Complex Collective Trauma Following a Terror Attack in a Small Community: A Systemic Analysis of Community Voices and Psychosocial Interventions

In this ethnographic study, data were collected four months, one year, and three years following a terror attack on civilians in a small Israeli community. The data included protocols of meetings of the intervention team, informal and formal interviews, and follow-up telephone interviews with local leaders and psychosocial professionals who worked with individuals, families, and groups in the community. Content analysis of field notes and interviews led to the elaboration of the theoretical construct “complex collective trauma.” The analysis of the community voices and psychosocial interventions indicated the importance of action-oriented, meaning-making community projects and memorials, screening and government-funded short-term trauma therapy, mapping interlocking circles of vulnerability, and an integrated clinical-community model coordinated long-term (one year) by an outside professional.     

A social host in the machine? The case of group attention

I argue that akin to mind-body dualism, social-mental dualism is open to critique. That is, mental processes can be inherently social, with sociality ‘baked into’ the architecture of the cognitive mechanism. As a case in point, I introduce the reader to the cognitive mechanism of group attention. In particular, I focus on the differences between group attention and ideomotor imitation in terms of their (a) compliance to the social-mental dichotomy, and (b) contributions to building common knowledge—a prerequisite for human communication and collective action. Finally, I suggest possible implications of group attention scholarship for other social memory phenomena such as social contagion, socially shared memory-induced forgetting, and the saying-is-believing effect.     

Does interaction matter? Testing whether a confidence heuristic can replace interaction in collective decision-making

In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the ‘confidence heuristic’. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task: either directly, by opting for the judgement made with higher confidence, or indirectly, by opting for the faster judgement, exploiting an inverse correlation between confidence and reaction time. We found that the success of these heuristics depends on how similar individuals are in terms of the reliability of their judgements and, more importantly, that for dissimilar individuals such heuristics are dramatically inferior to interaction. Interaction allows individuals to alleviate, but not fully resolve, differences in the reliability of their judgements. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of confidence and collective decision-making.     

Archetypes and architecture: The coniunctio of Canary Wharf

In The Psychology of the Unconscious Jung foretold his hypothesis of the collective unconscious and the way it is represented in the stories and symbolism of myths and legends. Later, he uncovered this in the texts of the alchemists, especially the Rosarium Philosophorum , which he believed allegorized the archetype of relationship and new birth that they called the mysterium coniunctionis . He recognized the same symbolic meaning in the building of his home, ‘the tower’, at Bollingen, which represented his own individuation and new birth. Similarly, group process might evoke or be influenced by archetypes, which are then manifested in socio-cultural phenomena, one expression of which is architectural design.

This article argues that such archetypal expression can be discerned in the design and landscaping of Canary Wharf in London. It explores how the socio-economic aims of the development, coupled with the geographic characteristics of the area, might have evoked in the group of individuals concerned the archetype of the mysterium coniunctionis . Thus the design characteristics of Canary Wharf's architecture appear curiously similar to those of the woodcuts in the Rosarium Philosophorum , and some examples are presented. Both seem creative manifestations of the same archetype. In concluding, the author reflects on the meaning of his work, and, as Jung wrote, ‘the unexpected and the incredible belong to this world. Only then is life whole’.     

Cities as Collective Beings

This article introduces the concepts of System, Autonomous System, Intelligent System, Multiple System, and Collective Being. It deals with issues related to managing these different levels of systemic aggregation. The author then discusses applications related to Architecture and design with particular reference to cities.     

“Everyone always did the same”: Constructing legacies of collective industrial pasts in ex-mining communities in the South Wales Valleys

Understanding post-industrial places requires an engagement with how these communities construct identities around a sense of a shared or common industrial past, particularly in areas that have struggled to adapt to the loss of community-defining industries (Beatty et al. 2007). This paper draws on ethnographic data, non-directive interviews, and auto-ethnographic reflections collected in an ex-coal mining town in a South Wales valley in the UK. The paper seeks to better consider post-industrial collective identities by attending to concepts of collective memory and imaginaries of industrial pasts. Conceptualising memory as rooted in the material and immaterial; affective, emotive and discursive; shared and imagined; this paper discusses how everyday relationships are inextricably linked to an assumed shared history within an ‘typical’ active mining community. By engaging the everyday lives, practices, and discourses of contemporaneous residents this paper outlines the ways in which the past is constructed as universal and homogenous. It also extends this discussion to consider how these imagined shared pasts, and the enduring values routed in these collective memories, are mobilised to construct senses of inclusion, difference, and othering; imagined industrial pasts have enduring impacts for the construction of contemporary communities.     

Relation numérique et travail de care : construction et entretien d’un collectif dans le cadre du portage salarial

Work relations are changing due to development of employment new forms and digital interactions. The French “portage salarial” status crystallizes these two forms of evolution, that staff and freelance employees “carried” coexist in the same organization and whose interactions are mediated. This article presents a qualitative and inductive research, conducted with grounded theory on a “portage” company's permanent employees. The results show that care work done by the company staff for the “portés” workers, not digitally mediated, can overcome the business relationship and produce a collective work. Subsequent interactions, digitally mediated, maintain this collective work.