Editors’ Introduction

In psychoanalysis there is an evolving canon on the trans-generational transmission of trauma.1 In focusing on the psychic shadows of Big History, this canon has largely emphasized the haunting of our patient’s psyche, the privacy of familial revelations, and the privacy of dyadic, clinical repair. The trans-generational turn has been inspired by our increasing attention to massive trauma, to the way massive trauma can shape the familial unconscious. This familial unconscious is shaped through stories and relational patterning, by both resiliency and wounds (Salberg & Grand, 2017). With this new look, the ghosts of our forebears have entered the analytic situation, producing a much-needed expansion in our vision of the human family. To heal human suffering, we often need to reclaim our elders, as well as the roots and branches of our family tree. Who were they? What political/cultural epoch were they living in? What was their position in that epoch? What cataclysms marked them? As the transgenerational turn takes hold in mainstream psychoanalysis, such inquiries have entered our clinical focus. Big History receives another layer of witnessing and recognition in this clinical process, as implicit knowing moves towards articulation. But, with the exception of work by Grand (2013), and Salberg and Grand (2017), this lens focuses on repairing the individualized wounds left by Big History. We have not yet imagined this lens as a method for repairing the effects of history on itself. In this book, we want to imagine an intimate address to history itself. In our discipline, there have been recurrent splits between applied and clinical psychoanalysis. In the trans-generational turn, applied and clinical psychoanalysis finally begin to interpenetrate. Then, too, we are newly awakened to ethics and social justice and we have begun to incorporate these into clinical practice (Grand, 2000, 2010, 2014; Layton, 2009,

2015; Orange, 2016). To have an ethos of concern: we have begun to link this capacity to ‘mental health.’ We see empathic capacity as a necessary part of healthful functioning and the engagement with others as an outgrowth of this developed capacity. And so, as we parse the patient’s genealogy of trauma, we are beginning to rewrite the psychoanalytic family. In this rewriting, the psychoanalytic family can become the more fully developed human family. However, too often this trans-generational genealogy of trauma is still being mapped onto pre-Oedipal dyads and Oedipal triads. In our view, this mapping is a retreat from radical change in psychoanalysis. In this retreat, the psychoanalytic family remains mommy, daddy, baby,2 and psychoanalytic theory remains intact, unaltered at its core. Not cracked open by genealogies of trauma, or by the violence of collective wounds. In this hesitation, we sustain the individualized insularity that has separated applied and clinical psychoanalysis. Certainly, in the transgenerational literature, analytic process moves individualized wounds towards reflective narrative. Psychic wounds are characterized as dissociated ‘chronicles’ (see Meares, 1998) about our pre-history. Healing is linked to a subjective narration of that inheritance (albeit mutually constructed), in the context of empathic witnessing. But, with rare exception (Frie, 2011; Grand, 2000; Guralnik, 2014) where is our Other in this healing trajectory? Is it really possible to create a liberating narrative of our history, while we retain a fixed, alienated chronicle of our Other? In our view, the alienated, objectified Other will always correspond to some persecutory object inside of us, even if our efforts at splitting and projection are sanctioned by normative culture. Splitting and projection are never stable arrangements; they devolve into some form of destruction. Psychoanalytic work with trans-generational trauma certainly speaks to the internalized, alienated Other of our pre-history. But this turn has not yet spoken to another dimension of (personal and collective) healing: conversing with the alienated Other who is actually outside of us. As a social ‘addendum’ to traditional psychoanalytic models, transgenerational inquiry allows us to heal some patients, and some parts of our patients. But until psychoanalysis incorporates an address to the Other into the core of our theory and process, we believe that destruction will repeat, somewhere in the system. Most of us have an alienated Other, and most of us live in a world of alienated Others. The world is too much with us. Our family trees and their ghosts; our collectivities and

