Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2011, 56, 607–626

Healing the wounds of our fathers:

intergenerational trauma, memory,
symbolization and narrative

Angela Connolly, Rome

Abstract: This paper explores the history of psychoanalytical approaches to intergen-

erational trauma, both from the Freudian and from the Jungian schools, and addresses
the need when we speak of intergenerational or transmitted trauma to better define the
nature and the different categories of trauma with particular reference to extreme and
cumulative traumas such as those experienced by the survivors of the Nazi death camps
and the Russian gulags.
Therapy with survivors and with their children requires a particular adaptation of
analytical technique as what is at stake is not so much the analysis of the here and
now of the transference and countertransference dynamics which indeed can in the early
stages be counterproductive, but the capacity of the analyst to accept the reality of the
trauma with all its devastating and mind-shattering emotions without losing the capacity
to imagine and to play metaphorically with images, essential if the patient is to be able
to create a space for representation.

Key words: intergenerational trauma, extreme trauma, the failure of representation and
the ‘empty circle’, modifications of analytical technique

As the children of survivors are said to dream

the night-mares of their parents,
I inherited nameless fears.
‘Kinderszenen’
Anne-Marie Levine (1994)

Defining trauma
The concept of trauma, the idea that real events can bring about a breach in
the protective shield of the psyche, disrupting psychic structure and the sense
of self, has played a fundamental role in psychoanalytic theory although with
considerable oscillations in how much trauma was considered to play a role
in psychopathology. Contemporary theory has tended once again to centre
attention on the importance of real events, focusing in particular on childhood
trauma and on issues of faulty attachment and of separation.

0021-8774/2011/5605/607 
C 2011, The Society of Analytical Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
608 Angela Connolly

Trauma can occur however at any time in our lives and neurophysiological
and neuropsychological research has done much to illustrate the devastating
effects it can play for as van der Kolk states, ‘extreme experiences throughout
the life cycle can have profound effects on memory, affect regulation, biological
stress modulation and interpersonal relatedness’ (2000, p. 19).
Increasingly the term trauma has been used in the psychoanalytic literature as
a kind of blanket term thus reducing its descriptive usefulness. As Shmuel Gerzi
writes, ‘Accumulated knowledge about trauma tends to reduce the description
of the phenomenon to its lowest common denominator’ (2005, p. 1033).
Kijak and Funtowicz argue for the specificity of what they term, ‘the syndrome
of the survivor of extreme situations’ (1982, p. 26), due to the intensity of the
trauma and its distinctive quality which is related to certain specific factors:
the traumatic situation is completely unprecedented; the victimizers are fellow
human beings, justified by law and against whom there is no possibility of
reaction; the physical and psychic sufferings are forever on the borders of
endurance; the victims are constant witnesses of torture and killings; there
is almost complete social isolation; the loss of human rights and property is
total; the extreme situation has no temporal limit.
In the kind of extreme cumulative, collective trauma such as that suffered
by the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps and/or by the entire
population under the Stalin regime, what is at stake, therefore, is this deliberate
intentionality which destroys what Laub and Podell call ‘the primary empathic
bond’ (1995, p. 991) thus creating an abyss between the sufferer and the human
community. Primo Levi in the ‘I Sommersi e i Salvati’, cites as an example of
this loss of the tie to the human community, the chilling comment of Jean
Amery, another survivor of Auschwitz who later killed himself: ‘whoever has
been tortured remains tortured. . . . whoever has undergone torment is no longer
at home in the world. . . . the faith in humanity which is already fractured with
the first blow to the face and then demolished by torture, can never be regained’
(Levi 2003, p. 14).
We find the same kind of despair in the writings of Varlam Shalamov, author
of the Kolyma Tales (1994), the most lucid and evocative account of the living
death experienced by the inmates of the Soviet gulags: ‘This unbearable work
will leave us with wounds that can’t be healed, and all our late years will lead
to lives of physical and psychological pain. And the pain will be endless and
assume many different forms’ (1994, p. 41).
The result of this type of massive, extreme trauma is the creation of a
rupture at the heart of the psyche such that a void is produced in which any
representation of the experience becomes impossible due to ‘the collapse of the
imaginative capacity to visualize atrocity’ as Laub and Auerhahn put it (1993,
p. 288). The terrifying experience of this void is expressed in images, such as ‘the
black hole’ or the ‘empty circle’, ‘a magnetic core of nothingness’, that eclipse
life and lead to a disorientation that cannot be overcome (Laub & Podell 1995,
p. 1002).
Healing the wounds of our fathers 609

