The Seba library treats Institutional Forgetting in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Herman, Judith Lewis, Nietzsche, Friedrich, Lewis, Marc).
when ‘trusted and powerful institutions… act in ways that visit harm upon those dependent on them,’ as ‘institutional betrayal.’
Herman introduces Freyd’s concept of ‘institutional betrayal’ as the formal name for the process by which institutions suppress, minimize, or collude in harm rather than bearing witness to it — the structural analog to individual traumatic forgetting.
, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, 1992thesis
Forgetting is no mere vis inertiae as the superficial imagine; it is rather an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression.
Nietzsche establishes the philosophical grounds for treating forgetting as a purposive act rather than passive decay, a framework directly applicable to institutions that actively foreclose memory of harm.
, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887thesis
rigid, cookie-cutter methods and institutional self-interests too often turn ‘treatment’ into a dead end or a revolving door for people who seek help.
Lewis diagnoses how institutional self-interest within addiction medicine perpetuates structural blindness to therapeutic failure, a concrete exemplification of institutional forgetting in clinical practice.
, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease, 2015supporting
The offense is precisely what must not be forgotten, since it is through the act of facing what has happened and fitting it into a whole by remembering it that the possibility of atonement occurs.
Kurtz and Ketcham articulate the counter-imperative to institutional forgetting: only by retaining and integrating the record of offense can accountability and healing (‘at-one-ment’) become possible.
, The Spirituality of Imperfection Storytelling and the, 1994supporting
if active attempts are being made to avoid and forget traumatic material, avoidant cognitive processes can become automatic… maintaining traumatic amnesia.
The Lanius volume maps the cognitive mechanisms — directed forgetting and automatized avoidance — that at the individual level mirror the processes institutions employ to sustain collective non-remembrance of trauma.
, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting
unawareness, or ‘the phenomenon of information inaccessibility,’ may help a child to maintain necessary attachments with abusive caregivers.
The argument that information inaccessibility preserves dependent relationships offers a psychodynamic parallel to institutional forgetting, wherein organizations suppress knowledge of harm to maintain authority and dependency.
, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010supporting
When something vanishes from consciousness it does not dissolve into thin air or cease to exist, any more than a car disappearing round a corner becomes non-existent.
Jung’s general account of unconscious retention establishes that what is institutionally ‘forgotten’ is not destroyed but relocated outside of sanctioned awareness, where it continues to exert influence.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976aside
Hilgard has argued that amnesic barriers are the intrinsic structure by which mental contents that would ordinarily be connected are disaggregated.
The concept of amnesic barriers as disaggregating structures provides a model for how institutional forgetting operates by severing linkages between knowledge, accountability, and response.
, The impact of early life trauma on health and disease the, 2010aside