ABSTRACT
Clinical work, especially the unconscious material, relational dynamics, and emotional exchanges of an in-depth psychotherapy, offers a privileged window on to the nature, mechanisms, and consequences of the transmission of trauma. Vamik Volkan offers a set of reflections on how psychoanalysis moved toward de-emphasizing the effects of real world events on the developing psyche and the cost of that avoidance to the clinical outcomes and depth of self-knowledge of some patients. Barri Belnap picks up the theme of communication and shows us how parents use rituals and idiosyncratic speech acts to convey their trauma to their children. Virginia Demos joins this theme of loyalty and disaffirmed experience in an extended account of a patient's struggles to get past the abuse of her childhood, itself related to abuse and traumatic loss in her parents' lives.
