healing wounds of fathers

Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2011, 56, 607626

Healing the wounds of our fathers:intergenerational trauma, memory,

symbolization and narrative

Angela Connolly, Rome

Abstract: This paper explores the history of psychoanalytical approaches to intergen-erational trauma, both from the Freudian and from the Jungian schools, and addressesthe need when we speak of intergenerational or transmitted trauma to better define thenature and the different categories of trauma with particular reference to extreme andcumulative traumas such as those experienced by the survivors of the Nazi death campsand the Russian gulags.

Therapy with survivors and with their children requires a particular adaptation ofanalytical technique as what is at stake is not so much the analysis of the here andnow of the transference and countertransference dynamics which indeed can in the earlystages be counterproductive, but the capacity of the analyst to accept the reality of thetrauma with all its devastating and mind-shattering emotions without losing the capacityto imagine and to play metaphorically with images, essential if the patient is to be ableto create a space for representation.

Key words: intergenerational trauma, extreme trauma, the failure of representation andthe empty circle, modifications of analytical technique

As the children of survivors are said to dreamthe night-mares of their parents,I inherited nameless fears.

KinderszenenAnne-Marie Levine (1994)

Defining trauma

The concept of trauma, the idea that real events can bring about a breach inthe protective shield of the psyche, disrupting psychic structure and the senseof self, has played a fundamental role in psychoanalytic theory although withconsiderable oscillations in how much trauma was considered to play a rolein psychopathology. Contemporary theory has tended once again to centreattention on the importance of real events, focusing in particular on childhoodtrauma and on issues of faulty attachment and of separation.

0021-8774/2011/5605/607 C 2011, The Society of Analytical PsychologyPublished by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

608 Angela Connolly

Trauma can occur however at any time in our lives and neurophysiologicaland neuropsychological research has done much to illustrate the devastatingeffects it can play for as van der Kolk states, extreme experiences throughoutthe life cycle can have profound effects on memory, affect regulation, biologicalstress modulation and interpersonal relatedness (2000, p. 19).

Increasingly the term trauma has been used in the psychoanalytic literature asa kind of blanket term thus reducing its descriptive usefulness. As Shmuel Gerziwrites, Accumulated knowledge about trauma tends to reduce the descriptionof the phenomenon to its lowest common denominator (2005, p. 1033).

Kijak and Funtowicz argue for the specificity of what they term, the syndromeof the survivor of extreme situations (1982, p. 26), due to the intensity of thetrauma and its distinctive quality which is related to certain specific factors:the traumatic situation is completely unprecedented; the victimizers are fellowhuman beings, justified by law and against whom there is no possibility ofreaction; the physical and psychic sufferings are forever on the borders ofendurance; the victims are constant witnesses of torture and killings; thereis almost complete social isolation; the loss of human rights and property istotal; the extreme situation has no temporal limit.

In the kind of extreme cumulative, collective trauma such as that sufferedby the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and/or by the entirepopulation under the Stalin regime, what is at stake, therefore, is this deliberateintentionality which destroys what Laub and Podell call the primary empathicbond (1995, p. 991) thus creating an abyss between the sufferer and the humancommunity. Primo Levi in the I Sommersi e i Salvati, cites as an example ofthis loss of the tie to the human community, the chilling comment of JeanAmery, another survivor of Auschwitz who later killed himself: whoever hasbeen tortured remains tortured. . . . whoever has undergone torment is no longerat home in the world. . . . the faith in humanity which is already fractured withthe first blow to the face and then demolished by torture, can never be regained(Levi 2003, p. 14).

We find the same kind of despair in the writings of Varlam Shalamov, authorof the Kolyma Tales (1994), the most lucid and evocative account of the livingdeath experienced by the inmates of the Soviet gulags: This unbearable workwill leave us with wounds that cant be healed, and all our late years will leadto lives of physical and psychological pain. And the pain will be endless andassume many different forms (1994, p. 41).

The result of this type of massive, extreme trauma is the creation of arupture at the heart of the psyche such that a void is produced in which anyrepresentation of the experience becomes impossible due to the collapse of theimaginative capacity to visualize atrocity as Laub and Auerhahn put it (1993,p. 288). The terrifying experience of this void is expressed in images, such as theblack hole or the empty circle, a magnetic core of nothingness, that eclipselife and lead to a disorientation that cannot be overcome (Laub & Podell 1995,p. 1002).

natasabrozovicHighlight


Healing the wounds of our fathers 609

When the trauma is massive, prolonged and deliberately inflicted, as Jung putsit, whole tracts of our being can plunge back into unconsciousness and vanishfrom the surface for years and decades (1934, para.286). In such situations, theinitial affective reactions are ones of terror and depersonalization that then giveway to feelings of depression and guilt. Gradually, even these feelings becomedeadened and the dissociation is now so profound that even survival becomesa matter of indifference. In the end the individual is precipitated into a state ofliving death that can be best expressed by the image of the walking dead, theMusulmans, of which Levi writes,

They populate my memory with their faceless presence and if I could enclose all theevil of our times within a single image I would choose this familiar image: an emaciatedman with his head bowed and his shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyesit is impossible to read any trace of thought.

(2003, pp. 16364)

Varlam Shalamov, who spent 17 years in the gulags of the Kolyma (Auschwitzwithout the ovens in the description of the character Kipreev), gives a luciddescription of this loss of feelings in his Kolyma Tales,

Wed all learned meekness and had forgotten how to be surprised. We had no pride,vanity, or ambition, and jealousy and passion seemed as alien to us as Mars, andtrivial in addition. . . .We understood that death was no worse than life and we fearedneither. We were overwhelmed by indifference.

