Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Maercker
Alfried Krupp Senior Fellow
(April - September 2022)
- Studied medicine at the Humboldt University in Berlin
- 2011 to 2018 head of a working group of the WHO to revise the international classification of diseases in the field of trauma and stress-related disorders
- Since 2017 head of the Historical Commission "Instrumentalization of Psychology in the Former GDR" of the German Society for Psychology
- Professor of Psychopathology and Clinical Intervention at the University of Zurich and Co-Director of the Psychotherapeutic Center of the Psychological Institute
Fellow project: "Clinical psychological perspectives on historical trauma“
My project on "Clinical Psychological Perspectives on Historical Trauma" will be dedicated to the further development of a concept in psychotraumatology that emerged as complementary to the 40-year-old concept of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Clinical Cultural Psychology and the academic discipline of social work: the notion of Historical Trauma.
A clinical view of historical trauma, such as the one I present for discussion, focuses on groups of survivors who, during therapeutic treatment or psychosocial interventions, want to deal with the historical trauma inflicted on them or their ancestors. In a direct way, these patients do so when they want to talk explicitly about the extremely aversive collective experiences. In particular, an indirect form of thematization is the insistence on belonging to a particular group of affected people defined ethnically or historically.
In my project, I would like to take up implicit and explicit discourses on the concept of historical trauma and work out whether a differentiation is possible that sharpens the conceptual inventory and enables social- or emotion-historical approaches to contemporary history for certain groups of victims such as the survivors of the Shoa, genocides, colonial and state dictatorial violence.