Trans-generational Trauma and the Other

Dialogues across history and difference

Sue Grand, Jill Salberg, Sue Grand, Jill Salberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315466279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Often, our trans-generational legacies are stories of 'us' and 'them' that never reach their terminus. We carry fixed narratives, and the ghosts of our perpetrators and of our victims. We long to be subjects in our own history, but keep reconstituting the Other as an object in their own history. Trans-generational Trauma and the Other argues that healing requires us to engage with the Other who carries a corresponding pre-history. Without this dialogue, alienated ghosts can become persecutory objects, in psyche, politics, and culture.

This volume examines the violent loyalties of the past, the barriers to dialogue with our Other, and complicates the inter-subjectivity of Big History. Identifying our inherited narratives and relinquishing splitting, these authors ask how we can re-cast our Other, and move beyond dysfunctional repetitions - in our individual lives and in society.

Featuring rich clinical material, Trans-generational Trauma and the Other provides an invaluable guide to expanding the application of trans-generational transmission in psychoanalysis.It will appeal to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists and trauma experts.

Part I
When Our Histories Collide

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Introduction

Haunted Dialogues: When Histories Collide

C. Fred Alford

Intergenerational Trauma is Always about Attachment

It is common today to write about intergenerational trauma in terms of phantoms, the past haunting the present. All three chapters in this section show the way in which children contain the unassimilated trauma of their parents, and often their grandparents and beyond. Each chapter includes an evocative case study. In one a daughter is almost sacrificed by her parents as an act of atonement to parents who had sacrificed themselves, or so it seemed to the girl’s father, to save him from the Nazis (Apprey). The second is an account of a Jewish woman who would feel the historical oppression of black women in order to make a connection to her black analyst, so similar and so different from her beloved Russian Jewish grandmother (Grand). In the third the son of a Russian P.O.W. turned German soldier is treated by a therapist who is herself dealing with her aging mother, a Holocaust survivor (Liner).

Each paper is theoretical, Apprey’s the most so. But it is the three authors’ case studies, drawn from their own experience, that captivate me, even as I recognize that the goal is always to use practice to stimulate theory, and theory to inform practice. Rather than review the papers, which the reader can read for him or herself, I thought it more useful to think about the ghosts that we inherit from the past in terms of attachment theory.

All the papers either argue, or assume with Abraham and Torok (1994), that intergenerational trauma has the characteristics of a phantom. “The phantom is a formulation of the unconscious that has never been conscious—for good reason. It passes—in a way yet to be determined—from the parent’s unconscious to the child” (p. 173). The key point is that the transmission is from one unconscious to another, a process Freud recognized (1914, p. 194) but like Abraham was unsure how to explain.

As Torok points out, Freud is not talking about some “mystical phenomena,” but “most likely the beginnings of conscious communication” that never makes it past the unconscious (Abraham and Torok, 1994, p. 179). In other words, the phantom is a formation of the unconscious that is found there not because of the subject’s own repression “but on account of a direct empathy with the unconscious or the rejected psychic matter of a parental object” (p. 181).

I have spent a number of years studying Holocaust survivors and their children. Most children seem to agree that they have suffered from an over-involvement in their parents’ suffering at the price of their own development.

I felt like I was the image of my mother’s mother [who was murdered at Auschwitz]. I asked her today what she [grandmother] was like and I was told that I look like her, that I act like her. I was named after her. And I felt I don’t want any part of this. I felt I don’t even want to talk to my mother. I want me.

(Mason and Fogelman, 1984)

In fact, it’s not so simple. Most want to know more than they are able to bear, and some are able to elaborate their parent(s)’ experience in creative terms, and so make it their own. Consider the artist David Gev.

“I did not witness the most important events of my life,” says artist David Gev. “They happened before I was born, yet their memory persists. How does one take on the memories of another individual, let alone the collective memory of millions?”

Artist David Gev’s work is meant to evoke the European landscape as seen from inside a train car on its way to a concentration camp. Gev did not directly experience this suffering, nor did he himself look out from the trains, or feel the pains of hunger and cold, but still he witnessed these things through pieces of stories told to him by his father. Without knowing all that occurred, he was forced to formulate images in his mind of what his father might have seen.

(Berman, 2013)

As one looks at photographs of glass art by Gev, one is surprised by how pretty the abstract scenes are. If one did not know what they represent, one would be hard pressed to guess that they represent horror.