(1994, p. 33)

One of the devastating effects of such trauma is the way in which it impacts notonly the survivors but also the future generations. As Nadezhda Mandelstamwrites in reference to the experience of the Stalin years, Every section of thepopulation has been through the terrible sickness caused by terror, and nonehas so far recovered or become fit again for normal civic life. It is an illnesspassed to the next generation so that the sons pay for the sins of the fathers(1999, p. 300).

The discovery of intergenerational trauma

The Holocaust or Shoah has had a profound and indeed traumatic influence onpsychoanalytic thinking on trauma, manifested in a long period of silence thatlasted almost to the beginning of the eighties. As Jucovy writes:

Denial and repression reigned during this period of silence. Both temporal andemotional distance seemed necessary before survivors were able to deal with theirrepressed memories and before well-trained and experienced therapists were ready todeal with issues that cried out for confrontation and intervention.

(1992, p. 282)

Initially it was as though it was impossible to even think about this kind ofreality for as Des Pres states:



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The concentration camp experience represents an evil so appalling that we too, whenwe turn to face it, suffer psychic unbalance . . .. Some hideous impression of Auschwitzis in every mind, far removed from conscious thought but there . . . and anythingconnected with it, anything that starts it into consciousness, brings with it a horrortoo large and intensely personal to confront safely.

(1976, p. 170)

When the children of survivors of the camps began to grow up it becamegradually apparent that they had a greater tendency to display emotionalproblemswith respect to the general population. According to Jucovy pessimismabout the possibility of confronting and treating intergenerational trauma wasrampant (1992, p. 269) and it was only with the pioneering work of JudithKestenberg and with the findings of a study group set up in 1974 that a picturebegan to emerge of the type of psychological condition characteristic of manyof the second generation and the possibility of treating them analytically wascreated (Kestenberg 1982; Bergman & Jucovy 1982).

Children of survivors show characteristic deficits such as a failure ofmetaphorization with subsequent difficulties in distinguishing between realityand fantasy, and a disturbance of temporality, all of which lead to the typicaldisturbances of memory and of identity.

These initial findings have been confirmed and expanded in subsequentpsychoanalytic publications that show the presence of intergenerational traumanot only in the children of Holocaust survivors but also in the children of thesurvivors of repressive regimes. With the increasing research it has also becomeclear that one of the principle factors in the intergenerational transmissionof trauma is the incapacity on the part of the survivors to remember, tomourn and to symbolize the trauma. As Eizerik writes, in many severelytraumatized individuals, unresolved mourning may lead to a deficit in the abilityto symbolize. These unmetabolized, unsymbolized mental structures are thentransmitted to future generations (2010, pp. 38889).

The reality of intergenerational trauma has also found confirmation in thefindings of the neurosciences such as the research of Yehuda et al. (2000, pp.125259) that showed that the lasting hormonal changes found in Holocaustsurvivors with PTSD have been replicated in a high percentage of adultchildren of these survivors. Such research underlines the devastating effectsof intergenerational trauma on the psychobiological condition of the childrenof survivors and emphasizes the importance of psychoanalytic research in thisfield.

What then of our own Jungian community? Once again we find the sameconspiracy of silence with respect to the Holocaust and intergenerationaltrauma but here, if anything, the silence was more prolonged, and as JoanneWieland-Burston, remarks there are comparatively few publications on thesubject by Jungians (2005, p. 504). She attributes this silence to two factors:our own reaction to the trauma of Jungs ethically deplorable relationship withNazi Germany and with anti-Semitism; and the classical Jungian model of the






psyche that stresses the archetypal and the impersonal rather than the socialand the personal. Of course there has been much work by individual analystsbut somehow the theme of the Holocaust still tends to evoke strong negativeemotions and overall until recently there has been comparatively little publishedin Jungian journals on this topic.

After the collapse of the Iron Curtain, however, when Jungian analystsbegan to work in Russia and in the countries of the ex-Soviet bloc and topublish their analytic experiences, the attitude of our community to collectivetrauma and to intergenerational trauma began to change. Our awareness ofthe reality of trauma and our reflections on how best analysts can treatsurvivors and their children, were further deepened by the presentation of PumlaGobodo-Madikizela at the 2007 Cape Town conference and the many movingtestimonies given in Vilnius in 2009.

In this paper, I would like to focus my attention on intergenerationaltrauma and how we can work in analysis to heal these wounds bequeathedby the fathers. In the words of Eli Wiesel Auschwitz means death . . . . oflanguage . . . and of time (1975, p. 3145) and it is on these two areas thatI propose to concentrate herewith.

Intergenerational trauma and the death of time

The phrase the death of time refers to the discontinuity between past, presentand future that survivors of collective trauma experienced and transmitted totheir children. Kijak and Funtowicz have described the profound dissociationin temporality that occurred in survivors of extreme situations leading tothe simultaneous coexistence of two aspects of the ego: one part of this egocontinues living in the death camp stripped of all its defenses; the other part,adapted to the new reality, behaves . . . as if it were able to love, to hate, tostruggle, to work, making projects or becoming ill (1982, p. 30).

As the Spanish writer Jorge Semprun, a survivor of Buchenwald, writes [it isas if] I never left, in spite of all appearances, and which I would never leave,despite the masquerades and make-believe or life (1997, p. 153).

