ABSTRACT
When I was five or six years old, I had a recurring dream, actually more a nightmare. I dreamt that I was with my parents and older sister in what looked like a smoke-filled saloon from a 1950s Hollywood Western. The atmosphere was tense and I was aware of a legend about a witch who had a brown paper bag filled with cancer. If she put it under your chair, you would die. The witch entered the saloon and placed the bag under my chair. I would wake up terrified, paralyzed with fear. I never understood why I kept dreaming this dream. In time it faded. I was fortunate to know my grandparents as an adult. One day, in speaking with my mother’s mother, she told me of a recent nightmare she had had. She said she dreamt it often. She dreamt that she would walk out of the subway in Brooklyn and not know where she was. She would feel terrified in the dream – not just lost, but terrorized by lostness. As she told me this dream, I could sense her real panic, her terror at being alone in the world. I was in my thirties and wanted to reassure my terrified, beloved grandmother; I tried, although I was not sure I could. I did not yet know my grandmother’s trauma – her own mother’s death during childbirth when my grandmother was just four years old – or how to understand its entrance into my childhood and my dreamscape. It was only during a second analysis, one more open to the occurrence of transgenerational transmissions, that I came to know and understand that multiple generations and their trauma histories inhabited my world, my nightmare. It was only then that the witch with death in a paper bag stopped haunting me. How does one explain the occurrence of anxieties, terrors, and nightmares that inhabit the children and grandchildren of trauma survivors (who
have been called the second and third generation) when the content fits the actual experience of the first-person trauma survivor? The process, as discussed in the literature, sounds almost magical: passage from grandparent to parent to child, extruding unconscious toxic contents. It feels mystifying. I propose that the mode of transmission is much more understandable if we utilize the lens of attachment theories and research as a through line to weave together multiple literatures. The intersection that I want to focus on is how a person carries within his or her mind and inscribed on his or her body numerous histories of experiences within the family’s legacy of traumas and losses, along with the family’s culture and external world. How do trauma survivors transmit these unspoken fragments to their children? Given my dream, this question was deeply personal, a psychological imperative for me. However, I came to believe that it was also an imperative for psychoanalysis. The growing literature on transgenerational transmission of trauma has begun to provide a much-needed expansion of the psychoanalytic field. Ogden (2008), in writing about Bion’s ideas on cognition, suggests that one of Bion’s central ideas was that “it requires two minds to think one’s most disturbing thoughts” (p. 20). I would elaborate on this, drawing on Faimberg’s (2005) idea that what occurs is a history of identifications, what she has termed a telescoping of generations, and I would suggest that it may take three generations to contain disturbing feelings and events. This has been a central feature in the concept of the transmission of traumatic experience from the first to the second or third generation: that parents extrude the traumatic contents of their minds into their children. The work on transgenerational transmission of trauma often refers to these unspoken stories, but the mode of transmission has been shadowy and poorly defined. In proposing attachment as the mode of transmission, I hope to integrate theories and thus clarify our own and our patients’ experiences. Understanding the role of attachment and the mutual regulation and/or dissociation of affects within human relationships opens the door to deepening our conception of how transmissions occur implicitly and explicitly. Parents and children form an attachment unit that allows for deep unconscious communication of fear and safety, of anxiety and security, of closeness and distance, love and hatred, and so much more. All of this is often transmitted through the registers of attunement and misattunement and the active processes of self-other regulation of affects.
