ABSTRACT
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.
