Abstract

The counter-cultural movida madrileña, an unbridled, hedonistic, and drug-riddled celebration of Spain's freedom, was far from the only cultural ramification of the country's transition to democracy. Upon Franco's death and the consequent lifting of the curtain of censorship, there also arose from the rubble of the fallen dictatorship diverse narrative voices that expose symptoms of deep-seated personal and collective trauma. Voices from a Wound: Recovery from Trauma in Spanish Narratives of Memory Since 1966 traces the progressive exposition of trauma narratives from Spain's transition to democracy until the early twenty-first century. In their style and themes, narrative works from this time period expose the evolution from untreated and symptomatic psychic wound, through the rocky road of testimony and the talking cure, and finally to the healing salve of reconnection with the community.

The current debate in Spain over the proposed Law for the Recovery of Historical Memory, legislation that would publicly recognize the victims of the Franco regime, suggests the very political nature of the acts of remembering and forgetting. In light of this, Voices from a Wound: Recovery from Trauma in Spanish Narratives of Memory Since 1966 investigates such political issues as gender identity, dissociative amnesia, the collapse in understanding at the heart of trauma, our so-called “age of testimony,” censorship and freedom of thought, official historiography and individual experience, violence and resistance, and the particular fear that the “talking cure” may in fact lead to the very political polarization that gave rise to the Spanish Civil War in the first place.