How art has addressed and transmuted trauma over the past half-century, from Louise Bourgeois to Glenn Ligon Trauma in all its forms--internal and external, individual and collective--has been an enduring theme in 20th- and 21st-century art. The proliferation of violent imagery, particularly since the expansion of mass media during and after World War II, has led to artworks that marshal consciousness of traumatic events and their cultural processing. These developments in art run parallel with the emergence of trauma studies, which confront the repercussions of traumatic events: the Holocaust, global conflict, sexual violence, systemic racism and gender discrimination. Psychic Wounds brings together artists from the mid-20th century to the present who have addressed trauma in their work. The book also contains an anthology of critical writings on trauma by curators, art historians and theorists, among them Robert Storr, Griselda Pollock, Huey Copeland and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Artists include: Gerhard Richter, Kazuo Shiraga, Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Glenn Ligon, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Carrie Mae Weems, Cindy Sherman, Bruce Nauman and Anicka Yi.

Readers connect to characters with depth, ones who have experienced life’s ups and downs. To deliver key players that are both realistic and compelling, writers must know them intimately—not only who they are in the present story, but also what made them that way. Of all the formative experiences in a character’s past, none are more destructive than emotional wounds. The aftershocks of trauma can change who they are, alter what they believe, and sabotage their ability to achieve meaningful goals, all of which will affect the trajectory of your story. Identifying the backstory wound is crucial to understanding how it will shape your character’s behavior, and The Emotional Wound Thesaurus can help. Inside, you’ll find: * A database of traumatic situations common to the human experience * An in-depth study on a wound’s impact, including the fears, lies, personality shifts, and dysfunctional behaviors that can arise from different painful events * An extensive analysis of character arc and how the wound and any resulting unmet needs fit into it * Techniques on how to show the past experience to readers in a way that is both engaging and revelatory while avoiding the pitfalls of info dumps and telling * A showcase of popular characters and how their traumatic experiences reshaped them, leading to very specific story goals * A Backstory Wound Profile tool that will enable you to document your characters’ negative past experiences and the aftereffects Root your characters in reality by giving them an authentic wound that causes difficulties and prompts them to strive for inner growth to overcome it. With its easy-to-read format and over 100 entries packed with information, The Emotional Wound Thesaurus is a crash course in psychology for creating characters that feel incredibly real to readers.

This book challenges the widespread scholarly and popular belief that the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) was followed by a ‘traumatic silence’. It achieves this by opening an alternative archive of published testimonies which were largely produced in the 1920s and 1930s; testimonies were written by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, in both English and Irish. Nearly all have eluded sustained scholarly attention to date. However, the act of smuggling private, painful experience into the public realm, especially when it challenged official memory making (or even forgetting), demanded the cautious deployment of self-protective narrative strategies. As a result, many testimonies from the Irish Civil War emerge in non-conventional, hybridised and fictionalised forms of life writing. This book re-introduces a number of these testimonies into public debate. It considers contemporary understandings of mental illness and how a number of veterans – both men and women – self-consciously engaged in projects of therapeutic writing as a means to ‘heal’ the ‘spiritual wounds’ of civil war. It also outlines the prevalence of literary representations of revolutionary sexual violence, challenging the assumptions that sexual violence during the Irish revolution was either ‘rare’ or ‘hidden’.

Free your Body, Mind, and Soul from Emotional Trauma and Pain You've become an expert at surviving the ups and downs of life, but now is the time to start feeling worthy of the good life you dream about. This inspiring book features unique methods of visualization and shamanic psychotherapy for deep, transformational healing in a step-by-step format that anyone can use. Heal Your Inner Wounds guides you through each stage of life—from childhood to adulthood—and shows you how to work through and release the pain and resentment that may be lingering. Whether it's caused by relationship trouble, family problems, or self-esteem issues, Abby Wynne teaches you how to let go of negativity from the past so you can have an amazing future.

A guide to working with the chakras to heal emotional wounds, release physical tensions, explore psychic abilities, and awaken spiritual energies • Explores each chakra on the physical, psychological, psychic, and spiritual level and explains how the chakras can be understood as an embodied map of the psyche, linked with different stages of development • Details the author’s system of Chakra Therapy, which integrates healing touch with chakra visualizations • Offers practical exercises to nourish and support each chakra as well as practices for daily chakra maintenance In this in-depth guide to working with the chakras, author Glen Park draws on her decades of experience as a Chakra Therapist to explain how the chakras can be understood as an embodied map of the psyche, with each chakra representing a different stage of development from infancy and childhood through adulthood, with the Heart Chakra playing a central role in awakening the spiritual potential of the upper chakras. She examines each chakra individually on the physical, psychological, psychic, and spiritual level, as well as through the lens of the solar (masculine) and lunar (feminine) channels. She shows how the connections between the chakras and developmental stages are paralleled in the findings of Western psychology and neuroscience and how our collective expressions of the chakras influence cultural trends in society. The author’s system of Chakra Therapy integrates healing touch with guided chakra visualizations, offering practical exercises to nourish and balance each chakra so it can be integrated and in harmony with the entire chakra system. She explores how to work with the Heart Chakra for deep transformation and self-healing, including healing emotional wounds from childhood and enabling the psychic and spiritual levels of the Throat and Eye Chakras to develop, with the potential of opening to the divine realm of the Crown Chakra. Sharing case studies from her Chakra Therapy practice, she shows how we gain a richer understanding of ourselves both mentally and physically by working with the chakras, opening ourselves to the potential for deep soul growth and transformation.

This book addresses the issue of trauma and psychic wounds to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology. In so doing, it reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather appears as its very locus. A philosophical approach of the "new wounded" (brain lesion patients) forms the matter of the confrontation.

In the last decade, the question of how trauma is remembered and narrated has become increasingly crucial in literary studies and in psychotherapy. Writing Wounds rethinks the relation between trauma, memory and narrative through readings of key fictional, autobiographical and “autofictional” texts by recent French women writers: Marie Cardinal, Chantal Chawaf, Hélène Cixous, Charlotte Delbo, Béatrice de Jurquet and Sarah Kofman. By drawing on and also interrogating recent theories of trauma, this study shows that trauma is inscribed in writing through recurring images of the body and of bodily wounding that mark the limits and possibilities of narrativisation. This book has a double aim: to offer new readings of texts by modern French women writers and to rethink the crucial question of how narratives of trauma are to be read. Writing Wounds will be of interest to researchers working on trauma, modern French literature, women’s writing or “life-writing” as well as to a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on trauma and narrative.