Archiving Trauma: Methodological Inquiries into Mental Health and Memory in Chile

Scholars of many world regions have studied memory struggles in the aftermath of state violence. Trauma studies scholars have shown how psychology has been deployed as a political practice. Drawing on these literatures, this paper explores the construction of human rights NGO archives in Chile, particularly regarding mental health documents, under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) and the transition to democracy that followed. Mental health professionals played a significant role in shaping memories of the Pinochet regime’s violence. Looking at the archive reveals how they systematically documented and archived testimonies of trauma, which required their professional skill, thus ensuring mental health an indisputable place in the human rights movement.

During the dictatorship, human rights NGOs provided legal, financial, and educational aid to those who suffered from the regime’s political repression, and they created mental health teams to offer therapy to those populations. Therapists linked the individual’s psychic recovery to collective struggles for democracy. Trauma resulting from state violence isolated individuals and compromised their political commitments, while recovery signified re-establishing one’s ties to the collective. In the context of mass violence, therapists often encouraged patients to go beyond speaking about their trauma privately. They helped patients organize their oral narratives into concise, written testimonies that could be published in international human rights reports, legal cases, and later, in Chile’s truth commissions. Many testimonies appeared in bulletins and studies that circulated among Santiago’s human rights organizations.

To what extent should we project North-American notions of privacy onto documents produced with the intent of both aiding patients’ personal recovery and publicly denouncing human rights violations? Delving into this and other methodological and ethical questions, I examine how recovering the integrity of the individual through a collective process, and restoring the collectivity by recovering the individual, blurred the boundary between private and public.