ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one aspect of the issue of trauma: its transmission from one generation to the next. V. Volkan's work argues cogently that the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next takes many forms. Silence is a recurrent feature in the transmission of trauma, silence about something both terribly confusing and absolutely urgent. In a sense, the patient played out the transmission of trauma in the transference relationship to her therapist by allowing herself to react to his vacation with the feelings and images of abandonment in her dream. J. Lacan drew attention to a different task for clinical psychoanalysis: pathology reflected a position of objectification, and treatment facilitated a subject's coming into being. The chapter shows that treatment resistance can be considered the response of some patients to treatments that do not take into account the critical issue of subjectivity, that is, of the core meaning-making dimension of human experience.