our ethical position within our own epoch: now, all of this has pushed past our gates. Psychoanalysis has always been concerned with social justice and cultural critique (see Altman, 1995; Aron & Starr, 2012; Hollander, 2010, etc.). It has always been permeated with both moralism and ethics. These themes have been potentiated, and illuminated, by the trans-generational turn. As editors, we sense a paradigm shift in psychoanalysis; this allows us to ask new questions. Can the psychoanalytic family expand into a wider I-We-Thou that is, and is not, a nuclear family? And if we expand into the wider I-We-Thou, what happens to the alienated Other of our own pre-histories? How do I speak to you: the ‘enemy’ descendent of my own ancestral persecution? How do we converse across dread, difference, and hatred? Can we recognize ourselves as their persecutory Other? What of our own shame and guilt? How and where do we locate our ethical responsibility? How do we share that responsibility, and make reparation? Is it possible to sustain our own historical subjectivity while knowing our Other as a historical subject? Can we enter into these haunted dialogues, and then, can we free ourselves from these repetitions? As editors we are joining with other analysts who are considering these questions. Many of us are drawing on the work of Buber and Levinas – Jewish ethicists and philosophers who wrote after World War I and II. Centuries of Judeo-Christian ethical teachings were profoundly affected by the geo-political events of twentieth century Europe. As editors, we, ourselves, are inspired by these Jewish traditions, even as we hope to engage diverse religious/cultural/ethical traditions that can help us all speak to our Other. In this book, our tradition begins to meet some of these other worlds, and in the spirit of our mission, we would hope that this conversation keeps opening up within psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, Buber and Levinas are the lodestars of the ethical/social/historical turn in our discipline. Buber (1958, 1960), despite having broken with traditional Jewish religious life, drew upon both Jewish ethics and Hasidic ideals when writing his major philosophical thesis I and Thou (first written in 1923, translated into English in 1925). He was writing post WWI and during the upheavals in Europe and the revolutions in Russia. Big History demanded that questions be raised about the relevance of religious ideas, given man’s inhumanity to man. In a parallel crisis, Levinas turned to the tradition of Talmud study, after the cataclysm

of WWII and the Holocaust. He endeavored to imbue philosophy with the moral ethics he discovered it lacked, a vacuum he believed contributed to human capacity for destructiveness. His works, starting with Totality and Infinity (1969), paralleled Buber’s ideas of I and Thou but Levinas expanded his work to be an ethics of the other. Levinas’ work demands of us to be less God oriented and more responsible towards another, believing that holiness is in the face of the other. As Goodman and Layton (2014) and Orange (2011, 2016) note, our turn towards ethics is embedded in historical-political analysis, it draws on Buber’s I-Thou and Levinas’ construct of the Other (Goodman, 2012; Orange, 2010).3 Furthermore, this social-ethical turn recognizes what Grand (2013) calls the ‘collectivized self,’ a notion previously excluded from clinical theory. As these trends interpenetrate, we can now query our long tendency, in psychoanalysis, to conflate moralism and ethics, so that we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Once we were taught not to impose our morality on our patients, and then, we discovered that normative morality was still permeating our theory and practice. As we disentangle oppressive social edicts from the ethics of Buber and Levinas (Orange, 2011) we have gradually claimed the implicit ethical position that has always existed in psychoanalysis: a search for the I-Thou capacity. As we make this ethical position explicit, we radically alter the trans-generational perspective. We can recognize that we all live within haunted dialogues, we recreate and disrupt those dialogues. In the process, we hope to heal ourselves. And we can hope to heal history itself. The authors in this book are trying, and failing, and still trying to have these conversations. As psychoanalysts, we sense that we cannot avoid the alienated Other of our pre-history. And we cannot avoid being the alienated Other in someone else’s pre-history. As Layton notes (2015), we have multiple identity markers. Most of us hold multiple positions within multiple histories. For too many of us, there is a persecutory ghost that shape-shifts through the generations. As that ghost moves through time, it often moves between the imaginary and the real. In this volume, psychoanalysts try to cross the barrier to the Other, they query inherited narratives, discover the complicated inter-subjective truths of Big History, relinquish splitting, and try to rewrite the alienated loyalties of the past. They also consider the impediments to these trans-generational conversations; the nature of our resistance; the failure and collapse of that

conversation. Throughout these chapters, the reader will find recurrent themes. What happens when life introduces us to the characters of our historic imagination? What happens when the Other does not conform to our imaginary Other? What happens to our wounds when our Other tries to discover us? Within our psyches, our lives, and in our global politics, we discover that we are fighting, or fleeing, our ancestors’ war, as we carry out our trans-generational errands (Apprey, 1996, 2003). And many of us are still fighting over, or fleeing from, our ancestors’ culpability for that war. For our authors, haunted dialogues address personal healing, but they also reckon with history itself – with the hope of forestalling the next war. In the Jewish mystical tradition, God, before creating the world, needed to undergo a process known as tzimtzum, literally of contraction. God understood that for there to be room for a world, God would have to make room, contract God’s being. In discussing this creative moment, Linzer (2016) writes, ‘Ironically, though, if the creating is to build a space for the other, then such an act of personal expression must also be an act of personal contraction.’ One does not need to believe in a divine being to understand the profound implications of this idea; that living a humane life involves an ethical responsibility to others. As in the creation myth/allegory, we will need to contract ourselves and our own needs creating and allowing space for an-others subjective world. This is our ethical goal, that in creating space for the wounds, histories, traumas, and triumphs of the other we will have created a better psychoanalysis and facilitated a more resilient world.