James Gilligan on Facing the Past in the U.S.
James Gilligan, MD, is a lecturer in the
department of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and president of
the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy, founded in
1991 to encourage education and research about and promote
psychotherapy professionals working with criminal offenders.
A psychiatrist who has been on the Harvard Medical School faculty for 30 years, Gilligan specializes in violence prevention and the evaluation and therapy of violent individuals. He has served as medical director of the Bridgewater (MA) State Hospital for the criminally insane, clinical director of mental health services for the Massachusetts prison system, and director of the Institute of Law and Psychiatry and the Centre for the Study of Violence. Since 1994, Gilligan has been a supervisor and consultant in clinical and forensic psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital.
Gilligan is the author of the acclaimed Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (1997), an examination of the violence epidemic in America and its connection to shame. He is also a contributing author of Forensic Psychotherapy: Crime, Psychodynamics and the Offender Patient, Volume II.
In this video clip from Facing History and Ourselves's 1997 Conference on Human Rights and Justice, Collective Violence and Memory: Judgment, Reconciliation, Education, Dr. James Gilligan stresses the importance for the United States to have an honest encounter with its own history. The magnitude of possibility inherent in this sort of confrontation, he says, can be seen in the remarkable work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
A psychiatrist who has been on the Harvard Medical School faculty for 30 years, Gilligan specializes in violence prevention and the evaluation and therapy of violent individuals. He has served as medical director of the Bridgewater (MA) State Hospital for the criminally insane, clinical director of mental health services for the Massachusetts prison system, and director of the Institute of Law and Psychiatry and the Centre for the Study of Violence. Since 1994, Gilligan has been a supervisor and consultant in clinical and forensic psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital.
Gilligan is the author of the acclaimed Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (1997), an examination of the violence epidemic in America and its connection to shame. He is also a contributing author of Forensic Psychotherapy: Crime, Psychodynamics and the Offender Patient, Volume II.
In this video clip from Facing History and Ourselves's 1997 Conference on Human Rights and Justice, Collective Violence and Memory: Judgment, Reconciliation, Education, Dr. James Gilligan stresses the importance for the United States to have an honest encounter with its own history. The magnitude of possibility inherent in this sort of confrontation, he says, can be seen in the remarkable work of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Transcript:
"When we talk about truth and reconciliation, I as an American, have to
say, 'Truth? Reconciliation? Yes, that would be a very good idea-for
America.' Now, what I'm saying is . . . I think we have an enormous
amount to learn from what you are doing in South Africa. We talked
earlier about nations acknowledging genocide. I haven't heard yet today
an acknowledgment that the United States has committed not one but two
major genocides: genocide of Native Americans and genocide of African
Americans over the last four centuries. We have not yet, I think,
really made a serious effort to arrive at the truth about this or to
arrive at the kind of reconciliation that we desperately need as a
society if we're going to be able to heal the desperately
violence-producing effects that this has had on our society."
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Video length:
00 min 31 sec
Date filmed:
Apr 10 1997 
