ABSTRACT
It is common today to write about intergenerational trauma in terms of phantoms, the past haunting the present. All three chapters in this section show the way in which children contain the unassimilated trauma of their parents, and often their grandparents and beyond. Each chapter includes an evocative case study. In one a daughter is almost sacrificed by her parents as an act of atonement to parents who had sacrificed themselves, or so it seemed to the girl’s father, to save him from the Nazis (Apprey). The second is an account of a Jewish woman who would feel the historical oppression of black women in order to make a connection to her black analyst, so similar and so different from her beloved Russian Jewish grandmother (Grand). In the third the son of a Russian P.O.W. turned German soldier is treated by a therapist who is herself dealing with her aging mother, a Holocaust survivor (Liner). Each paper is theoretical, Apprey’s the most so. But it is the three authors’ case studies, drawn from their own experience, that captivate me, even as I recognize that the goal is always to use practice to stimulate theory, and theory to inform practice. Rather than review the papers, which the reader can read for him or herself, I thought it more useful to think about the ghosts that we inherit from the past in terms of attachment theory. All the papers either argue, or assume with Abraham and Torok (1994), that intergenerational trauma has the characteristics of a phantom. “The phantom is a formulation of the unconscious that has never been conscious-for good reason. It passes-in a way yet to be determinedfrom the parent’s unconscious to the child” (p. 173). The key point is that
the transmission is from one unconscious to another, a process Freud recognized (1914, p. 194) but like Abraham was unsure how to explain. As Torok points out, Freud is not talking about some “mystical phenomena,” but “most likely the beginnings of conscious communication” that never makes it past the unconscious (Abraham and Torok, 1994, p. 179). In other words, the phantom is a formation of the unconscious that is found there not because of the subject’s own repression “but on account of a direct empathy with the unconscious or the rejected psychic matter of a parental object” (p. 181). I have spent a number of years studying Holocaust survivors and their children. Most children seem to agree that they have suffered from an over-involvement in their parents’ suffering at the price of their own development.
