Abstracts (İngilizce özetler)

 

Separation and mortality

SAFFET MURAT TURA

In this article separation and mortality is discussed as the universal trauma of human life. Separation is in the essential domain of psychoanalytic inquiry whereas mortality trangresses the borders of psychoanalysis directing us to an existential domain. Nevertheless the working through of both traumas in the analytic atmosphere contributes human life new meanings as far as transcendence is concerned. The article also discusses the pains of living in a cultural world where existence lacks such a transcendence problematique.

 

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Turks/Kurds, mothers and politics:

A comment on Turkish and Kurdish mothers

who lost their sons in the war

SERPİL SANCAR

Twenty years of war in Turkey reflect as a trauma to the lives of mothers who lost their sons in the war. Whether Turk or Kurd, for those women who have to cope with loss of beloved ones, war means deprivation, poverty and breaking off with the fundamental emotional ties that make life meaningful. This essay is based on interviews with Turkish mothers who do not realize that they virtually live in a war, and Kurdish mothers who are part of the war, on motherhood, war, politics and the future of Turkey. Politics of war politicize women, or rather make them the “tools” or the “victims” of violence politics. This “politicization” that is constructed over motherhood does not give those women the opportunity to transform the main style of politics. Mothers believe the solution should come from the political institutions – the assembly. But the lack of connection between political institutions and the women, make the words of mothers “apolitical”. The politicization of mothers reproduce the “victimhood” of women as far as it fails to cooperate with a political movement against despotism, violence, racism, sexism, militarism and exploitation.

 

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A comparison between the mental states and

bereavement reactions of the people who lost

first degree relative in a traumatic manner

with those whose relatives have died of leukemia

TUBA ÖZPOLAT OLGUN - ŞAHİKA YÜKSEL

The main aim of this study is to compare the mental states and bereavement reactions of the people who lost first degree relative in a traumatic manner with those whose relatives have died of leukemia. The factors determining the bereavement process following a traumatic loss and the long term effects of traumatic loss are also investigated.

Ninety people who lost a first degree relative 1-5 years ago are accepted to the study. The participants are divided into three groups according to the way of death of their relatives. The first group is consisted of people whose relatives have died in a military fight, in the second group there are people whose relatives were killed by unknown persons or are still lost and the third group is consisted of people who lost their relatives because of leukemia. The bereaved relatives are evaluated through Semi Structured Interwiev Form, Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D), Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAM-A), Structured Diagnostic Interwiev for DSM-III-R (SCID), Symptom Check List- 90-R (SCL-90-R), Inventory of Complicated Grief and Impact of Event Scale-Revised Form.

The mean age of the participants are 39. %60 of them are women and %64 are married. A significant majority of the participants is composed of hausewives (%43), primary or secondary school graduates (%67) and low socioeconomic status (%67). %50 of the bereaved relatives are the ones who lost their brothers or sisters, %25 are mother who lost their children and %13 are fathers who lost their children.

The severity of the psychiatric illnesses of the people whose relatives have died in a military fight is significantly more than the other two groups. The scores of the Inventory Complicated Grief and Impact of Event Scale-Revised Form of the two groups who lost their relatives in a traumatic manner, are higher than the scores of the people whose relatives have died of leukemia. The severity of the psychiatric illnesses and complicated grief tend to decrease in time but not significantly. The age, marital status, socioeconomic level, ethnic origin, religious belief, childhood and adulty loss history of the bereaved people are found to have no significant effect on the psychiatric illness and complicated grief level. The mother who lost their children, the women, the ones with low educational level, the ones who have a history of an affective or somatoform disorder and the ones who have chronic physical illness are determined to have higher score in psychiatric illness and complicated grief scale. The scores of men, working people and the ones with high educational level are lower.

The findings of the study are discussed in the contex of related literature. Psychiatric illness and complicated grief following traumatic losses are more severe than the ones following the losses due to natural causes. A complex interaction between many factors are thought to have a role in the development of the grief process following the traumatic losses.

 

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Individual and social implications

of traumatic experiences

ÖZGE YENİER DUMAN - EROL GÖKA

Today the concept of trauma is so much broadened to include a wide range of events such as war, torture, rape, natural disasters, accidents, immigration, acute or chronic diseases and the loss of acquitances. These events can have serious traumatizing effects on mental life of individuals. Whether these traumatizing events have permenant effects or not depends both on personal characteristics of individuals and on the reaction of their social surroundings to the traumatic events in question.