When the trauma is massive, prolonged and deliberately inflicted, as Jung puts
it, ‘whole tracts of our being can plunge back into unconsciousness and vanish
from the surface for years and decades’ (1934, para.286). In such situations, the
initial affective reactions are ones of terror and depersonalization that then give
way to feelings of depression and guilt. Gradually, even these feelings become
deadened and the dissociation is now so profound that even survival becomes
a matter of indifference. In the end the individual is precipitated into a state of
living death that can be best expressed by the image of the walking dead, the
Musulmans, of which Levi writes,

They populate my memory with their faceless presence and if I could enclose all the
evil of our times within a single image I would choose this familiar image: an emaciated
man with his head bowed and his shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes
it is impossible to read any trace of thought.
(2003, pp. 163–64)

Varlam Shalamov, who spent 17 years in the gulags of the Kolyma (‘Auschwitz
without the ovens’ in the description of the character Kipreev), gives a lucid
description of this loss of feelings in his Kolyma Tales,

We’d all learned meekness and had forgotten how to be surprised. We had no pride,
vanity, or ambition, and jealousy and passion seemed as alien to us as Mars, and
trivial in addition. . . . We understood that death was no worse than life and we feared
neither. We were overwhelmed by indifference.
(1994, p. 33)

One of the devastating effects of such trauma is the way in which it impacts not
only the survivors but also the future generations. As Nadezhda Mandelstam
writes in reference to the experience of the Stalin years, ‘Every section of the
population has been through the terrible sickness caused by terror, and none
has so far recovered or become fit again for normal civic life. It is an illness
passed to the next generation so that the sons pay for the sins of the fathers’
(1999, p. 300).

The discovery of intergenerational trauma

The Holocaust or Shoah has had a profound and indeed traumatic influence on
psychoanalytic thinking on trauma, manifested in a long period of silence that
lasted almost to the beginning of the eighties. As Jucovy writes:

Denial and repression reigned during this period of silence. Both temporal and
emotional distance seemed necessary before survivors were able to deal with their
repressed memories and before well-trained and experienced therapists were ready to
deal with issues that cried out for confrontation and intervention.
(1992, p. 282)

Initially it was as though it was impossible to even think about this kind of
reality for as Des Pres states:
610 Angela Connolly

The concentration camp experience represents an evil so appalling that we too, when
we turn to face it, suffer psychic unbalance . . .. Some hideous impression of Auschwitz
is in every mind, far removed from conscious thought but there . . . and anything
connected with it, anything that starts it into consciousness, brings with it a horror
too large and intensely personal to confront safely.
(1976, p. 170)

When the children of survivors of the camps began to grow up it became

gradually apparent that they had a greater tendency to display emotional
problems with respect to the general population. According to Jucovy pessimism
about the possibility of confronting and treating intergenerational trauma was
rampant (1992, p. 269) and it was only with the pioneering work of Judith
Kestenberg and with the findings of a study group set up in 1974 that a picture
began to emerge of the type of psychological condition characteristic of many
of the second generation and the possibility of treating them analytically was
created (Kestenberg 1982; Bergman & Jucovy 1982).
Children of survivors show characteristic deficits such as a failure of
metaphorization with subsequent difficulties in distinguishing between reality
and fantasy, and a disturbance of temporality, all of which lead to the typical
disturbances of memory and of identity.
These initial findings have been confirmed and expanded in subsequent
psychoanalytic publications that show the presence of intergenerational trauma
not only in the children of Holocaust survivors but also in the children of the
survivors of repressive regimes. With the increasing research it has also become
clear that one of the principle factors in the intergenerational transmission
of trauma is the incapacity on the part of the survivors to remember, to
mourn and to symbolize the trauma. As Eizerik writes, ‘in many severely
traumatized individuals, unresolved mourning may lead to a deficit in the ability
to symbolize. These unmetabolized, unsymbolized mental structures are then
transmitted to future generations’ (2010, pp. 388–89).
The reality of intergenerational trauma has also found confirmation in the
findings of the neurosciences such as the research of Yehuda et al. (2000, pp.
1252–59) that showed that ‘the lasting hormonal changes found in Holocaust
survivors with PTSD have been replicated in a high percentage of adult
children of these survivors’. Such research underlines the devastating effects
of intergenerational trauma on the psychobiological condition of the children
of survivors and emphasizes the importance of psychoanalytic research in this
field.
What then of our own Jungian community? Once again we find the same
‘conspiracy of silence’ with respect to the Holocaust and intergenerational
trauma but here, if anything, the silence was more prolonged, and as Joanne
Wieland-Burston, remarks ‘there are comparatively few publications on the
subject by Jungians’ (2005, p. 504). She attributes this silence to two factors:
our own reaction to the trauma of Jung’s ethically deplorable relationship with
Nazi Germany and with anti-Semitism; and the classical Jungian model of the
Healing the wounds of our fathers 611