Equally, we find the same disturbance of temporality in the second generationas the work of Judith Kestenberg has shown. Kestenberg talks of a time tunnel(1982, pp. 83102) and Haydee Faimberg of a telescoping of generations,a tyrannical intrusion of history (1988, p. 99). Often the survivors identifiedchildren born after the Holocaust with the deceased and the children themselvesidentified with the dead. In this way they became a kind of revenant andindeed Perel Wilgowicz speaks of a vampiric identification in which the childof survivors becomes imprisoned in the parents trauma, neither dead nor alive,unborn, in an imageless, timeless condition, condemned to repeat what theythemselves have not experienced (1999, p. 1063).

The same phenomenon was again found in interviews carried out with secondand third generation Jews whose grandparents or parents were inmates of death




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camps. For example, Nadine Fresco, in interviews with eight French Jews bornbetween 1944 and 1948, asked about the effects that the genocide had on theirlives. She talks about the deathly silence of the parents (1984, p. 418) andof the transmitted wounds of memory, linked to the parents silence, whichprofoundly altered the childrens experience of time.

Raffaella De Castro, a philosopher, in Testimonies of the Non-Experienced,collected and analysed the stories of 23 third generation Roman Jews, whoserelatives had been victims of the Fascist persecutions. She speaks of a traumatictopos in the construction of identity, a story that has the power of a myth andthat risks beingmistaken for one, becomingmerely pre-history or post-historyof the mind, passed on from generation to generation and of the need to makesense of these paradoxical and difficult memories of an experience that has notbeen lived but transmitted (2008, pp. 32627).

Thus the death of time creates a dissociation between history and memorywith the result of the creation of a history without memory, history as abstractdead facts, and a memory without history, purely subjective, mythical andtherefore ineffective for the creation of meaningful narratives.

The transmitted memories from which the children of survivors sufferare memories without experience or amalgam-memories (Neri 1982, p.338). The Italian psychoanalyst Claudio Neri suggests that these memoriesof the non-experienced consist initially not of images but of transmittedsensations and emotions and that it is exactly because these memories arenot experienced that they acquire their repetitive, static and coercive character.In their essence they remain unchanging but over time they accumulate aroundthemselves an amalgam of images taken both from personal experience andfrom the stereotyped images of family history or the social group (1982,pp. 33839).

Thus the dissociation between the subjective time ofmemory and the objectivetime of history, profoundly impacts the capacity of survivors and their childrento create meaningful narratives, essential for a sense of identity for, as ColineCovington remarks, Our establishment of identity is based on historicalconstruction (1995, p. 40).

Intergenerational trauma and the death of language

In situations such as the Nazi camps and the Soviet gulags, the extreme physicaldeprivation, the constant threat of extinction and the deliberate process ofdehumanization led inevitably to a world without metaphor to use Herzogsevocative phrase (1982, p. 114). This has profound effects on symbolization aswe know from the work of Lakoff and Johnson that metaphor lies at the heartof our capacity to think imaginatively and to perform dream work (1980/2003,p. 270).

Ilse Grubrich-Simitis in her ground-breaking article From concretism tometaphor (1984) on her work with children of Holocaust survivors, was








one of the first to describe a peculiar characteristic: concretism. In thepsychotic universe of the extermination camps, the occurrence of totallysenseless eventsevents that have no explanation, indeed cannot be explainedfundamentally question the semantic dimension, i.e., a realm central to the ego.It undermines the metaphorical and the non-metaphorical use of speech as wellas the structuring of time in past, present and future (1984, p. 307).

Shalamov describes this loss of language in the following passage where hedescribes his incapacity to write even something as simple as a letter:

The camp had dried up my brain and I could not, I just could not squeeze anotherword from it. I was not up to the job and not because the gap between my will andKolyma was too great, not because my brain was weak and exhausted, but because inthose folds of my brain where ecstatic adjectives were stored, there was nothing buthatred.

(Shalamov 1994, p. 450)

The death of language also profoundly modifies the capacity to create dreammetaphors and to link them together to create narratives. This is a central issue,I think. As Margaret Wilkinson says, dreams may be thought of as extendedsymbolic metaphors . . .which reflect the particular preoccupations of thedreamer and the underlying complexes that drive these preoccupations (2006,p. 51). Indeed recent neurophysiological research confirms the importanceof dreaming for the consolidation of memory and for the metabolization ofemotions and sensations (ibid., p. 47).

The death of language severely affects the capacity to dream. According toThomas Ogden,

not all psychic events occurring in sleep (even those events in visual imagistic form thatwe remember on waking) merit the name dream. Certain phenomena occurring insleep may appear to be dreams but they involve no unconscious psychological work the work of dreaming which results in psychological growth.

(2003, p. 19)

In Antonino Ferros account of dreaming, the ability to dream depends on thecapacity to transform sensory and proto-emotional experience into visualpictograms, through a work of metaphorization as for example when asensation or feeling of rage is transformed into the visual image of a roaringlion. Dreaming also requires however what Ferro terms the narrative capacityof the mind in dreaming, the ability to link together the visual metaphors toform a narrative (2002, p. 605).

