Survivance

The term survivance designates the unconscious strategy put in place by the survivors of a collective disaster and their descendants, to reconstruct anew the precarious basis of a possible life among the “normal” people of the world which they inhabit. Survivance is admittedly a challenge and a bet upheld by the inheritors of contemporary mass exterminations. Yet it also remains the only attitude survivors put constrain upon the life they have left, as well as the memory of the people and the engulfed country of which they have become the depositaries . Survivors also seek to put into words the silent murder from which they were paradoxically born, by putting into the ground their ancestors, and finally being able to extract themselves from the weight of the crime which continues to affect the very life that was transmitted to them. They must therefore also carry the painful paradox of identifying with their dead ones and of violently detaching themselves from them. This violence is necessary for them to precisely retrieve a sense of heritage. For the people who struggle with the spontaneous adherence to the cultural illusions which envelop the will and the desire to live, survivance would seemingly be the art of translating and resowing left over things.

Such and such defined historical configuration should then be taken into account as an example which allows something which cannot psychologically be represented to be shaped into a metaphor, where bodiless ancestors are transmitted to the survivors. As René Kaës reminds: “Effacing collective murder and State violence saps the narcissistic base of generating, in order to destroy it, it reaches to memory and transmission. What is effaced as not having happened, does not have a place in which to be considered and in which to articulate the course of individual histories with the course of collective history.” (Dunod, Violence d’Etat et psychanalyse, 1989, xv) The survivors must also have previously restored a human figure to their graveless missing ones. This grants them an interiority that has finally become habitable and allows them to mourn their homeless parents’ shadows.

Survivance thus means the necessity of a life with an eye to the past, aiming not to make amends to their ancestors – which is completely impossible – but to symbolically give them the conditions of a subsequent psychological parenthood, when all possibility for them to enjoy this role was taken away. This practice – should it be precised ? –is of course not dictated by an oblative filial disposition but rather by the urgency of a selfish interest which attempts to somewhat establish, for oneself, the bases of an absent childhood and thereby to recreate, for one’s own descendants, the protective illusions of the first spring times. The historical cataclysms of our twentieth century have in common of having engendered inheritors who must elaborate within themselves and for others the representation proper to their parents, so as to be able to substitute from the paralysis of their initial incorporation the innovation of identification which sustains life.

Translation: Sarah Voke

Altounian, Janine, La Survivance / Traduire le trauma collectif [2000], preface by Pierre Fédida, postface by René Kaës, Paris: Dunod, 2003.

–, Ouvrez-moi seulement les chemins d’Arménie / Un génocide aux déserts de l’inconscient [1990], preface by René Kaës, Paris: Les Belles Lettres & Confluents psychanalytiques, 2003.

–, L’intraduisible / Deuil, mémoire, transmission [2005], Paris: Dunod, 2008.

–, De la cure à l’écriture / L’élaboration d’un héritage traumatique, Paris: PUF, 2012.

Alnounian, Vahram & Janine Altounian (eds.), Mémoires du Génocide arménien / Héritage traumatique et travail analytique, Paris: PUF, 2009.