psyche that stresses the archetypal and the impersonal rather than the social
and the personal. Of course there has been much work by individual analysts
but somehow the theme of the Holocaust still tends to evoke strong negative
emotions and overall until recently there has been comparatively little published
in Jungian journals on this topic.
After the collapse of the Iron Curtain, however, when Jungian analysts
began to work in Russia and in the countries of the ex-Soviet bloc and to
publish their analytic experiences, the attitude of our community to collective
trauma and to intergenerational trauma began to change. Our awareness of
the reality of trauma and our reflections on how best analysts can treat
survivors and their children, were further deepened by the presentation of Pumla
Gobodo-Madikizela at the 2007 Cape Town conference and the many moving
testimonies given in Vilnius in 2009.
In this paper, I would like to focus my attention on intergenerational
trauma and how we can work in analysis to heal these wounds bequeathed
by the fathers. In the words of Eli Wiesel ‘Auschwitz means death . . . . of
language . . . and of time’ (1975, p. 314–5) and it is on these two areas that
I propose to concentrate herewith.

Intergenerational trauma and the death of time

The phrase ‘the death of time’ refers to the discontinuity between past, present
and future that survivors of collective trauma experienced and transmitted to
their children. Kijak and Funtowicz have described the profound dissociation
in temporality that occurred in survivors of extreme situations leading to
‘the simultaneous coexistence of two aspects of the ego: one part of this ego
continues “living” in the death camp stripped of all its defenses; the other part,
“adapted” to the new reality, behaves . . . as if it were able to love, to hate, to
struggle, to work, making projects or becoming ill’ (1982, p. 30).
As the Spanish writer Jorge Semprun, a survivor of Buchenwald, writes [it is
as if] ‘I never left, in spite of all appearances, and which I would never leave,
despite the masquerades and make-believe or life’ (1997, p. 153).
Equally, we find the same disturbance of temporality in the second generation
as the work of Judith Kestenberg has shown. Kestenberg talks of a ‘time tunnel’
(1982, pp. 83–102) and Haydee Faimberg of ‘a telescoping of generations’,
a ‘tyrannical intrusion of history’ (1988, p. 99). Often the survivors identified
children born after the Holocaust with the deceased and the children themselves
identified with the dead. In this way they became a kind of ‘revenant’ and
indeed Perel Wilgowicz speaks of a ‘vampiric identification’ in which the child
of survivors becomes imprisoned in the parents’ trauma, neither dead nor alive,
unborn, in an imageless, timeless condition, condemned to repeat what they
themselves have not experienced (1999, p. 1063).
The same phenomenon was again found in interviews carried out with second
and third generation Jews whose grandparents or parents were inmates of death
612 Angela Connolly