Mental disorders that result from the “individual” dimension of trauma are the subject matter of psychiatry. However leaving all responsibility of trauma related issues to psychiatry because of its present engagement with the subject may lead to disregard and psychiatrization of the social dimension of trauma.

In recent months doctor-patient relations were again under close inspection in the context of a traumatic event. Prisoners were in an act of starving to death against the cell-type prisons. The act of prisoners for starving to death can be described as a social trauma not only because of its effects on a wide variety of people from the society such as the prisoners themselves, their families, physicians and other health workers but also because this action itself have the potential of traumatizing the whole social space.

It’s possible to define Turkey as a country of traumas where we experience natural disasters, traffic terror, violence within family and violence at social environment. It is also difficult to determine the severity of individual and social effects of these diverse traumatic events. There are more then ten thousand people who had lost their lives at the earthquake of Marmara and forty thousand people who had died at the conflicts at Southeast Anatolia. Three million people had changed or were forced to change their places within the borders of the country and thousands of people had consulted the legal authorities with the claim of torture or had consulted the medical authorities for help with the same claim. In defining the situation in Turkey, the major difficulty lies in making a clear discrimination between nature-bound trauma and human-bound trauma. In order to live in environments that are free of psychological violence it is necessary to clean the environment from violence instead of escaping from it. The survival of the society from the effects of traumatic events can be possible by excerting an active control over them that is similar to the survival strategies at the individual level.

 

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Trauma, posttraumatic stress disorder

and cognitive-behaviorist treatment

EBRU ŞALCIO⁄LU

Psychological trauma due to natural disasters, wars, road accidents, or various forms of violence is known to be associated with severe psychological problems in the short- and long-term. Of these problems Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is widely recognized by the world psychiatric community. PTSD symptoms are clustered in three categories: (1) re-experiencing of the trauma events, (2) avoidance of trauma reminders and emotional numbing, and (3) hyper-arousal symptoms such as extreme alertness due to a sense of impending danger, and increased startle reactions. PTSD is a chronic and disabling condition, which, if left untreated, may persist for years, decades, or even a lifetime. It may severely impair work, social, and family functioning. This paper attempts to give a brief review of the literature about the studies of PTSD. It gives an overview about the course, prevalence, risk factors for the disorder as well as psychological theories that try to explain its etiology. Finally treatment issues are discussed within a framework that addresses the need for systematic and long-term efforts in dealing with the mental health effects of large-scale disasters.

 

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Earthquake and trauma

SEDAT IŞIKLI

Trauma and disaster are part of our everyday lives, despite our wishes. With the advent of mass communications, we are more aware than ever of the frequency of these events; we see and hear both manmade and natural disasters from around the globe rather than only in our own community. Traumas and disasters affect hundreds of thousands every year: victims, their relatives, their friends, disaster workers, and witnesses. The main objective of the present paper is to introduce the concepts of trauma and possible deleterious psychological consequences of earthquakes as traumatic events which are greatly feared, probably more than most other kind of disaster.

 

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Mobile phones in Turkey:

A technology of dissociation

F. ASUMAN SUNER

This article aims to discuss the use of mobile phones in Turkey since the late 1990s. The data used in the article are based on the findings of a survey entitled “The Diffusion and the Usage of Information Technologies in Turkey –2000” (DUITT-2000) conducted by TÜBİTAK-BİLTEN (Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey - Information Technology and Electronics Research Institute). One of the most striking outcomes of DUITT-2000 is the dramatic increase in the mobile phone ownership in Turkey from 1997 to 2000. The survey demonstrates that 50.2 % of the total number of households in urban areas (the settlements with a population of 20,000 or more) in Turkey have access to mobile phone technology (i.e., have at least one mobile phone at the household) by the year 2000. The rate of the mobile phone ownership on the basis of household was 10.1 % in 1997. The data prove that mobile phone ownership in Turkey increased nearly five times in three years between 1997 and 2000.

The article attempts to make sense of this development by employing a critical cultural analysis investigating the network of symbolic meanings established around the mobile phone technology in Turkey in relation to the recent crisis around the notions of belongingness, home, homeland.

