Introduction

In the final book written before her death, Jane Jacobs (2004), a progenitor of modern urban planning and the author of the defining Death and Life of Great American Cities, wrote about a phenomenon of denial and fantasy that occurs in the dark age after civilizations collapse. “Mass amnesia” was the term coined for an intriguing co-occurrence of denial regarding a society’s destruction by self or other, alongside the misplaced fantasy that once the collapse occurs there will be some meaningful remnant of what was that will carry their song through the night. More often, the remaining communities, if they remain, eventually forget what has been lost as well as forget that they have forgotten. Jacobs summarizes the example of Mesopotamia, whose trade and technological ingenuity allowed the region of modern Iraq, Syria, and Kuwait to become a locus of agricultural activity and site of some of our earliest cities. Mesopotamia’s long and frustrating decline was brought by compounding problems of deforestation and accelerated irrigation, leading to the increased salinization of once fertile soil, as well as sieges and the political misestimations of various eras. What may be lost in the copious histories of the fertile crescent is that what remains is a discontinuous lineage, with many linkages retrieved only fantastically through archeological reconstructions and having no thread to the present day. Indeed, uncountable societies have been genuinely lost, and some are recalled after a painful erosion of memory such as occurred in aboriginal societies and empires of the Americas after European-borne disease, displacement, and genocide. The chapters in this collection have in common with Jacobs (2004) the themes of loss and excavation. These chapters speak of the spaces across time and between people, spaces of nothing through which legacies are nonetheless transmitted. Shared with these themes is the ambiv-

alent promise of “crossing the divide” (Gump, 2015). As the reader will see, the touching that may occur across interpersonal and temporal divides can be both a necessary and healing attempt at unison, in some contexts, and, in others, a bruising or even terrorizing collapse of space and re-enacted trauma. Like the archeological past, though, the need to fill gaps in traumatized history may be powerful and even glorious as any renaissance brings light and activity. We may never know what life was like in those early cities, but the parameters of our own urban spaces and lives are certainly defined by them. Likewise, the authors in this collection have detailed excavations precisely to speak to those absolute silences that fill post-traumatic divides and reproduce social and interpersonal dynamics, in order to exorcise and honor, so that movement may finally occur. In “Collectively Creating Conditions for Emergence,” Katie Gentile describes a powerful analysis within which trauma was expressed in the bodies of both analyst and patient throughout their years of work together. Gentile focuses on the intersections of trauma, specifically violence against women that often times is coded and split as either racially based or gendered. Utilizing her own embodied experience within sessions, Gentile finds deep empathic resonance which enabled her to identify and assist in mourning the sexual and gendered violence experienced by her patient, a second generation Puerto Rican-American young woman. Gentile acknowledges the risk of colonization and the need for it to become mutual, representing an opening – multitemporal and consummating multiple identities – such that the patient could orient the other to ideally share experience and dispel a mutual “haunting” of futures lost. Judith Lewis Herman’s “Trauma and Recovery: A Legacy of Political Persecution and Activism Across Three Generations” takes as its beginning the year 1953 and the United States government’s persecutory efforts to end the progressive movements of the early and mid-twentieth century. As with all the chapters in this collection, Lewis does not consider individual narratives alone but enjoins them with a generational constellation. The protagonist in Lewis’ chapter is her mother, the psychologist and analyst Helen Block Lewis, who, in 1953, was being interrogated by the McCarthy committee accused of Communist Party membership. Lewis describes an ideological tension with Helen – a divide of generations – that parallels disconnections in progressive

movements that upheld sexism in obvious contradiction to liberationalist ideals. For Lewis these are not despairing observations, as she speaks of life as opened in political mobilization and contact with others, including the political act of psychoanalysis. In “Shadows of Terror: An Intergenerational Tale of Growing Up in the Old Left,” Lisa S. Lyons considers the influence of state power in her family’s life. Lyons puts forth a clear and sophisticated message that when considering trauma the goal is not always to close space through contact – touching across the divide. Rather, there can be safety in distance from both powerful and close others. Lyons offers an open question regarding the decisions of leftist parents who devote their lives to activism while risking exposure of their children to terrifying potentialities. By the chapter’s conclusion, Lyons takes the reader outside of the family to a case study that details a mutual movement through trauma. In a compelling manner, Lyons shows how the present is informed, even if only vaguely, from the distal immanence of generational transmission. In “To Unchain Haunting Blood Memories,” Kirkland C. Vaughans explicates the massive failure and consequence of banishing slavery to the neglected corridors of American remembrance. This “secret,” terribly concealed since Reconstruction, succeeds in expanding the traumatic sequelae of slavery in African American lives as a denial of memory and obstruction to flourishing in hostile social structures. The memories are denied, not lost. Although slavery may haunt, its artifact is alive and embedded in American institutions and decried by the activists and resisters of subsequent generations. Vaughans locates healing in the psychoanalytic closure of neglected space, allowing voices their truth and speaking of a psychic and political dimensionality that is often felt but unacknowledged. These chapters are meditations on space and its closure in trauma and across generations. Yet this may not be an empty space after all. Instead, lives travel through the radiation of histories, ever exquisite in their non-linearity. The excavations of the past are not irretrievable, only inchoate; an inheritance that fascinates but cannot be revealed outside of its embodied, creative reconstruction. As these authors demonstrate, contact across distance brings ambiguous outcomes. Humans have mass and move heavily through space. We may join or colonize with our reach. The closing of space can be touch and holding

and/or the oppressing impingement of repetition. We cannot help but bring our histories – in their full constellation – into our spaces. Excavation is the work of justice. It takes the courage of authors like these to begin the re-tellings that are necessary to invite us more ethically into our past and our futures.