Survivors of intense trauma frequently report disturbances of dreamingwhich can take the form of an inability to dream, hallucinations in sleep andnightmares which can be repetitive or not, and we find the same disturbancesin intergenerational trauma. It is as though the children are forced to dream thenightmares of their parents, and indeed there are indications that the less theparents remember, the more these experiences are transmitted to the children in





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forms that are difficult to represent and elaborate. In the words of the Americanpoet Anne-Marie Levine, whose poem I quoted at the beginning of this work:

Nothing was mentioned about the Holocaust either at home or at school . . . . everynight I had terrible nightmares. My parents were dismayed . . . . they wanted to forgetand I kept them from it. I had inherited their unconscious. It was diabolical.

(Levine cited in Laub & Podell 1995, p. 1000)

The nightmares so frequently reported by the children and grandchildren ofsurvivors are thus not so much a reflection of the unconscious of the child,but an attempt to represent and come to terms with the reality of the parentstrauma. AsWilson says, we may be faced with the psychological representationof a rendition of the past upon which the bizarre logic of the nightmare revealsreal events rather than the intrusion of unconscious processes (1985, p. 73).

Analysing the trauma narratives

Much work on the victims of trauma has focused on what Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela refers to as the potentially reparative elements of narrativetestimony (2008, p. 176). Witnessing through narrative requires, however,the capacity to overcome the death of time and language but it is just thesecapacities that have been destroyed.

Creating meaningful narratives about the experience of extreme trauma is adifficult and painful task whether this has been experienced or transmitted.Initially survivors of the camps found themselves trapped between twoopposing force fields: on the one hand, the pressing need to cancel outunbearably painful memories; on the other, the need to keep faith with thedead, to bear witness, as a means of justifying ones own survival whenso many had succumbed. One of the principle problems was the difficultyof finding narrative forms capable of giving an authentic voice to suchexperiences.

Narrative requires the capacity to use metaphor in order to fashion theexperience into a form that will be comprehensible and meaningful to othersbut as Laub and Auerhahn point out, because of the radical break betweentrauma and culture, victims often cannot find categories of thought or wordsfor their experience (1993, p. 287).

Initial narratives tended to take the form of chronicles, detailed, factual,historical accounts but, as Laub and Podell (1995, p. 997) state, such narrativesare able only to convey the surface of the experience, they lose their power toimpact on the present living world. Moreover, the strict adherence to what theIsraeli writer AharonAppelfield, a child survivor of an extermination camp, callscompulsory memory (1994, pp. xi-xiii), memory that according to Laub andPodell, by its nature, precludes the establishment of a dialogical relationshipand hence hinders the reconnecting to others and to oneself in the present(1995, p. 997).



In situations of extreme trauma, as Ann Adelman states, the annihilation ofthe potential other led to an abandonment of hope for the construction andevolution of shared memories through verbal relatedness (1995, p. 363). Thisis shown clearly in accounts of the Shoah such as those of Primo Levi and JeanAmery. In these narratives, where as Laub and Podell state, the artists attemptto depict a trauma exclusively from within the trauma (1995, p. 1001), therisk is that the narrative is told only from the point of view of a victim whois trapped in a past that infiltrates and renders meaningless the present andthe future, exactly because what is missing in such accounts is the idea of another capable of empathizing with the reality of the trauma. Relevant hereis Primo Levis recurrent nightmare in which he dreams that he is relating hisexperiences of Auschwitz to his loved ones and they move away from him,distant and indifferent, leaving him desolate and alone, and the despair thatLevi expressed shortly before he killed himself:

the experience of which we survivors of the Nazi lagers are the bearers is alien to thenew generations in the West and it is becoming ever more alien as the years pass . . . forus talking to young people is becoming more and more difficult

(2003, pp. 16364)

The art of trauma

How then to be able to represent the trauma both as an account that is faithfulto the subjective experience and as a narrative that is meaningful to a thirdperson? As Marcelo Vinar responds,

only the skill of a poet or a patient in transference can go some way to achievingthis by using metaphor as best he can to express the emotional intensity and theincandescence of the experience where words so often fail.

(2005, p. 315)

Any attempt to convey the reality of trauma requires the creation of newaesthetic forms that creatively blend different literary and artistic categoriessuch as the historicized fiction of Shalamov. As Semprun puts it,

I dont want to do a plain eyewitness account. Right from the start I mean to avoid, tospare myself any recital of suffering and horror . . . so I need a narrative I that drawson my experience but goes beyond it, capable of opening the narrative up to fiction, toimagination . . .Fiction that would be as illuminating as the truth to seem convincing.

(1997, p. 165)

Shalamovs Kolyma Tales (1994) represents an example of a successful attemptto open up trauma to the imaginative possibilities of representation through thecreation of a new prose. The ability to remember, elaborate and imaginativelyreflect on the experience of extreme trauma requires a capacity to maintain asense of perspective and detachment from the memory. As Laub and Auerhahnstate, this requires the presence of an I which remembers and relates to the




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experience and an I who is aware of and relates to the act of remembering(1993, p. 296). In his attempts to bridge the gap between historical fact andliterary fiction, Shalamovs dry, unemotional style and his use of disjointed shortstories told from multiple perspectives to create shifting mosaics of memory,each one enclosed within itself and unconnected from the other fragments ofmemory and experience, conveys better than anymore traditional literary form,the fragmentation of identity, the loss of affectivity and above all the innerisolation that life in the Gulags brought about.

Shalamovs tales show a remarkable capacity to depict the reality of traumawithout remaining trapped in the role of victim but what is missing, however,is the belief in the possibility of a dialogue with a receptive other, essential forthe recreation of the empathic bond and for the possibility of escaping from theimprisonment in the past.