camps. For example, Nadine Fresco, in interviews with eight French Jews born
between 1944 and 1948, asked about the effects that the genocide had on their
lives. She talks about the ‘deathly silence’ of the parents (1984, p. 418) and
of the transmitted ‘wounds of memory’, linked to the parents’ silence, which
profoundly altered the children’s experience of time.
Raffaella De Castro, a philosopher, in Testimonies of the Non-Experienced,
collected and analysed the stories of 23 third generation Roman Jews, whose
relatives had been victims of the Fascist persecutions. She speaks of ‘a traumatic
topos in the construction of identity, a story that has the power of a ‘myth’ and
that risks being mistaken for one, becoming merely ‘pre-history’ or ‘post-history’
of the mind, passed on from generation to generation’ and of the need to make
sense of these paradoxical and difficult memories of an experience that has not
been lived but transmitted (2008, pp. 326–27).
Thus the death of time creates a dissociation between history and memory
with the result of the creation of a history without memory, history as abstract
dead facts, and a memory without history, purely subjective, mythical and
therefore ineffective for the creation of meaningful narratives.
The transmitted memories from which the children of survivors suffer
are ‘memories without experience’ or ‘amalgam-memories’ (Neri 1982, p.
338). The Italian psychoanalyst Claudio Neri suggests that these memories
of the non-experienced consist initially not of images but of transmitted
sensations and emotions and that it is exactly because these ‘memories’ are
not experienced that they acquire their repetitive, static and coercive character.
In their essence they remain unchanging but over time they accumulate around
themselves an amalgam of images taken both from personal experience and
from the stereotyped images of family history or the social group (1982,
pp. 338–39).
Thus the dissociation between the subjective time of memory and the objective
time of history, profoundly impacts the capacity of survivors and their children
to create meaningful narratives, essential for a sense of identity for, as Coline
Covington remarks, ‘Our establishment of identity is based on historical
construction’ (1995, p. 40).

Intergenerational trauma and the death of language

In situations such as the Nazi camps and the Soviet gulags, the extreme physical
deprivation, the constant threat of extinction and the deliberate process of
dehumanization led inevitably to a ‘world without metaphor’ to use Herzog’s
evocative phrase (1982, p. 114). This has profound effects on symbolization as
we know from the work of Lakoff and Johnson that metaphor lies at the heart
of our capacity to think imaginatively and to perform dream work (1980/2003,
p. 270).
Ilse Grubrich-Simitis in her ground-breaking article ‘From concretism to
metaphor’ (1984) on her work with children of Holocaust survivors, was
Healing the wounds of our fathers 613

one of the first to describe a peculiar characteristic: concretism. In the

psychotic universe of the extermination camps, ‘the occurrence of totally
senseless events—events that have no explanation, indeed cannot be explained—
fundamentally question the semantic dimension, i.e., a realm central to the ego.
It undermines the metaphorical and the non-metaphorical use of speech as well
as the structuring of time in past, present and future’ (1984, p. 307).
Shalamov describes this loss of language in the following passage where he
describes his incapacity to write even something as simple as a letter:

The camp had dried up my brain and I could not, I just could not squeeze another
word from it. I was not up to the job – and not because the gap between my will and
Kolyma was too great, not because my brain was weak and exhausted, but because in
those folds of my brain where ecstatic adjectives were stored, there was nothing but
hatred.
(Shalamov 1994, p. 450)

The death of language also profoundly modifies the capacity to create dream
metaphors and to link them together to create narratives. This is a central issue,
I think. As Margaret Wilkinson says, ‘dreams may be thought of as extended
symbolic metaphors . . . which reflect the particular preoccupations of the
dreamer and the underlying complexes that drive these preoccupations’ (2006,
p. 51). Indeed recent neurophysiological research confirms the importance
of dreaming for the consolidation of memory and for the metabolization of
emotions and sensations (ibid., p. 47).
The death of language severely affects the capacity to dream. According to
Thomas Ogden,

not all psychic events occurring in sleep (even those events in visual imagistic form that
we remember on waking) merit the name ‘dream.’ Certain phenomena occurring in
sleep may appear to be dreams but they involve no unconscious psychological work –
the work of dreaming – which results in psychological growth.
(2003, p. 19)

In Antonino Ferro’s account of dreaming, the ability to dream depends on the

capacity to transform ‘sensory and proto-emotional experience’ into ‘visual
pictograms’, through a work of metaphorization as for example when a
sensation or feeling of rage is transformed into the visual image of a roaring
lion. Dreaming also requires however what Ferro terms ‘the narrative capacity
of the mind in dreaming’, the ability to link together the visual metaphors to
form a narrative (2002, p. 605).
Survivors of intense trauma frequently report disturbances of dreaming
which can take the form of an inability to dream, hallucinations in sleep and
nightmares which can be repetitive or not, and we find the same disturbances
in intergenerational trauma. It is as though the children are forced to dream the
nightmares of their parents, and indeed there are indications that the less the
parents remember, the more these experiences are transmitted to the children in
614 Angela Connolly

forms that are difficult to represent and elaborate. In the words of the American
poet Anne-Marie Levine, whose poem I quoted at the beginning of this work:

