ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author delineates the difference between the conflicts of parents who were victims of a historic trauma and their offspring who have been burdened by the trauma of their parents. She considers this to be an important distinction which is not always sufficiently maintained in the psychoanalytic literature. The mere expression of the process of “transmission of trauma” suggests to the author that a historic event can be deposited in or passed on to future generations like a bank account or a bad debt: the language used for this identification draws excessively on the traumatic events, rather than on its being the resolution of a conflict in that the identification defensively diminishes the difference between generations. The author illustrates her attempt to equate her trauma with theirs in order to defend against having to experience the actual traumatic events in her own life.
