Sibony-Malpertu, Yaelle

To make or not to make history: The bombing of Le Havre, September 1945 - 2022.


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This article was written on the seventieth anniversary of the bombing of Le Havre by the raf during the Second World War. It proposes a psychoanalytic approach of “memory reconstruction” processes concerning this traumatic event. It also shows the difficulty of initiating a reflection exclusively centered on these bombings, as this would extract the event from its historical context, which is complex and extended in time (between 1939 and 1945, without taking into account the postwar policies concerning the memorialization of these events). We thus try to shed light on this traumatic entanglement and bring it into resonance with different mnemic processes. Finally, we highlight the conditions required to inscribe this traumatic event in a therapeutic process of individual and intergenerational reappropriation.