Emigration has become a widespread aspiration in Turkish society, particularly since the end of the 1990s. The prime motive behind this collective desire can be described as a mode of growing pessimism, and even despair, about the possible life prospects that people expect to have if they continue to stay in Turkey. We can identify two developments in particular which contributed to the surfacing of such a mood: The Marmara Quake in 1999 that killed more than 20,000 people and left millions homeless; and the economic breakdown of the February 2001 as an outcome of which the state of relative economic stability that had been reached during the last couple of years was once again lost. As a result of these developments, the notions of “home” and “homeland” have become sites of insecurity, instability and crisis in Turkey since the late 1990s, and consequently, more and more people began considering to leave their homeland for a better life at another country.

The article develops a comparative analysis which attempts to conceive the symbolic meanings established around mobile phones in Turkey in relation to the reception of the mobile phone technology in some other non-Western societies which experience the condition of crisis like Turkey. As an easily accessible information and communication technology, which requires a certain degree of technological literacy from its user, mobile phones are perceived in these societies primarily as a symbol of “global culture.” The strongest connotative meaning that mobile phones generate is a prospect of “catching up with the world” or “feeling like an inhabitant of the world.” As the mobile phone connects its user to the “world,” it creates an illusory dissociation from the immediate cultural locality that one has to inhabit. The mobile phone, in this regard, is a means of “being elsewhere” without physical mobility. It functions, in other words, as a means of a temporary migration to the imaginary space of the “global world.”

 

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The socio-cultural and socio-economic analysis

of the Menemen event

NURŞEN MAZICI

Menemen event is one of the eighteen riots that occurred in the first fifteen years of the Republic; in the official history it is represented as a religious upheaval. Menemen, with its geographical location and social and cultural characteristics is not a typical place for such a riot. In this essay, the reasons behind the riot is observed. These reasons, especially the economic ones, are closely related with the politics of that period. In 1930s, the economic problems caused by internal and external factors, deeply affected the Aegean Region where the main source of income was agriculture; the new concepts and institutions that were brought to define the nation-state alienated the people; Republic was represented as the regime of urban people, and poor and uneducated masses held on to the traditional institutions of the old regime. A marginal group was mobilized through religious symbols but the Republican People’s Party abused this and used it as an excuse to close the Free Republican Party. Although the religious organising of the people was known, preventive measures were not taken and the military did not intervene, and these reveal the utilisation of the riot by the government.

 

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Ataturk statues and the visualization

of official history in the early Republican Turkey

FAİK GÜR

In the inter-war period in Europe, the notion of relations between state and society illustrated different conceptualizations of modernization. In Northern Europe, the British Empire, and France, modernization was widely based on ‘individual autonomy.’ In Italy, Germany, Russia and Turkey, however, the political elite rejected this model and employed ‘collectivity’ as their foundation for understanding relations between state and society. They believed that collectivity in terms of work, culture and class would create a powerful society and state. Therefore, they sought to create a “truly revolutionary culture” by which to define the state and advance its claims.

The construction of a new Turkish state and society between 1923 and 1945 best exemplifies this model. Immediately following the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the new political authority began to transform the “corrupt,” and “rotten” Ottoman Empire into a new modern nation. For the new Turkish political elite, relations between society and state had to be shifted from a religious to a secular base in order to foster the growth of secularized authority and a secular social order. They considered a “Turkified” nation, a more racially and culturally homogenous population, as the first requirement of such secularization. The exchange of populations with Greece (1923-1925) and the subsequent suppression of the Kurds (1924 - 1936) were designed to homogenize the population. Partly in an attempt to undermine any wider Islamic identification in the populace, imposition of a Turkifying compulsory romanization soon followed. These projects could not alone create new loyalties. They were therefore paired with a complementary positive emotional element: visible and public markers designed to draw and hold popular loyalty. The “paraphernalia” of the new nation were created with expedience, and included emblems, literature, music, architecture, national museums, statues and monuments.

Turkey was not alone at this time. Its northern neighbor, the most important ‘enemy’ of Turkey, the Russian Empire, was also going through revolutionary changes. For the Russian and Turkish new political order, there needed to be innovative symbols to conquer and then to crush the currently available ones in pursuit of a nationwide cult that could be instrumental in the emergence of Turkish and Russian nationalism as well as in the visualization of Turkish and Russian experience of modernity.

I would argue that erection of Ataturk statues was among the most influential performances of the new political order in the early Republican Turkey. These statues were erected in public spaces and in squares and thus they were expected to provide the highest possible visibility and thus perceptibility. More than forty Ataturk statues and monuments were erected in Ankara, Istanbul and other major cities. I argue that most of these statues visualize Turkish official history as well as a nation’s birth in terms of the conscious disassociation of the past from the present.