ABSTRACT
In many case studies in the literature, the focus is on what occurs in the clinical space with little description of the patient’s outside life that contributes to the therapeutic work. Ettinger (2006) describes the “traumatic thing” being located within her “other’s other.” “Aching” inside of her is this unknown that is awaiting a memory for signification. As she writes, “[s]uch are the traumatic” (p. 166). In this chapter I want to revisit a case I had already written about (Gentile, 2013), in order to add a form of engagement I did not describe in my previous work. This case directly speaks to trans-generational trauma that happened not only within the patients’ family but I feel reproduces trauma transmitted within cultural domains as carried by race, class, and gender. This chapter functions as a part two to that earlier case study. In many ways I have come to feel that this case illustrates one of the common forms of violence against women that is embedded within the white supremest patriarchal culture and that oftentimes get coded as either only racial or gender based violence. I hope to focus on the intersections (Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1991). Freire (1972) claimed transformation only occurs through a deep engagement with the world. I am using this chapter as a special opportunity to complicate a story of transformation that, like all such stories, was kaleidoscopic and included other spaces of engagement, namely community-based activism. This activism took place side by side to the clinical work. While there is no doubt our clinical work enabled my patient, Vasialys, to volunteer and participate in community activism, the activism fed back into the clinical work, deepening our engagement. This chapter reviews the case, focusing more on the trans-generational enactments of violence and the role of activism in disrupting these repetitions. Vasialys, a young Puerto Rican-American college student, grew up witnessing her father’s frequent physical and verbal abuse of her mother.
The clinical work with her stood out to me because whenever I saw her it seemed as if there were two parallel sessions occurring: one verbal that had the affectless rhythm of a drone, and a physical session. The physical session involved her sitting on the couch completely still, intensely staring at me with huge eyes, while I felt evacuated of all energy. I was not just listless but almost paralyzed with hopelessness. It was too much work to pick up my hand to gesticulate when I could manage to utter a word and I felt a weight on my chest and lap that made breathing a chore. To better understand this clinical experience I reviewed psychoanalytic theories of witnessing and trauma. As I observed (Gentile, 2013), much of the literature on witnessing has evolved from certain examples of trans-generational trauma that did not exactly fit with Vasialys’ particular history. First of all, much psychoanalytic thinking about transgenerational trauma comes from the Holocaust primarily, and secondarily from other forms of mass genocide. This means the identified originary trauma is understood to be discrete in time and space, for instance, the Holocaust and other genocides have temporal beginnings and endings, although many identified beginnings can be gradual and the “endings” may be more equivalent to transitions. U.S. slavery transitioned into different forms of institutionalized genocide such as Jim Crow laws, rampant lynching, and now the prison industrial complex and criminal justice system (Alexander, 2010). Additionally some might understand the impact of the Holocaust also having roots in histories of displacement and religious-based violence. In contrast to this model of genocidal violence, the cases of trans-generational trauma I see most often have less discrete, more diffuse temporal boundaries. They involve generations of domestic violence, sexual violence, and profound child neglect. These forms of violence, in my cases violence against women, reproduce misogynous values that are so endemic and central to our culture that we may not even consider their transmissions a manifestation of transgenerational trauma. Indeed in a search of PEP and Psychinfo databases there were only a handful of articles that described sexual violence through the lens of trans-generational trauma. And certainly because violence against women is so endemic and enduring within most cultures it can be hard to consider it akin to or a form of genocidal violence. I am just making a point here, not necessarily saying violence against women is a form of genocide. Obviously it is complex as women do not constitute a universal or unitary racial or ethnic group. However the practices