Nothing was mentioned about the Holocaust either at home or at school . . . . every
night I had terrible nightmares. My parents were dismayed . . . . they wanted to forget
and I kept them from it. I had inherited their unconscious. It was diabolical.
(Levine cited in Laub & Podell 1995, p. 1000)

The nightmares so frequently reported by the children and grandchildren of

survivors are thus not so much a reflection of the unconscious of the child,
but an attempt to represent and come to terms with the reality of the parents’
trauma. As Wilson says, ‘we may be faced with the psychological representation
of a rendition of the past upon which the bizarre logic of the nightmare reveals
real events rather than the intrusion of unconscious processes’ (1985, p. 73).

Analysing the trauma narratives

Much work on the victims of trauma has focused on what Pumla Gobodo-
Madikizela refers to as ‘the potentially reparative elements of narrative
testimony’ (2008, p. 176). Witnessing through narrative requires, however,
the capacity to overcome the death of time and language but it is just these
capacities that have been destroyed.
Creating meaningful narratives about the experience of extreme trauma is a
difficult and painful task whether this has been experienced or transmitted.
Initially survivors of the camps found themselves trapped between two
opposing force fields: on the one hand, the pressing need to cancel out
unbearably painful memories; on the other, the need to keep faith with the
dead, to bear witness, as a means of justifying one’s own survival when
so many had succumbed. One of the principle problems was the difficulty
of finding narrative forms capable of giving an authentic voice to such
experiences.
Narrative requires the capacity to use metaphor in order to fashion the
experience into a form that will be comprehensible and meaningful to others
but as Laub and Auerhahn point out, ‘because of the radical break between
trauma and culture, victims often cannot find categories of thought or words
for their experience’ (1993, p. 287).
Initial narratives tended to take the form of chronicles, detailed, factual,
historical accounts but, as Laub and Podell (1995, p. 997) state, such narratives
‘are able only to convey the surface of the experience, they lose their power to
impact on the present living world’. Moreover, the strict adherence to what the
Israeli writer Aharon Appelfield, a child survivor of an extermination camp, calls
‘compulsory memory’ (1994, pp. xi-xiii), memory that according to Laub and
Podell, ‘by its nature, precludes the establishment of a dialogical relationship
and hence hinders the reconnecting to others and to oneself in the present’
(1995, p. 997).
Healing the wounds of our fathers 615

In situations of extreme trauma, as Ann Adelman states, ‘the annihilation of

the potential ‘other’ led to an abandonment of hope for the construction and
evolution of shared memories through verbal relatedness’ (1995, p. 363). This
is shown clearly in accounts of the Shoah such as those of Primo Levi and Jean
Amery. In these narratives, where as Laub and Podell state, ‘the artists attempt
to depict a trauma exclusively from within the trauma’ (1995, p. 1001), the
risk is that the narrative is told only from the point of view of a victim who
is trapped in a past that infiltrates and renders meaningless the present and
the future, exactly because what is missing in such accounts is the idea of an
‘other’ capable of empathizing with the reality of the trauma. Relevant here
is Primo Levi’s recurrent nightmare in which he dreams that he is relating his
experiences of Auschwitz to his loved ones and they move away from him,
distant and indifferent, leaving him desolate and alone, and the despair that
Levi expressed shortly before he killed himself:
the experience of which we survivors of the Nazi lagers are the bearers is alien to the
new generations in the West and it is becoming ever more alien as the years pass . . . for
us talking to young people is becoming more and more difficult
(2003, pp. 163–64)

The art of trauma

How then to be able to represent the trauma both as an account that is faithful
to the subjective experience and as a narrative that is meaningful to a third
person? As Marcelo Vinar responds,
only the skill of a poet or a patient in transference can go some way to achieving
this by using metaphor as best he can to express the emotional intensity and the
incandescence of the experience where words so often fail.
(2005, p. 315)

Any attempt to convey the reality of trauma requires the creation of new
aesthetic forms that creatively blend different literary and artistic categories
such as the historicized fiction of Shalamov. As Semprun puts it,
I don’t want to do a plain eyewitness account. Right from the start I mean to avoid, to
spare myself any recital of suffering and horror . . . so I need a narrative ‘I’ that draws
on my experience but goes beyond it, capable of opening the narrative up to fiction, to
imagination . . . Fiction that would be as illuminating as the truth to seem convincing.
(1997, p. 165)

Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (1994) represents an example of a successful attempt

to open up trauma to the imaginative possibilities of representation through the
creation of a ‘new prose’. The ability to remember, elaborate and imaginatively
reflect on the experience of extreme trauma requires a capacity to maintain a
sense of perspective and detachment from the memory. As Laub and Auerhahn
state, this requires the presence of an ‘I’ which remembers and relates to the
616 Angela Connolly

experience and an ‘I’ who is aware of and relates to the act of remembering
(1993, p. 296). In his attempts to bridge the gap between historical fact and
literary fiction, Shalamov’s dry, unemotional style and his use of disjointed short
stories told from multiple perspectives to create shifting mosaics of memory,
each one enclosed within itself and unconnected from the other fragments of
memory and experience, conveys better than any more traditional literary form,
the fragmentation of identity, the loss of affectivity and above all the inner
isolation that life in the Gulags brought about.
Shalamov’s tales show a remarkable capacity to depict the reality of trauma
without remaining trapped in the role of victim but what is missing, however,
is the belief in the possibility of a dialogue with a receptive ‘other’, essential for
the recreation of the empathic bond and for the possibility of escaping from the
imprisonment in the past.
Effective trauma narratives require what Laub and Podell (1995, pp. 991–
98) term ‘the art of trauma’, a particular form of artistic representation that is
capable because of its ‘indirect, unaestheticized and dialogic nature’ of creating,
the possibility of ‘witnessing at an internal level’ through the recreation of
a dialogical space with the other such as we can find in the 2008 animated
documentary of Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir.
Waltz with Bashir, which is based on the real experiences of the director,
opens when Folman encounters an old friend who tells him about a recurrent
nightmare. They conclude that this is related to their experiences during the
Lebanese war of 1982 and Folman realizes that he has no memory whatsoever
of this experience. He asks help from another friend who suggests that he
contact his fellow soldiers to try to reconstruct his memories. The rest of the
film describes how, through these dialogues, he is able to gradually connect to
a series of screen memories, surreal images and flashbacks until the memory
of the traumatic experience, his witnessing of the massacre in the Palestinian
camps of Sabra and Chatila, return in their full horror.
Like Shalamov’s tales, Waltz with Bashir, which blends together the
dispassionate and objective style of the documentary with the imaginative
power of animated visual images, is capable of conveying the reality of the
traumatic event in a way that no traditional aesthetic form can do. At the
same time, however, the depiction of multiple viewpoints and perspectives that
emerge through the dialogue between Folman and his fellow soldiers opens the
way to the possibility of the recreation of the empathic bond essential for the
elaboration of trauma. This film, winner of numerous awards, is one of the
finest examples of the consequences of trauma and of the art of trauma, the
‘ability to revive the enshrouded past of a trauma through a dialogue in the
present’ (Laub & Podell 1995, p. 993).

Healing the wounds in therapy

According to Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, in situations of extreme trauma, the parents’
need to deny their experiences often lead them to react to the child’s perception
Healing the wounds of our fathers 617

of their trauma by unconsciously conveying the message that this perception was
merely a fantasy of the child (1984, pp. 317–8). In this way the capacity of the
child to distinguish between fantasy and reality is impaired and the possibility
of imaginatively ‘knowing’ the parents’ trauma is foreclosed.
Working with trauma requires modification of analytic technique. For
Bohleber, in intergenerational trauma, analysis of the transference and the
countertransference only in the here-and-now of the analytic relationship
without any narrative reconstruction of the causative traumatic reality, ‘risks
failing to help the patient to distinguish between phantasy and reality, and in
the worst case, of retraumatizing the patient’ (2007, p. 343).
For this narrative reconstruction of the traumatic event to take place,
however, what is at stake is above all the analyst’s affective responses.
In most psychoanalytic work the attention of the therapist is essentially
focused on the inner world and the analytic facts are interpreted in terms of
the processes, complexes and dynamics of psychic reality. The use of such an
approach to the therapy of the survivors of extreme trauma or to that of their
children is however, as Laub and Auerhahn say,
disastrous with victims who can neither use their trauma defensively nor playfully,
and experience such analysis of their reality as a conceptualization of all reality as
fantasy and hence, entrapment in the symptomatic level of not knowing.
(1993, pp. 99–100)

