ABSTRACT
If the trauma cannot be integrated, the victim becomes distant from reality, and creates a particular intrasubjective psychological space for herself. In order to be able to relate to others, she shares and expands this intrasubjective world. This special intrasubjective psychological space, both traumatized and traumatizing, expanded to the external world, we have termed the transgenerational atmosphere (Bakó and Zana, 2018). In this chapter we discuss in detail the characteristics and functions of the transgenerational atmosphere.
The atmosphere, originally constructed to keep at a distance the psychological impact of the uncontainable trauma, is also, for the generations involved, the milieu in which the trauma is lived out and transmitted, through non-verbal remembering and non-verbal communication. The theoretical framework of the transgenerational atmosphere helps us to better understand the way the trauma is transmitted, how the expanded psychological field creates the possibility for former generations to pass on their traumatic experiences. The last section of the chapter deals with group-level processes, that is, the intersections of transgenerational atmospheres in society.
