Coping Rituals in Fearful Times

This collection of articles reveals ritual to be a unique and powerful asset in healing trauma and broken relationships. Each contribution offers insights on how, in the face of uncertainty, threat and dislocation, human beings feel compelled to 'do something’, usually with or for others, to alleviate their anxiety, fears and sense of powerlessness. The editor and authors demonstrate how the imaginative processes at the heart of ritualmaking contribute to self- and group regulation by healing and mitigating the negative impact of trauma on individuals, collective groups, and even global systems.  

The authors are a group of remarkable scholars, researchers and practitioners who represent a diverse range of disciplines and subfields, including archaeology, Chinese studies, digital culture, ecological science, philosophy, psychology, psychotherapy, the politics of memory and the preservation of cultural heritage in wartime, ritual anthropology, social research, physics, research on traumatic stress, and peace studies. Students and researchers across the social and behavioural sciences will find this volume useful.

• healing trauma
• ritualising in armed conflict
• polyvagal theory
• ancient coping practices
• art and ritual
• Chinese Warring States period
• trauma and medical interventions
• memorialisation
• Memory Box project
• healing of addictions
• ritual as adaptive mechanism
• ritual in disasters
• ritualistic responses to extremism

• Geneva, Switzerland

  Jeltje Gordon-Lennox

Jeltje Gordon-Lennox is a psychotherapist, author and independent researcher in the fields of psychotraumatology and emerging secular ritual. She has edited Emerging Ritual in Secular Societies. A Transdisciplinary Conversation (2017), the first book of its kind to discuss the importance of secular rituals for cultural and personal growth. She has written five practical guides for crafting non-religious ritual: Three guides in English published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London, UK and two guides in French published by Labor et Fides, Geneva, Switzerland. She writes on psychotrauma and emerging ritual in both languages for publication in art expositions, catalogues and theological journals.