Effective trauma narratives require what Laub and Podell (1995, pp. 99198) term the art of trauma, a particular form of artistic representation that iscapable because of its indirect, unaestheticized and dialogic nature of creating,the possibility of witnessing at an internal level through the recreation ofa dialogical space with the other such as we can find in the 2008 animateddocumentary of Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir.

Waltz with Bashir, which is based on the real experiences of the director,opens when Folman encounters an old friend who tells him about a recurrentnightmare. They conclude that this is related to their experiences during theLebanese war of 1982 and Folman realizes that he has no memory whatsoeverof this experience. He asks help from another friend who suggests that hecontact his fellow soldiers to try to reconstruct his memories. The rest of thefilm describes how, through these dialogues, he is able to gradually connect toa series of screen memories, surreal images and flashbacks until the memoryof the traumatic experience, his witnessing of the massacre in the Palestiniancamps of Sabra and Chatila, return in their full horror.

Like Shalamovs tales, Waltz with Bashir, which blends together thedispassionate and objective style of the documentary with the imaginativepower of animated visual images, is capable of conveying the reality of thetraumatic event in a way that no traditional aesthetic form can do. At thesame time, however, the depiction of multiple viewpoints and perspectives thatemerge through the dialogue between Folman and his fellow soldiers opens theway to the possibility of the recreation of the empathic bond essential for theelaboration of trauma. This film, winner of numerous awards, is one of thefinest examples of the consequences of trauma and of the art of trauma, theability to revive the enshrouded past of a trauma through a dialogue in thepresent (Laub & Podell 1995, p. 993).

Healing the wounds in therapy

According to Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, in situations of extreme trauma, the parentsneed to deny their experiences often lead them to react to the childs perception



of their trauma by unconsciously conveying themessage that this perceptionwasmerely a fantasy of the child (1984, pp. 3178). In this way the capacity of thechild to distinguish between fantasy and reality is impaired and the possibilityof imaginatively knowing the parents trauma is foreclosed.

Working with trauma requires modification of analytic technique. ForBohleber, in intergenerational trauma, analysis of the transference and thecountertransference only in the here-and-now of the analytic relationshipwithout any narrative reconstruction of the causative traumatic reality, risksfailing to help the patient to distinguish between phantasy and reality, and inthe worst case, of retraumatizing the patient (2007, p. 343).

For this narrative reconstruction of the traumatic event to take place,however, what is at stake is above all the analysts affective responses.

In most psychoanalytic work the attention of the therapist is essentiallyfocused on the inner world and the analytic facts are interpreted in terms ofthe processes, complexes and dynamics of psychic reality. The use of such anapproach to the therapy of the survivors of extreme trauma or to that of theirchildren is however, as Laub and Auerhahn say,

disastrous with victims who can neither use their trauma defensively nor playfully,and experience such analysis of their reality as a conceptualization of all reality asfantasy and hence, entrapment in the symptomatic level of not knowing.

(1993, pp. 99100)

Working with intergenerational trauma necessitates the recreation of theempathic bond essential for the reconstruction of temporality and of language,but this can only be brought about by the capacity on the part of the therapist,to allow the structure-shattering psychotic universe of the extermination campsto reach himself, as Grubrich-Simitis writes (1984, p. 313). This evokes intenseanxiety and emotional strain in the analyst and requires a conscious effort onhis/her part to overcome the temptation to withhold empathy. In the phaseof analysis that the author refers to as the joint acceptance of the Holocaustreality, it is the analysts capacity to accept this reality, to affirm it throughactual non-metaphorical statements, to be affectively impacted by it withoutlosing his/her capacity for hope and without losing the capacity to distinguishinner and outer reality, past and present that opens the way for the patient toenter so to speak, the world of metaphor (1984, p. 316).

The importance of this willingness on the part of the analyst to allow himselfto be emotionally affectedwithout losing his imaginative capacities is beautifullyillustrated in Colmans description of work with his patient Anna in a recentpaper (2010, pp. 27597).

In analysis, the perception of the reality of the analysts emotional responserestores the empathic bond through the internalization of a dialogue witha witnessing other and thus re-establishes the capacity to use metaphorand narrative. Similarly, it recreates a sense of temporality through theacknowledgement that this thing that I remember and dream about, reallyhappened but it happened in the past and not to me.

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If in creative works it is the capacity to use imaginative and originalmetaphors that facilitate the narration, the acceptance and the working throughof traumatic realities, in analysis this takes place above all through the dreams.A fundamental part of analytic work in trauma needs to be focused on therestoration of the capacity to perform dream work and any eventual progressin this kind of analysis can be traced out through the dreams and the way inwhich they change in the course of the therapy.

In the initial stages of analysis, the confusion between subjectivities andbetween memory and history is reflected in the repetitive, impoverished andnightmarish quality of the dreams. This is evident in one of the dreams collectedby De Castro from third generation Italian Jews. This dream shows clearly theway that the dreamer is caught in a past that does not belong to him; he isunable to distinguish between the objective, past reality of the parents traumaand his own subjective reality:

In the past I had dreams in which there were also Nazi criminals with machine guns,or things like this or directly linked to these things but flashes, images, that is now Ihave fragments at a visual level, dreams of this kind but . . . Ive never had a dream onthis from start to finish. And, but I have this image of Nazi soldiers with machine gunsand helmets in two different contexts. One is in the open, and in a place so foggy,cold and nocturnal, the classical scenes from films with the light of the torches andthe dogs, Alsatians which are barking and frothing at the mouth, things of this kind.Otherwise the classical eruption into the house, where they break down your doorand the house is always more or less linked to my life and sometimes it is my house,they erupt into the sitting room.

