Régine Waintrater
Psychoanalyst, Family Therapist, Associate Professor at Université Paris 7-Diderot
Monday, March 28, 2010
5:00p.m.
Humphrey Forum, Humphrey Center
301 19th Ave. S.
The human catastrophes that marked the 20th century have made survivor testimony an unprecedented issue. For genocide survivors and their descendants, testimony is a means to inscribe a history within a genealogy that has been broken by the violent acts of genocide. As an oral or written account, testimony engages, provokes and challenges disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. How does the process of witnessing develop? What are the expectations that it provokes--and what are its risks? How can bearing witness restore the victims' identity, rather than re-traumatizing them?
Régine Waintrater's practice as a therapist is critical of the ideology of testimony as catharsis. Waintrater has been involved in the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University Library, and in the USC Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, two important projects of testimony collection. Her experience with these projects will be the point of departure for addressing issues surrounding testimony.
Régine Waintrater is the author of Sortir du genocide (Out of Genocide: Testifying to Learn to Live Again).
Co-sponsors: The Human Rights Center at the University of Minnesota Law School, History Department, Human Rights Program, CHAIM (Children of Holocaust Survivors Association in Minnesota)