The general insight suggested by Gev’s experience is that “we survive by forming relationships, and adapting to the minds of others” (Slade, 2013, p. 41). Gev, and second generation survivors like him, seem to have felt forced to imagine the horrors their parents went through in order to reach through a barrier of silence that was also a barrier against human connection, human attachment. Parents can love their children, but if they cannot share themselves with their children, if large portions of their minds are permanently closed to their children, then something will always be missing. It is this search for this missing piece, the lost connection with the mind of the parent, that also forms and frames the mind of the second generation survivor.

Gev seems to have found a particularly creative way of imaging the experiences of his father, melding the bits and pieces of what he was told into beautiful form. The usual cautions about art after Auschwitz (Adorno, 1967, p. 34) do not apply here, as Gev is not memorializing the Holocaust, but coming to terms with his own experience of the Holocaust, via his father.

Children want to know about their parents’ emotional experience during the Holocaust, or other traumatic times. They want to be let in. To be denied this experience is the equivalent of being dropped by the mind of the mother, as D. W. Winnicott put it. This can happen at any age, and with either parent. For holding is not something that begins and ends in infancy and childhood. It continues throughout life, as we try to find a place in which we are secure enough to just be.

John Bowlby conceived of this place in spatial terms. “All of us, from the cradle to the grave, are happiest when life is organized as a series of excursions, long or short, from the secure base provided by our attachment figure” (Bowlby, 1988, p. 69). Winnicott conceived of this space not just in the arms of the mother, but in the mind of the parent and significant other, a mind shared with the child, but allowing the child enough space to be. For Winnicott (1989, p. 145), childhood trauma is a “failure relative to dependence.” Often the child will do anything to restore this dependence, including attempting to share the parent(s)’ trauma, which is experienced as a barrier between them.

Erik Hesse and Mary Main (1999), leading attachment theorists, explain the process slightly differently. During the normal course of child rearing, traumatized parents will reexperience their original trauma, leading to episodes of parental detachment and confusion. This is the case even with good, generally competent, parents. Incapable of understanding the source of the parents’ distress, the child will either blame itself, or be drawn into compulsively trying to comfort the parent. Role reversal, the child comforting the parent, is a common attachment strategy undertaken by children of traumatized or disturbed parents. It is a leading marker of what is called ambivalent attachment, and is considered a response to unpredictably responsive care-giving.

The task of attachment is not just about feeling protected, having a secure base. The task includes being in emotional attunement with one’s caregiver. We neglect the degree to which the child and adolescent needs to know and feel something of the parent(s)’ horror in order to have access to the reality of the parent. Without this access, everything feels phony, unreal, including the child him or herself. If the child is securely attached, he or she can feel something of the parents’ horror. This too is the attunement that supports attachment, preventing the horror from isolating the child from the parent, or encouraging the child to reenact the parents’ horror in order to feel close.

How odd it is for the child to feel abandoned by the parent because the parent won’t share his or her horror. But that seems to be the way it works. In this respect, the phantom that Abraham and Torok write about, an expression of the unconscious that stems from empathy with the unconscious or the rejected portions of the parents’ psyche, arises naturally because the child wants to feel what the parent experienced but cannot know. To feel what the parent feels but does not know is a way to share the mind of the parent, the leading medium of attachment.

The problem of course is when the second generation wants what it cannot tolerate, at least not in unmediated form. The ideal would be if the child could help the parent articulate the phantom through his or her desire to know. It is difficult to identify how often this happens, for therapists seldom see happy children. One imagines that it is relatively rare. But therapy offers a second chance for the child to take what the parent could not tolerate and come to know it in him or herself.

Apprey refers to the ghosts of the pasts as le revenant, that which returns. Revenant is also another word for vampire. The undead yearn for young blood, and one might imagine that the task of the therapist and patient is to bring the darkness of the past into the light so that it can die a natural death through repression. Trouble is, the phantom is also a living link to the parent, and one suspects that the best one can do, and the best one should want to do, is to give substance to the past, so that it can embody the link between the generations.

References

Abraham, Nicolas and Torok, Maria (1994) The Shell and the Kernel, vol. 1. Translated by Nicolas Rand. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Adorno, Theodor (1967) Prisms. Translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Berman, Marisa (2013, Sept. 12) A legacy of survival. Narratively. http://narrative.ly/survivors/a-legacy-of-survival. Accessed April 26, 2015.

Bowlby, John (1988) A Secure Base. New York: Routledge.