(De Castro 2008, p. 291)

The fragmentary and disjointed character of this dream with its amalgam ofpersonal memories, of family stories and of images taken from contemporarycultural stereotypes of the Holocaust, reflects the way in which the memoriesof the non-experienced come to be constructed. Similarly, it demonstrates howthe coercive and repetitive nature of these non-memories blocks the capacity toperform dream work and to transform the images, for here the dream imagesare not metaphoric representations but iconic presentations of the transmittedtrauma.

Working in Russia

As Orlando Figes notes in The Whisperers, in addition to the millions whodied, or were enslaved, there were tens of millions, the relatives of Stalinsvictims, whose lives were damaged in disturbing ways, with profound socialconsequences that are still felt today (2007, p. xxxi). One such devastatingconsequence was the injunction to silence. As one woman whose fatherwas arrested in 1936 remembers, we were brought up to keep our mouthsshut . . .we went through life afraid to talk . . . even today, if I see a policeman,I begin to shake with fear (2007, p. xxxi).


This silence still reigns in Russia as, apart from a brief period during the earlyYeltsin years when the archives of the State were opened, there is an almost totallack of public space for witnessing and for elaboration of the collective traumacaused by the Stalin terror. This places an extreme burden on the individualand makes itself felt in analysis.

Then, too, the breakdown of Soviet society and of the old collective identityrepresented yet another trauma as can be seen by the dramatic increase duringthe 90s in criminal behaviour, in social disorder, in suicides, in alcoholism andin the death rate among men.

I worked in Russia from 1996 to 2001 and when I look back now onthe analyses conducted during this period, the strongest impression revolvesaround just how unaware I was, especially at the beginning, of the profundityof the collective trauma and how much I defended myself against knowingthis reality.

Naturally I knew about the effects of Stalinism and about the Gulagsfrom my reading of the novels of authors such Bulgakov (1968) andSolzhenitsyn (1991), just as I was aware of the intense social instability andthe collapse of collective morality that was present in the Yeltsin period,but I was still incapable of knowing the trauma imaginatively. As Laub andAuerhahn (1993, p. 287) write, we all hover at different distances betweenknowing and not-knowing about trauma, caught between the compulsionto complete the process of knowing and the inability or fear of doingso.

Looking now from a distance of almost 10 years, at the early transferencedreams, described in a paper of 2006, I am struck by how much the difficultiesin distinguishing between reality and fantasy, the intrusion of the past and thealmost complete absence of a psychic space for symbolization, typical of thosewho have lived through intense collective trauma made itself felt in the dreamnarratives and in transference enactments and how little attention I paid tothese realities.

The initial dreams tended to have a nightmarish and fragmentary quality andthey were full of presentations of the effects of traumatic events, transmitted orexperienced, with images of containers blown apart by bombs, of containersthat overflowed or were dangerously unstable, of containers that stifled andconstrained. At the same time, the lack of belief in the possibility of beingable to communicate their experience to an other capable of understandingand knowing the affective reality of their experiences was reflected in dreamswhich represented the analyst as a distant and threatening figure with whomtrust and communication were impossible. At the beginning I failed completelyto recognize how the traumatic images of these dreams represented not so muchthe subjective reality of my analysands but rather the transmitted collectivetrauma, just as I was unable to acknowledge that their experience of theanalyst as a cold and uncanny figure was linked to my refusal to allow thecollective trauma to impact me affectively. This led inevitably to the tendency

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to interpret the dreams only in terms of the here-and-now of the transferenceand countertransference dynamics and indeed as I have written, the result, wasa somewhat obsessive insistence on rules and boundaries and a defensive useof interpretations which were designed more to expel projective identificationsand protect my boundaries, rather than to foster real insight (2006, p. 183). Allthis led to a real risk of re-traumatization and indeed fantasies of abandoningthe analysis occurred frequently.

It was only when I was gradually able to relinquish my own defences andto acknowledge the reality of the trauma both past and present that somethingbegan to change. One important factor in helping me in this passage was thatI was gradually realizing how much I, too, was making use of negation andmanic defences to ward off the reality of the very real threats that we all wereexperiencing: bombs in buses and in apartment blocks; fears for the safety ofmyself and my family linked to my husbands work as a journalist; the pervasivethreat of social collapse and violent disorder or repressive revolution.

The reality of any structure-shattering psychotic universe such as thatof the collective madness of the Stalin years transmits to the children andgrandchildren of the survivors unmetabolized bits of terrifying nothing to useWarren Colmans telling phrase (2010, p. 288).

One of the principle sources of suffering for these individuals is theirincapacity to recognize that this psychotic core of nothingness that threatenstheir very psychic existence does not come from themselves but from pastexternal reality. They feel (and all too often these feelings are accentuated bythe parents silence) that there is something wrong with them and that they needthe analyst to help them understand the real source of this experience.

This point is illustrated by the dream of another patient from a very differentbackground who had a brief analysis with me some time ago:

I am standing in an empty space of bare ground which is surrounded by barbed wirefences and wooden structures like watchtowers but there is no one there. Suddenly Ifeel that there is something there, a kind of malevolent and mindless presence that istrying to take over my mind and destroy my thoughts and my capacity to think, tomake me as mindless as itself. I feel that I can do nothing to resist it and I wake upscreaming.

