ABSTRACT
In 2009 I received a long awaited copy of the secret file the FBI had kept on my father and our family in the 1950s, during the McCarthy era (Federal Bureau of Investigation. File #1134958). Having ordered it as part of my ongoing exploration of the secrets and silence that had so marked my childhood, I read it with increasing excitement and shock. Aided by that file, I began to piece together a story about the silence and unexplored grief which permeated my growing up. I learned that stories I had thought were more paranoia than reality contained much that had been real, that there was reason for the secrets I had had to hold and the paralyzing silence that had been imposed on me, and that the terror so elaborated in my fantasy life had been an actual and constant presence. The fear of speaking can still ambush me. As I begin writing this essay, 50 years after the events I will examine, I have a nightmare in which I reveal deeply felt beliefs to someone who disagrees with them. I wake up in terror. If I express my own ideas I will be thrown out in the cold, alone, unprotected in Siberia, literally and figuratively. Some months after the dream, while delivering an early version of this chapter at a conference, I find myself scanning the audience, looking for undercover FBI agents. An old and familiar paranoia, based, I now know, on real events as well as fantasied elaborations. Half a century has passed, and speaking remains unsafe. How did that era come to weave its way into my more personal history and fantasy life? As I begin to think about this question, I am alive with memory fragments: stories, images, names. Each element feels compelling and bound to powerful emotions, but still, each piece is a shard, a bit of colored glass washed up on a beach. Starting with these shards, as well as dreams and reverie, I have used a wide range of sources to craft a mosaic. Like any complex family history, mine is multi-dimensional,
non-linear. I have attempted to be rigorous and accurate, but in the end it is my narrative, a reconstruction and a re-invention, understood as I look backwards through the lens of the present: Nachträglichkeit, a reconfiguration as well as a “remembrance of things past” (Shakespeare, W. Sonnet XXX). The multilayered understanding offered by psychoanalysis has expanded my remembrance and turned my attention to how state-imposed terror and the demand to keep secrets get inscribed, managed internally, and then transmitted across generations. What is done to us and for us by the state is taken in both directly and in multiple transformations, decoded and interpreted, as well as dissociated and re-enacted by parents and community. The “trans-social” (Puget, 1989), the social background in which we are all embedded, shapes our normative unconscious (Layton, 2004) and becomes an internalized object. This internalized object is elaborated within from our earliest years, kaleidoscopically shaping and shaped both by interpersonal experience and intra-psychic fantasy. In my family, the interweaving of the individual, the state, and the affects linking them offered to each of us multiple roles as doer and done-to (Benjamin, 2012); we each played many parts, in ever-shifting configurations.
