ABSTRACT

Trauma concerns violence, intended or not. In our justified, and rightly psychoanalytic, concern to focus on traumatic experience, and most recently on transgenerational transmission (Faimberg 1996; Davoine and Gaudilliere 2004; Salberg 2015), we may miss the violation at its core. Something has ripped through bodies and minds, causing damage that destroys human beings and leaves their ghosts (Loewald 1960) haunting future generations (Harris 2009), down to the seventh generation, we have been told. “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth have been set on edge” (Jeremiah 31:29). In less biblical and more clinical intensity, Sue Grand (Grand 2000, 2010) shows us how violence lives on, like a malignancy. Attachment fills the psychic holes children meet in their traumatized parents with terrors, unspeakable nightmares and daymares, impossible longings, disorientation. Memories of violence, more or less conscious in the parents and grandparents, become endless confusion for their children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren. As many remind us, we psychoanalysts must return to Sandor Ferenczi who first understood how violence turned into confusion and shame in the first generation. He explained how the child, identifying with the perpetrator(s), takes on the perpetrator’s point of view on herself, in a complex confusion of tongues, contextualized by radical abandonment. Ferenczi’s healing project attempted to find the wounded child in his adult patients, and to name the violence. Likewise, today’s psychoanalysis, including this book, has begun to name violence: the slavery system and its long inheritance; genocides; colonialism, child abuse and neglect, multiple forms of gender and sexual domination. Whether collective or personal or both, we want to know how this violence goes on and on, why it persists in ourselves-as familial memory, as “whiteness,”

even as obliviousness to our devastating climate emergency (Orange 2016a). We want to know how and why this violence continues decade after decade, and what to do about it. From the four chapters in this section, overlapping the collective, the clinical, and the personal, approaching these questions by diverse paths, many approaches-not to say answers-emerge. Evie Rappoport tells us the story of one who inherits genocide herself meeting another massacre in Cambodia. Eyal Rozmarin uses his childhood reading of War and Peace to contextualize his readings of twentieth-century thinkers on remembering violence. Sandra Silverman relates a clinical narrative of mental violence, where gender and sexuality express the confusion of tongues. David Goodman shows in his own life how religious beliefs intended to be comforting can mask forms of violence. Each of these has its own integrity, and its own rich relation to the transgenerational transmission theme of this book. Over and over, however, the word and sense of deception surfaces. “Everyone will agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.” So begins Emmanuel Levinas (Levinas 1969, p. 21), an author important to both Rozmarin and Goodman, as he begins his Totality and Infinity with a meditation on the ways that “winning” war suspends morality, totalizing all and everything. Duped, deceived, we have also been traumatized, entrapped by the violence that haunts us through the generations. As Rappoport reminds us, dictators like Pol Pot or Hitler deceive vast populations into suspending their ordinary moral sensibilities, and committing genocides, borne by the children and grandchildren of victims (Hoffman 2004) and perpetrators (Frie 2016) both. They resemble enormous versions of cults (Shaw 2014) as headed by malignant narcissists, deceiving their adherents into encouraging every kind of otherwise unimaginable violence to those they deem different and thus unacceptable to the regime. All of us, perhaps, become “duped by morality” into forgetting the possibility of such inordinate violence. Remembering, truly remembering, Rappoport implies, the other’s traumatic destruction provides a renewed encounter with one’s own. Rozmarin, relating both family and intellectual history, tells more of the ways that our best efforts at memory deceive us. We carry traces, both personal and historical. To his photographer friend, he looks like a Rabbi. To this reader, he sounds like an intellectual with deep emotional