This man came to me after a long previous analysis that he felt had helped himconsiderably because, despite the fact that the analysis had resolved many ofhis presenting problems, he still continued to suffer occasionally from terrifyingrepetitive nightmares in which he was being buried alive or being chased bypsychotic killers. In the beginning, like the previous therapist I too interpretedthese nightmares in terms of the transference and the personal complexes butsomething about the emotional intensity and the impersonal quality of thisparticular dream struck me; I remembered that the patient had previously toldme that his father had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese for four years butthat this was something that the father never spoke of and indeed discounted


as irrelevant to his present life. When I tentatively suggested to him that itsounded as though the images and the terrifying emotions of the dream mightbe similar to those of the inmates of the Japanese camps and that perhaps thisdream reflected not so much his own personal reality as that of his father, thepatient remained silent for a long period but then said that that would makesense as he had always wondered why his father was so reluctant to speakabout the past. This dream marked a turning point and for the first time he wasable to initiate a dialogue with his father about his experiences and the fatherwas able to tell him how the enforced starvation and the lack of any hope ofsalvation had gradually worn him down to the point that towards the end ofhis internment, he had sunk into a state of complete apathy and indifferenceeven to his own survival. The father was also able to confide that during thepatients infancy he had indeed suffered for a short time from a post-traumaticstress disorder with flashbacks and emotional outbursts. From that point on therepetitive nightmares ceased.

Looking back at this dream I could say that this image of the mindlessand invasive presence is a powerful metaphor both of the empty circle, thatmagnetic core of mindlessness and non-representation, and the destructive pullsuch a representation exerts on the psyche, a constant threat to psychic integrity.Repetitive nightmares, like the chronicles of survivors, are incapable of goingbeyond the real event which can only be endlessly repeated exactly because thedreamer is trapped in a past that is not his own, unable to tell if the terrifyingimages of the dreams are the representation of his or her own inner reality or thepast reality of the parents and it is only when the therapist is capable of recogniz-ing the transmitted nature of such images that something can begin to change.

In the case of my Russian analysands, the working through of my owndefences and my capacity to accept the reality of the trauma, both my ownand theirs, allowed me to begin to empathize with my analysands and tocommunicate something of my own affective experience to them. This graduallybrought about a change in the transference and countertransference dynamicsand the creation of an intersubjective space in which a new experience ofdialogue between our very different subjectivities became possible. The creationof this kind of space for inner dialogue and the recreation of the belief in another capable of knowing and understanding their reality was reflected indreams in which they spoke fluent English or in which I spoke Russian.

Through this inner dialogical space it became gradually possible for them torepresent imaginatively and symbolize in their dreams both the reality of thecollective trauma from the past and the insidious, silent yet devastating effectsthe collective denial of this reality continued to exert on their psyches (andmine). This passage is reflected in two dreams of one of my analysands:

Im with my wife in some place near Moscow at a conference and the topic is Stalin,his psychological heritage maybe. We are in a hall and my wife says she has a problemwith the sole of her foot. She shows me and there is a red lump on it. I look closer and

622 Angela Connolly

see its a nose of a face and I see its Stalins face. I see its moving as though its alive.When my wife walks the face disappears inside the foot. I ask if it bothers her and shereplies that she feels it but that its not particularly uncomfortable. We are told thatStalin will say something and I understand he will speak from my wifes foot. I havea feeling of invasion or possession.

A few days later the same analysand dreamt:

I feel something in my shoe and when I look I see theres a nail in the sole of the heel.I take it out and see its so big that it must have been in my foot but I felt nothing andIm surprised.

These two dream narratives illustrate how the recreation of an inner dialogicalspace and of the empathic bond with the other opens the way to the possibilityof a narrative and symbolic reconstruction of the historical reality of thetransmitted collective trauma. The image of Stalins face within the sole of thewifes foot, a face that is still alive and capable of speaking is a poignant andpowerful metaphor that communicates how past traumatic experiences, so longas they are unrecognized and unacknowledged, remain as foreign bodies in thepsyche, foreign bodies that are interposed between inner reality (the foot) andouter reality (the ground onwhich wewalk), capable of invading and infiltratingboth and of destroying the link between them. In the same way the image ofthe hole left in the dreamers foot by the nail represents the transformation ofthe empty circle, that terrifying image of the nothingness and meaninglessnesscreated by intense trauma whether experienced or transmitted, a hole thatsucks away both affective vitality and the capacity to think imaginatively andto create meaning. In this way the void left by the death of language and oftime can begin to be transformed. Of course the hole remains but it is nowcircumscribed and thinkable albeit within certain limits, limits posed by theimpossibility of ever fully knowing the reality of intense trauma. As Laubwrites,

in the case of massive psychic trauma, knowledge can be reconstructed onlyto a certain extent and though one senses and feels that one remains cut offfrom certain knowledge, one cannot go beyond these limits . . . the empty circleremains but can no longer wield such acute and inexplicable power over ones lifechoices.

(1998, p. 527)

Conclusion

As Freud so famously said in Analysis terminable and interminable, theanalytical relationship is based on a love of truth; that is on a recognitionof reality (1937, pp. 20953). If this is no easy task in any therapy, it isparticularly difficult in the therapy of the children of the survivors of intensetrauma where the search for the truth implies facing up to the devastating andmind-shattering knowledge of the evil of which ordinary men and women are


capable. Such knowledge inevitably evokes in all of us, a deep and seeminglyinsuperable despair as Grubrich-Simitis writes. In her words, it is the task of theanalytical partners, to wrest out of despair, a confirmation of the truly humandimension, which in the twentieth century, in the most brutal form ever, hasbeen cast in doubt (1984, p. 318).

