erases the possibility of desire and the power of the question.