May 15, 2022 Collab Salon: Fiction as witnessing practice

 Irene (trauma survivor) and Christoffer Haugaard (psychologist) developed a practice of witnessing in relation to Irene’s alter ego in fictionalized life stories. This developed out of necessity in order to address an intensely traumatic life history and powerful identity conclusions that were out of reach for regular conversation. The approach that we developed used two essential survival strategies from Irene’s childhood: Her invention of an alter ego and her imagination of having an audience to the injustices in her life. Over time, these practices became the central structure of our collaboration. In this collab salon, Christoffer will describe this practice with examples and present Irene’s account of the effects.