ABSTRACT
This book has had a rich gestational history. Several years ago, Salberg and Grand met to discuss mutual interests in political/social violence, the trans-generational transmission of trauma and the themes of attachment that have been focal to contemporary psychoanalysis. This inspired us to organize a conference at NYU, entitled The Wounds of History: Repair and Resilience in the Trans-generational Transmission of Trauma. Blessed with a wonderful committee,1 we brainstormed about how to address diverse Big Histories, their intra-psychic, inter-subjective and social legacies. Our particular emphasis was on repairing wounds and arresting painful repetitions, in both intimate and social registers. This mission awakened us to something that has been missing from the trans-generational literature: the transmission of strength, resourcefulness and resilience, that operates in tandem with the transmission of wounds. We wanted to attend to the dual edge of history’s legacy: the ways it can take shape in an ethos of care, as well as in varieties of (self/ other) destruction. This thrust us, of course, into the mysteries of the human condition: why do some of us metabolize trauma with concern for the other, while we also persist in the repetition of our own wounds. We have found no answers. However, what we did find is a common thread running through all of the trans-generational literature to date: that is, the disintegrative effects of trauma on attachment bonding. In this book, we highlight this theme, theorize it and make it explicit; but we also highlight the miracle of enduring attachment that is often threaded through encounters with trauma. In this book, we do not split, or bifurcate, these attachment motifs – but find them to be interpenetrating. Nonetheless, we think that they offer commentary on the vicissitudes of concern, resilience and repetitive destruction, which are the legacy of historical trauma. Gathering together as a committee, we
believed that a conference on these issues would speak to many clinicians, academics and activists. The study of trans-generational transmission of trauma began with a look at Holocaust trauma. Rich work in this field continues (Gerson, 2009; Grand, 2009; Grand & Salberg, 2015; Guralnik, 2014; Richman, 2006, 2014). It has been in the past 20 years that scholarship on witnessing, testimony and trans-generational transmission have extended beyond the Holocaust, to other political and social traumas and genocides. Thus, we have work by Apprey (2003), Gump (2010) and Leary (1997) on the legacy of African-American slavery in subsequent generations; Davoine and Gaudillière (2004) linked the inchoate memory of WWII with psychosis in subsequent generations; Faimberg’s idea of “telescoping of generations” and Reis’ (2005) efforts to expand analytic conceptions of the patient’s history past consideration of a person’s developmental course to include the shaping force of events in creating culture or the very subjects that experience culture and cultural events. Recently, Grand (2015b) has examined the racial legacy of Native American “vanishing” in the United States, and linked this to African-American slavery. Vaughans (2015) has written about the long-term effects of slavery naming it as a “cultural introject” affecting the lives of blacks and whites today. Grand (2000) has also examined the legacy of the Armenian genocide, as well as the trans-generational transmission of genocide through the perpetration of sexual abuse on succeeding generations. While Salberg (2015) has written how the attachment relationship is the mode of trans-generational transmissions and carries the presence and absence of parental dysregulation resulting from traumatic experiences. Nonetheless, to date, the literature is largely missing an explicit look at the strengths transmitted to subsequent generations, and the enduring capacities for love, bonding, devotion and activism that we often find in succeeding generations. To transmute violent repetitions into repair, these capacities need to be illuminated. Thus, in inviting our authors to contribute to this volume, we asked them to address several themes: a diversity of Big Histories; the repetition of both resilience and wounds; the repair of these wounds; and the complexity of attachment in the aftermath of trauma. Ultimately, the authors in this volume share a common goal. We want to expand the social/ethical turn in psychoanalysis (Goodman, 2012; Layton & Goodman, 2014; Layton, Hollander & Gutwill, 2006), and facilitate the I-Thou capacity that is nascent in all of us.