roots in Europe (including European Russia), and in Israel. Haunted, he cannot stop thinking about the moment when his grandmother realized that everyone was dead. Traces of the past and traces of the infinite. Memory deceives us, and brings us back, forcing us to question everything we ever thought. We are the suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head in a bad mood, Kafka tells him. Benjamin and Bloch offer him an angel of history and a spirit of utopia, but both already haunted, as if by the imminent “next catastrophe.” Ultimately he turns to Levinas, “the tallest tree,” not for comfort, but an attitude toward insoluble problems after what Derrida called “the worst,” the ultra-violent deception. Escape from violence requires, it seems, also to Rozmarin, a radical turn to the Other. In a gripping clinical narrative, Silverman shows us how deception traumatizes when a haunted mind takes over, through invasive violence (Williams 2010), the mind and body of a child. Unable to be at home in the body of a girl, or in the thought of transitioning to a male body, this patient struggles not only with gender trauma (Saketopoulou 2014), but with claiming her own life, from her mother and from her analyst. Her mother, more a possessive lover than the indispensable holding environment or primordial density (Loewald 1960, 2000), from which a child could differentiate, inhabits this young patient to the point that she/he cannot find a mind of one’s own, let alone a body. More differentiated, but attached to mentalization theories and reluctant to encourage the patient to go her own way toward becoming overtly male, the analyst witnesses a courageous struggle, while engaging in her own. This story engages urgent clinical questions about how our patients teach us. Only through a yielding of her own theories and presuppositions in a gradual surrender (Ghent 1990) to the Other, can the analyst stand by her patient escaping from the violence of gender. Finally, Goodman returns us to Ferenczi and confusion of tongues, the great traumatic deception. My young neighbors in New York’s Upper West Side used to ask me, “Are you a Chanukah or a Christmas?” In later life I am lucky to feel myself, not so traumatically, to be both and neither. Born into confusion between his parents’ Jewish heritage and life with their embrace of evangelical Christianity, he too was both, but this deceptive situation, as he tells us, imploded dramatically and traumatically in his life. When “religious” people blamed him, at age 16, for his mother’s death from cancer, and his father abandoned him to fend for himself, he

was left, like Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, with a profound disillusionment that he calls an “attachment disorder with truth.” Turning away from all the totalizing systems that had let him down and destroyed him, struggling through years of study and searching, he turned from searching for truth toward what Plato called “the Good beyond Being.” In the work of Levinas, he found in the demand to respond to the face of the Other and to care for the suffering, the path he needed. Profound and destructive shame often accompanies, as if built in to, deceptive traumatic violence. Duped by the leader, ideology, parent, creed, the consciously or unconsciously deceptive partner, one feels so humiliated to have believed and needed to believe. The victim now carries, often suicidally, shame that should belong to the perpetrators, a shame that impedes, or at least complicates, needed remembering and mourning. Primo Levi, Paul Celan, and Jean Améry are case examples (Orange 2016b). Beyond deception and shame, each of these authors engages the question of how the haunting past can be usefully remembered. All agree that monuments, even if they are called memorials, do little or nothing beyond assuaging guilt in perpetrators. They place the crime out there, as if finished now by its public acknowledgement-a further deception, creating more trauma for those affected. By contrast these authors write of totems, memorials, and memorializing. Rappoport describes a glass tower filled with actual human skulls from the killing fields of Cambodia. She calls it a totem, creating an embodied kinship bond linking the lost generation to the collectivity of living human beings. Such remembering helps us to witness, to remember, to affirm our bonds with all human beings. Rozmarin writes of responsibility as creative memorial, quoting Levinas: “The presence of persons who, for once, do not fade away into words, get lost in technical questions, freeze up into institutions and structures” (Levinas 1999, p. 87). Silverman shows us how the dead monument to the mother’s colonial takeover of her child becomes a living memorial, affirming what is still possible. Goodman transforms the dead cognition embodied in monuments to the dead, in dogmas, creeds, and systems into knowing as invitation, as demand, as responsibility to the other. As do our other authors, he makes his life a memorial that cries out never again, thus placing a spoke in the wheel (Bonhoeffer et al. 1970, p. 221) of the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Perhaps we could say that true memorials are turned toward the Other.