Compassion and callousness are two major conflicting motives that can play out within us and between us (Gilbert, 2021; Gilbert & Simos 2022). Compassion as a process arises from having a sensitivity to, and engaging with, suffering: accompanied by a commitment to try to...
war
Ukraine’s future hangs in the balance following Russia’s full-scale invasion in late February. Ukrainian people mounted a fierce resistance, with citizens being given arms to help defend their country while many thousands fled across European borders. The International...
As an Environmental Psychologist and Second Generation Holocaust survivor, my visit to this new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) proved to be both a personal and professional challenge.
My journey began with a telephone enquiry regarding...
You’ve worked on conflict programmes in Northern Ireland, the Middle East and elsewhere – could you tell us a bit about your work on peacebuilding?
During the 1980s I was living in a place called ‘The Killing Fields’ – a rural area so called because it...
How did the programme come about?
Following the success of Rob Rinder’s BAFTA winning Who Do You Think You Are the BBC wanted to explore further the experiences of second and third generation Holocaust survivors. I believe they placed an ad in both...
We bring you our archive content on the role of psychology in war, including interviews, reports and articles.
The declaration of war in August 1914 was greeted on all sides with a euphoria so delusional German psychiatrists dubbed it Mobilisation Psychosis (Mobilmachungspsychose). Public opinion was united in the belief there could be no better cure for ‘nerves dried up…from years of...
At half past six on a Tuesday morning the alarm clock goes off in a bedroom in Roswell, New Mexico, where twenty-eight-year-old Tiffany McGregor had been sleeping peacefully up till now. She sighs as she gets up to take a shower. While she is doing this her...
This book was produced as a result of Dr Clare Makepeace’s doctoral dissertation at Birkbeck but was inspired by the author’s father, Alan Makepeace, who was himself a prisoner of war in Poland, having been captured with 10,000 others in 1940.
Captives of War...
In February 1944 Lieutenant-Colonel Tommy Wilson, an army psychiatrist recruited from the Tavistock Clinic, submitted a nine-page report to the War Office. It focused upon the plight of tens of thousands of servicemen overseas who had, in recent times, become labelled by...