The Legacy of Trauma in the Narratives of Lithuanian Women Survivors of the 1941 Soviet Deportations to Siberia
My research interests include trauma narrativization, intergenerational transmission of historical trauma, and psychotherapy process. Specifically, my doctoral dissertation included an in-depth qualitative inquiry into the legacy of Stalinist deportations in Lithuania. I set out to collect life narratives of a sample of Lithuanian women survivors of the Soviet deportations to Siberian labor camps that occurred in 1941. My hope was that examining these narratives would deepen understanding of the psychic trauma experienced by survivors, preserve memory for future generations, and illuminate the remnants of traumatic memories that potentially signify intergenerational transmission.
Publications and Presentations
Dillon, J. (2015). The legacy of trauma in post-Soviet Lithuania: Survival, adaptation, and remnants in the life narrative of a 1941 deportee. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, New Brunswick, NJ.
Dillon, J. & O’Loughlin, M. (2014). Questions Unasked: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma in the Life Narrative of a Lithuanian Woman Survivor of the 1941 Soviet Deportations. In M. O’Loughlin (Ed.), The Ethics of Remembering and the Consequences of Forgetting: Trauma, History, and Memory. New York: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Dinger, U., Zilcha-Mano, S., Dillon, J. & Barber, J. (2014). Therapist adherence and competence in psychotherapy research. The Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology.
Dillon, J. (2013). The legacy of trauma: The changing sense of normalcy in the life narratives of Lithuanian women survivors of the 1941 Soviet deportations. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, New Brunswick, NJ.
