This book is about Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik, both Auschwitz survivors and central figures in the shaping of Holocaust memory, who dedicated their lives to bearing witness and writing about the concentration camps, seeking, in particular, to give voice to those who did not return. The two writers are generally treated as complete opposites: Levi level-headed and self-aware, Ka-Tzetnik caught up in repeating the traumatic past. In this book I show how fundamentally mistaken this approach is, and how the similarity between them is, in fact, far greater than it may seem. While Levi draws the map, Ka-Tzetnik reveals the territory itself, and, taken together, they offer a better understanding of the human experience of the camps. This book explores their writing and their lives up to their deaths-Ka-Tzetnik of old age and Levi by his own hand-offering new explanations of Levi's suicide, little understood to this day.

This book explores the long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma-particularly complex posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD)-from phenomenological and cognitive perspectives. For example, C-PTSD can result in impairments at the body-schema level. In order to survive, trauma victims may conduct their lives at the body-image level, thus producing a mismatch between body schema and body image. In turn, as in the case of somatoparaphrenia and body integrity identity disorder, this incongruity can result in body disownership, which will affect long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma.

This book describes the diverse manifestations of trauma and the ways in which trauma has shaped-and dismantled-our culture. Yochai Ataria describes how we are addicted to trauma and have become both its avid producers and consumers. Consequently, the culture in which we live has become posttraumatic in the deepest sense. This is apparent in the products that have shaped and continue to shape Western culture, ranging from the biblical sacrifice of Isaac to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Ataria exposes the primary attributes of this so-called posttraumatic culture: sacrifice through action, an uncontrolled lust for blood, an inability to speak and describe things in words, a sense of foulness and alienation, emotional death, imperviousness, separation, and an overwhelming sense of exile.

This lofty volume analyzes a circular cultural relationship: not only how trauma is reflected in cultural processes and products, but also how trauma itself acts as a critical shaper of literature, the visual and performing arts, architecture, and religion and mythmaking. The political power of trauma is seen through US, Israeli, and Japanese art forms as they reflect varied roles of perpetrator, victim, and witness. Traumatic complexities are traced from spirituality to movement, philosophy to trauma theory. And essays on authors such as Kafka, Plath, and Cormac McCarthy examine how narrative can blur the boundaries of personal and collective experience. Among the topics covered: Television: a traumatic culture. From Hiroshima to Fukushima: comics and animation as subversive agents of memory in Japan. The death of the witness in the era of testimony: Primo Levi and Georges Perec. Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism and the possibility of writing a traumatic history of religion. Placing collective trauma within its social context: the case of the 9/11 attacks. Killing the killer: rampage and gun rights as a syndrome. This volume appeals to multiple readerships including researchers and clinicians, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and media researchers.

This book offers an uncompromising and unapologetic phenomenological study of altered states of consciousness in an attempt to understand the structure of human consciousness. Drawing on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, it sets out to decipher the inextricable link between consciousness, body, and world. This link will be established through the presentation of in-depth phenomenological research conducted with former prisoners of war (POWs) and senior meditators. Focusing on two such disparate groups improves our understanding of the nature of the subjective experience in extreme situations - when our sense of boundary is rigid and we are disconnected both from the body and the world (POWs); and when our sense of boundary is fluid and we feel unified with the world (meditators). Based on empirical-phenomenological research, this book will explain how the body that is from the outset thrown into the intersubjective world shapes the structure of consciousness.

This volume explores themes originating from the work of Jean Amery (1912-1978), a Holocaust survivor and essayist-mainly, ethics and the past, torture and its implications, death and suicide. The volume is interdisciplinary, bringing together contributions from philosophy, psychology, law, and literary studies to illuminate each of the topics from more than one angle. Each essay is a novel contribution, shedding new light on the relevant subject matter and on Jean Amery's unique perspective. The ensuing picture is rich and multifaceted, uncovering unforeseen traits of Amery's thought, and surprising correlations that have so far been under-researched. It invites further studies of the Holocaust and its consequences to take their cue from non-neutral first person reflections.

This book is about Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik, both Auschwitz survivors and central figures in the shaping of Holocaust memory, who dedicated their lives to bearing witness and writing about the concentration camps, seeking, in particular, to give voice to those who did not return. The two writers are generally treated as complete opposites: Levi level-headed and self-aware, Ka-Tzetnik caught up in repeating the traumatic past. In this book I show how fundamentally mistaken this approach is, and how the similarity between them is, in fact, far greater than it may seem. While Levi draws the map, Ka-Tzetnik reveals the territory itself, and, taken together, they offer a better understanding of the human experience of the camps. This book explores their writing and their lives up to their deaths-Ka-Tzetnik of old age and Levi by his own hand-offering new explanations of Levi's suicide, little understood to this day.

This book explores the long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma-particularly complex posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD)-from phenomenological and cognitive perspectives. For example, C-PTSD can result in impairments at the body-schema level. In order to survive, trauma victims may conduct their lives at the body-image level, thus producing a mismatch between body schema and body image. In turn, as in the case of somatoparaphrenia and body integrity identity disorder, this incongruity can result in body disownership, which will affect long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma.

Body schema is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring. Body image consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one's own body. In 2005 Shaun Gallagher published an influential book entitled How the Body Shapes the Mind (OUP). That book not only defined both body schema and body image, but explored the complicated relationship between the two. It also established the idea that there is a double dissociation, whereby body schema and body image refer to two different but closely related systems. Given that many kinds of pathological cases can be described in terms of body schema and body image (phantom limbs, asomatognosia, apraxia, schizophrenia, anorexia, depersonalization, and body dysmorphic disorder, among others), we might expect to find a growing consensus about these concepts and the relevant neural activities connected to these systems. Instead, an examination of the scientific literature reveals continued ambiguity and disagreement. This volume brings together leading experts from the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry in a lively and productive dialogue. It explores fundamental questions about the relationship between body schema and body image, and addresses ongoing debates about the role of the brain and the role of social and cultural factors in our understanding of embodiment.

This book offers an uncompromising and unapologetic phenomenological study of altered states of consciousness in an attempt to understand the structure of human consciousness. Drawing on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, it sets out to decipher the inextricable link between consciousness, body, and world. This link will be established through the presentation of in-depth phenomenological research conducted with former prisoners of war (POWs) and senior meditators. Focusing on two such disparate groups improves our understanding of the nature of the subjective experience in extreme situations – when our sense of boundary is rigid and we are disconnected both from the body and the world (POWs); and when our sense of boundary is fluid and we feel unified with the world (meditators). Based on empirical-phenomenological research, this book will explain how the body that is from the outset thrown into the intersubjective world shapes the structure of consciousness. 

This volume explores themes originating from the work of Jean Amery (1912-1978), a Holocaust survivor and essayist-mainly, ethics and the past, torture and its implications, death and suicide. The volume is interdisciplinary, bringing together contributions from philosophy, psychology, law, and literary studies to illuminate each of the topics from more than one angle. Each essay is a novel contribution, shedding new light on the relevant subject matter and on Jean Amery's unique perspective. The ensuing picture is rich and multifaceted, uncovering unforeseen traits of Amery's thought, and surprising correlations that have so far been under-researched. It invites further studies of the Holocaust and its consequences to take their cue from non-neutral first person reflections.