| Abstract | Abstract The witnessing imagination, a mentality that can be deployed by health care professionals in their efforts to address social traumas, posits a unique role for some creative artists and their works. Creative artwork can assist the professional in preparing the self to enter into the position of a witness to social traumas. Creative artwork can also give the professional remarkable access to the voices and experiences of survivors and witnesses, and may even give shape to new ways of seeing the complex psychological, historical, and cultural processes of recovery from social traumas. Additionally, creative artwork may also provide a means for extending the professionals' witness through collaborative ventures betweeen creative artists and health care professionals. The author, a psychiatrist who has worked with Bosnian survivors of what we have come to call ethnic cleansing, discusses his involvement with creative artwork and how it has shaped his work as a witnessing professional.
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