Avery Gordon looked at a photograph taken at an early meeting of pioneer psychoanalysts. She noticed that someone was absent – a young woman who had been Jung’s lover and then a patient of Freud’s. Sabina Spielrein was listed as being at the gathering, yet she was missing from the official portrait. Why was this so, Gordon wondered. Her book Ghostly Matters investigates the missing Sabina and other ‘hauntings’.

Gordon  sees the recognition – the noticing – of ghosts as a profoundly political matter :

I used the term haunting to describe those singular and yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what‟s been in your blind field comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in linear time, alters the way we normally separate and sequence the past, the present and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. As I understand it, the ghost is not the invisible or the unknown or the constitutively unknowable, in the Derridean sense. To my mind, the whole essence, if you can use that word, of a ghost is that it has a real presence and demands its due, demands your attention. Haunting and the appearance of specters or ghosts is one way, I tried to suggest, we‟re notified that what‟s been suppressed or concealed is very much alive and present, messing or interfering precisely with those always incomplete forms of containment and repression ceaselessly directed towards us. 

Gordon’s concern is with the ghosts of trauma, exploitation and genocide and how they haunt everyday life, events, conversations. She sees the noticing of these ghosts as a call to action, not a reason to lament or  memorialise.

Gordon, A (2011) Some notes on haunting and futurity. Borderlands 10(2) p. 4