COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST: REWRITING HISTORY THROUGH A THERAPEUTIC PUBLIC DISCOURSE IN TURKEY

This article examines the growing interest in questions of memory, trauma, and justice in Turkey, with a special focus on the notion of "coming to terms with the past." Through an analysis of key academic and popular texts published between 2002 and 2013, it argues that "coming to terms with the past" is a therapeutic public discourse that rewrites national history through the temporality of trauma. In other words, this discourse reconfigures the sequence of past, present, and future as the beginning, development, and end of a case of collective trauma, applying the psychotherapeutic terminology of victimhood, healing, and forgiveness to social realities. The article offers new perspective on existing debates over "coming to terms with the past" by analyzing the limits of this therapeutic discourse and by exploring the potential and open-endedness of the politics of memory in Turkey.