「不要碰政治」？──轉型正義療癒工程的心理學介入

Stay Out of Politics: Constructing a Psychological Site for Transitional Justice

台灣經歷超過四十年的威權統治，不僅政治暴力受難者與家屬所承受的創傷後延性與代間創傷現象仍待了解，其對整體社會的全面影響亦尚待發掘。轉型正義乃涵蓋法律、歷史、政治、心理、文化等多重面向的繁複社會工程，世界各地轉型正義工程中，從倖存者與家屬的創傷修復、歷史真相重建、加害責任追究，到社會共生和解等問題層面，皆不乏心理專業的介入，但相關議題的心理學討論在台灣仍屬罕見。本論文嘗試從（一）轉型正義機制中真相訴說與創傷療癒的關係，（二）轉型正義修復措施與療癒或和解促進，及（三）加害責任追究與社群認同及和解間的張力等三大面向，檢視各國轉型正義案例中所彰顯的心理學意涵，並藉此回望台灣政治暴力創傷及處遇的本土現況，反思臨床與諮商心理學、社會心理學、司法心理學、政治心理學等諸多心理學次學門，在此多重倫理關係修復工地中的介入可能。

After more than 40 years of authoritarian rule in Taiwan, the KMT regime’s full impact on society as a whole is yet to be fully understood. The direct and intergenerational trauma due to the political violence and its aftermath suffered by the victims and their families has not been thoroughly examined. Based on ethno-psychoanalytic fieldwork, as well as governmental experience as a commissioner at the Transitional Justice Commission (TJC) in Taiwan, I argue that political trauma at both the individual and collective levels should be confronted within an integrative transdisciplinary framework.
The field of Transitional Justice (TJ) first emerged in the 1990s with a focus on the legal and institutional reforms required to usher in the process of democratization. In the first decade of the 21st century, TJ underwent a paradigm shift towards a multidimensional social project, encompassing legal, historical, political, psychological, and cultural transformation. I examined the international literature on TJ, notably case studies in different regions, and observed abounding psychological implications in diverse TJ projects, ranging from trauma rehabilitation, truth (re-)construction, accountability of the perpetrators, and social coexistence and reconciliation between antagonistic groups. However, these implications need to be further explored. At present, the majority of TJ projects envisage psychological interventions solely as complementary instruments to rehabilitate the victimized, often through a medical lens in terms of mental health. The limited role imagined for psychologists may be inherited from the psychotherapeutic experience and knowledge of Holocaust survivors’trauma and transgenerational repercussions. I indicate 3 major TJ themes with ramifications that may be delineated with the aid of psychology subdisciplines: (1) the relation between truth-telling and trauma healing; (2) the implementation of (inter-)national restoration measures in local contexts; and (3) the tension between ensuring accountability and searching for reconciliation.
Firstly, in most TJ discourses, the link between truth-telling and healing is often oversimplified to serve political purposes. Psychoanalytic reflection on the psychological configurations allowing the narrator to explore multiple layers of truth has not been integrated into debates around TJ projects, leading to a sterile opposition between speaking or not speaking. Secondly, although the UN has established basic principles and guidelines to remedy and repair the unfathomable loss and trauma endured by victims of gross human rights violations, their implementation in different countries varies according to socio-economic and political conditions. The incommensurability of trauma suffered by survivors is rarely debated; restoration measures are mostly reduced to monetary compensation. Several researchers have pointed out the top-down tendencies and the neglect of specific local contexts as the main obstacles to forming a sound and effective TJ policy. Thirdly, ensuring accountability is often presumed to obstruct reconciliation. However, political and social psychologists have found that most members of victim groups are willing to reconcile when individual perpetrators are duly punished and the harm properly compensated. An authentic reconciliation presupposes a radical transformation of the opposing inner narratives and social ideologies of antagonistic groups, and the formation of a fusion of horizons.
The second part of the article examines the actualities of TJ in Taiwan from the perspective of these 3 themes. Since the KMT, the ruling party during the authoritarian regime, continued to reign for more than a decade after the lifting of martial law, its legacies are omnipresent in both the public and private spheres. The current version of the KMT still fiercely denies the reality of the political suppression, resulting in the belated official acknowledgement of February 28th Incident and the 40-year-long White Terror; moreover, most survivors and perpetrators have now passed away, rendering the reconstruction of historical truth extremely laborious. The attempts to reveal perpetrators’wrongdoing still provoke anxiety and conflict among social groups along polarized political lines. For many generations, mental health practitioners, including clinical psychologists, were advised to“stay out of politics”to maintain“professional neutrality”. In the public sphere, truth-telling often encounters either indifference or resentment from those eager to look ahead and bury the past, or the tendency of extremists in the independence movement to reduce the multifaceted truth to oversimplified narratives of victimization or heroic hagiography.
Regarding restoration measures, monetary compensation was for a long time the only imaginable way for lawmakers and survivors to redress the extrajudicial killing and imprisonment suffered by around 20,000 (according to official records) political prisoners. The severe long-term psychological sequelae, such as the loss of basic trust and sense of self-integrity and all derived symptoms, were either totally neglected or treated as individual weaknesses to be consigned to psychiatric care. Nevertheless, the consequences of political trauma, including transgenerational trauma, are evident in survivors’autobiographies and oral historians’publications. Unfortunately, as the government decision makers lacked a trauma-informed sensibility, mental health professionals were not solicited to participate in the policymaking process until the inauguration of the TJC in May 2018. Political trauma and healing being a brand-new issue in Taiwan, it is imperative to provide proper training to practitioners in different branches of the helping professions, and to invent a substantial interdisciplinary network capable of creating reassuring relationships with traumatized survivors and their families, and of preparing them and their communities for reintegration.
The search for accountability as a necessary step towards reconciliation (to which most survivors aspire) remains a difficult ideal to achieve, especially since more than 5 million voters still support a KMT that continues to claim the ferocious suppression was a necessary evil in the context of civil war against the Chinese Communist Party. Although the stigmatizing attitude towards former political prisoners has diminished considerably, KMT politicians still resist all TJ endeavors to seek accountability, accusing them of being instrumentalized for purely political ends.
Holistic TJ projects require multidisciplinary collaboration in multidimensional enterprises so as to build an imagined community based on a new set of shared values, such as human rights, the rule of law, and democracy. This collaboration implies not only system reform, but also psychological, cultural, and social transformation. Therefore, an authentic healing of political trauma at the individual and collective levels goes beyond the recognition of subjective experience in a consulting room. Social members with different political convictions and identity affiliations need to transcend their own interests to confront together the consequences of the former government’s illegal acts. The article concludes by suggesting potential contributions various psychological sub-disciplines can bring to TJ.