Discursive approaches to ambiguous loss: theorizing community-based therapy after enforced disappearance

Simon Robins

Discursive approaches to ambiguous loss: theorizing community-based therapy after enforced disappearance

Politics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

Ambiguous loss is experienced and constructed relationally. As a result, the social and political context plays a role alongside psychological factors as elements that both mediate the impact of ambiguous loss and can aid or retard effective coping. By considering the case of persons disappeared in political violence, an approach to addressing ambiguous loss is theorized that can use community-based therapeutic approaches. Beginning from poststructuralist ideas of discourse as being constitutive of human subjectivity, the role of discourse is discussed in terms of its capacity to both construct ambiguity and mold social relations that can build resilience. A therapeutic approach is postulated with families of the disappeared that seeks explicitly to have an impact on discourses circulating in communities affected by disappearance in ways that positively influence the well-being of the families of those missing, as well as on the meanings and identities that affected persons construct from them.

Original language	English
Number of pages	308
Journal	Journal of Family Theory and Review
Volume	8
Issue number	3
Early online date	31 Aug 2016
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 31 Aug 2016

Bibliographical note

© 2016, National Council on Family Relations. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.

Access to Document

Discursive AL SR 261015
© 2016, National Council on Family Relations. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details.
Accepted author manuscript, 65.8 KBLicence: Unspecified

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jftr.12148/pdf

Cite this

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title = "Discursive approaches to ambiguous loss: theorizing community-based therapy after enforced disappearance",

abstract = "Ambiguous loss is experienced and constructed relationally. As a result, the social and political context plays a role alongside psychological factors as elements that both mediate the impact of ambiguous loss and can aid or retard effective coping. By considering the case of persons disappeared in political violence, an approach to addressing ambiguous loss is theorized that can use community-based therapeutic approaches. Beginning from poststructuralist ideas of discourse as being constitutive of human subjectivity, the role of discourse is discussed in terms of its capacity to both construct ambiguity and mold social relations that can build resilience. A therapeutic approach is postulated with families of the disappeared that seeks explicitly to have an impact on discourses circulating in communities affected by disappearance in ways that positively influence the well-being of the families of those missing, as well as on the meanings and identities that affected persons construct from them. ",

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