Why (Your) History Matters
Doing psychotherapy involves history, and history is not the same as what gets remembered or officially recorded. Walter Benjamin thought of history not in terms of facts or stories or memories but of images that rise up involuntarily at moments of historical emergency. They interrupt continuity with its predictable markers of progress. These fragmentary glimpses are different but no longer possible to ignore and they therefore disrupt established forms of expression and communication.
Don't wait ... There are no mistakes.
John Akomfrah
Part of what happens in psychotherapy sessions is a constant learning, by both parties. They keep having to learn what that interruption or disruption feels / sounds / looks / appears / disappears like. They invent or imagine ways to welcome it or at least give it a chance to have a say. For Benjamin involuntary memory isn't something individual people have, it always points to collective experience. Part of the shock may be that one finds oneself relating or connecting with what had always seemed other than oneself: no longer a single being. Many, and one of many, in a radically unexpected way.
John Akomfrah talks about why history matters here. He points out that:
The question of why history matters is connected to why the non-fictive or non-fiction matters, because you could tell, and I'm using the two phrases here in metaphoric terms, you could tell when the surplus of fiction has got into the mix. You know, so one of the reasons why I was compelled to make Vertigo Sea is because you're sitting there listening to someone referring to 'migrants' as 'cockroaches' and you think okay, what's going on here. How do people migrate from being migrants to cockroaches. What do you have to forget, what's the process of amnesia that allows the kinds of forgetting that builds into hierarchies in which there are beings and non-beings. So those things, the aversion to fiction, is what keeps me interested in the non-fictive. It's what keeps me interested in questions of the historical because they act as a kind of powerful counter-ballast to, it means a kind of turbulence of amnesia and amnesia is a constant sea, we swim in it all the time.