Chronology of Cultural Events and Cultural Shifts
August 23, 1944 Soviet conquest of Romania.
June 1953 Soviet army withdrawal from Romania; Ceaushescu's totalitarianism.
1959 Trial/execution/re-incarceration of Piteshti prisoners.
1961/62 Freeing of former Piteshti prisoners.
1989 Trial and execution of Ceaushescu.
1991/92 Former Piteshti prisoners seek help/psychotherapy by local
clinicians; Psychotherapists treat ill subjects/torturers; Psychotherapists identify with torturers; Romanian psychotherapists seek help from researchers.
Young student political inmates in the Piteshti penitentiary were customarily incarcerated and submitted to harsh physical and psychological torture. The treatment of prisoners was so brutal there that it frequently resulted in the death of the tortured inmates. My present work deals specifically with the singularly damaging counter-transferential tendencies surfacing in the treatment of post-traumatic stress patients in Romania, where, presumably, a new culture is being shaped out of the relics of the old one. In this study I focus solely on narratives of the Romanian victims and analyze their narrative production in interviews with the therapist over a period of at least one year. The material is made up largely of notes that have not been previously published; the translations from Romanian are mine.
One of the salient features of my interaction with Romanian mental health workers is the realization that, like the former prisoners, the health/mental workers are still living in relative isolation from the free world, and have been culturally exposed to communism over a period of more than forty years. Moreover, access to Western psychoanalytic know-how and Western psychiatric texts has been and continues to be very difficult. In fact, as reported by Romanian therapists, psychoanalysis and self-psychology are treated with contempt. As a result, the Romanian therapists' collaboration with this project seemed uniquely fortuitous.