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Cet article analyse lhistoire des approches psychanalytiques du trauma in-tergenerationnel des points de vue jungien et freudien et evoque la necessite, lorsquilest question de trauma intergenerationnel, de mieux definir la nature et les differentescategories de traumatismes. Une attention particulie`re est portee aux traumatismescumulatifs et extremes tels que ceux que vecurent les survivants des camps de la mortnazis et des goulags russes. La therapie avec les survivants et leurs enfants requiert uneadaptation particulie`re de la technique analytique. Ce qui est en jeu nest pas tant lici etle maintenant de la dynamique transferentielle et contretransferentielle qui, de fait, dansun premier temps peut saverer contreproductive, mais la capacite de lanalyste a` accepterla realite du trauma, avec toutes ses emotions devastatrices et aneantissantes, sans perdresa capacite a` imaginer et a` jouer metaphoriquement avec les images, essentielle pour quele patient puisse creer un espace de representation.

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Annaherungen anintergenerationale Traumata, sowohl von der freudianischen wie von der jungianischenSchule, und spricht die Notwendigkeit an, die gegeben ist, wenn wir von intergen-erationalen oder ubertragenen Traumata sprechen, die Art und die unterschiedlichenKategorien der Traumata besser zu definieren; dies unter besonderer Berucksichtigungextremer und kumulativer Traumata wie sie von Uberlebenden der Nazi Todeslagerund dem russischen GULAG erlitten wurden. Therapie mit Uberlebenden undderen Kindern erfordert eine besondere Adaption der analytischen Technik, dennhier geht es weniger um die Analyse des Hier und Jetzt, von Ubertragungs- undGegenubertragungsdynamiken was in der Tat in den fruhen Stadien der Behandlungkontraproduktiv sein kann, - sondern um die Fahigkeit des Analytikers, die Realitat desTraumas mit all ihren verheerenden und erschutternden Emotionen zu akzeptieren ohnedabei die Fahigkeit zu verlieren, zu imaginieren und metaphorisch mit Bildern zu spielen,was wichtig ist, wenn der Patient fahig wird, einen inneren Raum fur die Reprasentationaufzubauen.

In questo scritto viene esaminata la storia degli approcci al trauma intergenerazionaleda entrambe le scuole sia junghiane che freudiane e indica la necessita` di definire meglio,quando parliamo di trauma intergenerazionale o trasmesso, sia la natura che le differenticategorie di trauma con particolare riguardo ai traumi estremi o cumulativi come quellisubiti dai superstiti dei campi di morte nazisti o dei gulags Russi. La terapia con isopravvissuti e con i loro bambini richiede un particolare adattamento della tecnicaanalitica poiche cio` che e` in gioco qui non e` lanalisi del qui e ora delle dinamichetransferali e controtransferali, ma la capacita` dellanalista di accettare la realta` del trauma

624 Angela Connolly

con tutte le sue emozioni devastanti fino a frammentare le capacita` mentali, senza perderela capacita` di immaginare e di giocare metaforicamente con le immagini, fatto essenzialeperche il paziente diventi capace di creare uno spazio per la rappresentazione.

ta stat issleduet istori psihonalitiqeskih podhodov k mepokolen-qesko travme kak vo Frediscko tak i v ngiansko xkolah, i obrawenak potrebnosti luqxe opredelit prirodu i razliqnye kategorii travmy,vski raz voznikawe, kogda my govorim o mepokolenqesko ili peredan-no travme, i v osobennosti esli my imeem delo s kstremalnymii kumultivnymi travmami, takimi, kak travmy, ispytannye vyivx-imi v nacisckih koncentracionnyh lagerh i v russkom GULAGe. Ter-api s vyivximi i ih detmi trebuet osobo adaptacii analitiqeskotehniki, poskolku zdes na kartu postavlen ne stolko analiz zdes-i-seqas perenosno-kontrperenosno dinamiki, kotory, na samom dele,moet okazats kontrproduktivnym, skolko sposobnost analitika printrealnost travmy so vsemi ee opustoxawimi i rasxatyvawimi psihikumocimi bez utraty sposobnosti k voobraeni i k metaforiqesko igreobrazov, kotora okazyvaec vanexe i osnovno dl vosstanovlenisposobnosti klienta sozdat prostranstvo dl reprezentacii.

Este escrito explora la historia de enfoques psicoanalticos al trauma intergeneracional,desde la perspectiva de ambas escuelas, la freudiana y la Junguiana, y afronta la necesidadde definir major lo que queremos decir cuando hablamos de trauma intergeneracional otransmitidos para definir mejor la naturaleza y las diferentes categoras de trauma conreferencia particular aquello extremos y traumas acumulativos como los experimentadopor los sobrevivientes de los campos de exterminio nazi y los gulags rusos. La terapiacon sobrevivientes y con sus ninos requiere de una adaptacion particular de la tecnicaanaltica, ya que aqu lo que esta en juego no es tanto el analisis del presente de ladinamica de transferencia y la contratransferencia, ella puede verdaderamente, en lasetapas tempranas, ser contraproducente, pero la capacidad del analista para aceptarla realidad del trauma con todo su devastadoras emociones y rupturas del equilibriomental, sin perder la capacidad de imaginar y jugar metaforicamente con las imagenes,elemento esencial si el paciente es capaz de poder crear un espacio para la representacion.

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