Freud, Sigmund (1914) The unconscious. Standard Edition 12: 255–266.

Hesse, Erik and Main, Mary (1999) Second generation effects of unresolved trauma in non-maltreating parents: dissociated, frightened and threatening parental behavior. Psychoanalytic Inquiry 19: 481–540.

Mason, Edward and Fogelman, Eva (1984) Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust [a film]. Waltham, MA: National Center for Jewish Film, Brandeis University.

Slade, Arietta (2013) The place of fear in attachment theory and psychoanalysis: the fifteenth John Bowlby memorial lecture. In Yellin J. and Badouk-Epstein O. (eds.), Terror Within and Without: Attachment and Disintegration, pp. 39–58. London: Karnac Books.

Winnicott, D. W. (1989) The concept of trauma. In Winnicott C., Shepard R., and Davis M. (eds.), Psycho-Analytic Explorations, pp. 130–148. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter 1
Representing, Theorizing and Reconfiguring the Concept of Transgenerational Haunting in Order to Facilitate Healing

Maurice Apprey

Aiz Siem Vartiem Vaid

“Beyond these gates [at Salaspils] the ground is crying.”

Introduction

Psychoanalytic practices are gradually coming to include the analysis of transgenerational transmission of destructive aggression in their theoretical and technical praxes. This chapter starts with ordinary and extraordinary stories of returning to oneself as part of the narrative on transgenerational transmission. With the return to oneself in mind, I will ask: What basic conceptual assumptions could facilitate how we theorize transgenerational transmission? What impediments present themselves when we use existing psychoanalytic theories in inflexible ways as points of entry into psycho-analytic exploration? What may we come to grasp if, for example, we treat some forms of resistance as opportunities rather than opposition to analytic understanding? What, consequently, would constitute analytic readiness to receive the phantoms of transgenerational haunting when they return? These are some of the questions with which we will have to come to grips in order to represent, theorize and reconfigure the idea of transgenerational haunting so that we may facilitate healing. A transgenerational object relations theory could then be proposed at the end.

The Return of the Subject to Oneself; or, Foreshadowing the Concept of the Advenant

This chapter will serve as a bridge in two respects: a bridge between theory and practice; and second, a bridge between African-American and Jewish American experiences. The ethical standpoint subserving this bridge is also two-fold. First, although African-American and Jewish experiences are not interchangeable, they are horizonal; they tell us what heinous things human beings are capable of doing to each other (see Apprey and Stein, 1998). Second, human beings are defined by their capacity to overturn and to reconfigure the received. The theory of technique for upending the transgenerational transmission of destructive aggression in this chapter rests on this ethical position. Before entering into that domain, let us feed our imagination with the following three stories.

I

First, it is 1996, five years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the restoration of independence for Estonia. I am in Estonia as part of an interdisciplinary team of American scholars and diplomats who have come to ease tensions between indigenous Estonians and Estonian Russians after Sovietization. There is a break in peace-making proceedings. I decide to take a taxi to visit Salaspils, a notorious extermination camp in Latvia. In the words of Trudy Ulmann Schloss (1991), Camp Salaspils “was a horrible place from which only very few returned ” (p. 60). I have now arrived by taxi at Camp Salaspils. The taxi driver has his orders from a gatekeeper at the death camp and mass cemetery. He may not drive in. I have to walk all alone into the death camp. Unexpectedly, I am seized with terror. I am immobilized. From where I am standing I can see the “cars” in which hundreds were burned to death. From where I stand, an image of “the door of no return” in Cape Coast Castle comes to me. Cape Coast castle is a slave castle in Ghana, the country of my birth, and from where hundreds of thousands of kidnapped people were bound in chains and ferried in their fetters to the United States. With the condensation of what I am physically seeing and that which I have now conjured up in my head, these words come to mind: “if anything happened to me here, and if I did not return, no one would ever know.” Upon the translation of my terror into a narrative, I wake up from my temporary simulation of death and I am able to walk into the death camp alone. When death leaves its traces none of us can remain unaffected. It was not until I had returned home in a phenomenal and experiential way that I could be free to walk and to walk in. When I returned to my physical home in the United States, I looked up the translation of the words that greet visitors at the gate of the deat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Editors’ Introduction
• Part I When Our Histories Collide
• Part II Political Legacies, Encrypted Hauntings
• Part III Reassembling Narrative and Culture: Bridging Otherness
• Index