ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the author draws on Jung’s statement describing the collective madness that occurred in Nazi Germany to show how generational issues are enfolded in complexes that function over time and outside a phased developmental view of human behavior. Though related to time, generational processes may be nonstratified, nonlinear, and irrational. Generational processes are carried as psyche structures, not simply as memory traces. Absences, absent-presences, voids, and negative identities can all embody “psychic matter.” They are entities from the third realm or group life as expressed through the cultural unconscious. Positively, this becomes transitional space (Winnicott), and negatively, a dead space as the past closes and dies.