Book description
A central thesis of this volume is that what human beings cannot
contain of their experience - what has been traumatically overwhelming,
unbearable, unthinkable - falls out of social discourse, but very often
onto and into the next generation, as an affective sensitivity or a
chaotic urgency. What appears to be a person's symptom may turn out to
be a symbol - in the context of this book, a symbol of an unconscious
mission - to repair a parent or avenge a humiliation - assigned by the
preceding generation. These tasks may be more or less idiosyncratic to a
given family, suffering its own personal trauma, or collective in
response to societal trauma. This book attempts to address this heritage
of trauma - the way that the truly traumatic, that which cannot be
contained by one generation, necessarily and largely unconsciously plays
itself out through the next generation - and to do so both from clinical
and societal perspectives. The book looks first at the legacy of the
Holocaust, the study of which broke ground for the new field of
transmission studies; then the analysis and enactments of trauma in more
ordinary clinical practice; and finally more recent, large-scale
traumatic events within American society. Throughout, the links between
the "little histories" of people and families and the
"big history" of a society are illuminated and taken
seriously.
