ABSTRACT
In psychoanalysis, people arrived at the awakening: the wounds of others must be investigated to make meaning of their own. This chapter layers with the terrors of generations past; the terrors are layered onto succeeding generations. As the locus of unspoken dread, these borrowed wounds become their invisible master. Un-mourned, they can occupy their individual, and communal, unconscious. In this occupation, new forms of destructiveness can gestate. If traumatic experience has not been held by conscious, empathic communion, it can seize us in a renewal of violence. The persecuted can re-create the 'malignant dissociative contagion' from which they once suffered as victims. It is perhaps too simplistic, but author tempts to say: here people have the history of violence. This history makes its appearance in our consulting rooms, and on the global stage. Trauma speaks to the ghosts of violence, and she speaks for the ghosts of human integrity.