Working with intergenerational trauma necessitates the recreation of the

empathic bond essential for the reconstruction of temporality and of language,
but this can only be brought about by the capacity on the part of the therapist,
‘to allow the structure-shattering psychotic universe of the extermination camps
to reach himself’, as Grubrich-Simitis writes (1984, p. 313). This evokes intense
anxiety and emotional strain in the analyst and requires a conscious effort on
his/her part to overcome the temptation to withhold empathy. In the phase
of analysis that the author refers to as ‘the joint acceptance of the Holocaust
reality’, it is the analyst’s capacity to accept this reality, to affirm it through
‘actual non-metaphorical statements’, to be affectively impacted by it without
losing his/her capacity for hope and without losing the capacity to distinguish
inner and outer reality, past and present that opens the way for the patient to
‘enter so to speak, the world of metaphor’ (1984, p. 316).
The importance of this willingness on the part of the analyst to allow himself
to be emotionally affected without losing his imaginative capacities is beautifully
illustrated in Colman’s description of work with his patient Anna in a recent
paper (2010, pp. 275–97).
In analysis, the perception of the reality of the analyst’s emotional response
restores the empathic bond through the internalization of a dialogue with
a ‘witnessing other’ and thus re-establishes the capacity to use metaphor
and narrative. Similarly, it recreates a sense of temporality through the
acknowledgement that this thing that I remember and dream about, really
happened but it happened in the past and not to me.
618 Angela Connolly

If in creative works it is the capacity to use imaginative and original

metaphors that facilitate the narration, the acceptance and the working through
of traumatic realities, in analysis this takes place above all through the dreams.
A fundamental part of analytic work in trauma needs to be focused on the
restoration of the capacity to perform dream work and any eventual progress
in this kind of analysis can be traced out through the dreams and the way in
which they change in the course of the therapy.
In the initial stages of analysis, the confusion between subjectivities and
between memory and history is reflected in the repetitive, impoverished and
nightmarish quality of the dreams. This is evident in one of the dreams collected
by De Castro from third generation Italian Jews. This dream shows clearly the
way that the dreamer is caught in a past that does not belong to him; he is
unable to distinguish between the objective, past reality of the parents’ trauma
and his own subjective reality:

In the past I had dreams in which there were also Nazi criminals with machine guns,
or things like this or directly linked to these things but flashes, images, that is now I
have fragments at a visual level, dreams of this kind but . . . I’ve never had a dream on
this from start to finish. And, but I have this image of Nazi soldiers with machine guns
and helmets in two different contexts. One is in the open, and in a place so foggy,
cold and nocturnal, the classical scenes from films with the light of the torches and
the dogs, Alsatians which are barking and frothing at the mouth, things of this kind.
Otherwise the classical eruption into the house, where they break down your door
and the house is always more or less linked to my life and sometimes it is my house,
they erupt into the sitting room.
(De Castro 2008, p. 291)

The fragmentary and disjointed character of this dream with its amalgam of
personal memories, of family stories and of images taken from contemporary
cultural stereotypes of the Holocaust, reflects the way in which the memories
of the non-experienced come to be constructed. Similarly, it demonstrates how
the coercive and repetitive nature of these non-memories blocks the capacity to
perform dream work and to transform the images, for here the dream images
are not metaphoric representations but iconic presentations of the transmitted
trauma.

Working in Russia
As Orlando Figes notes in The Whisperers, in addition to the millions who
died, or were enslaved, ‘there were tens of millions, the relatives of Stalin’s
victims, whose lives were damaged in disturbing ways, with profound social
consequences that are still felt today’ (2007, p. xxxi). One such devastating
consequence was the injunction to silence. As one woman whose father
was arrested in 1936 remembers, ‘we were brought up to keep our mouths
shut . . . we went through life afraid to talk . . . even today, if I see a policeman,
I begin to shake with fear’ (2007, p. xxxi).
Healing the wounds of our fathers 619

This silence still reigns in Russia as, apart from a brief period during the early
Yeltsin years when the archives of the State were opened, there is an almost total
lack of public space for witnessing and for elaboration of the collective trauma
caused by the Stalin terror. This places an extreme burden on the individual
and makes itself felt in analysis.
Then, too, the breakdown of Soviet society and of the old collective identity
represented yet another trauma as can be seen by the dramatic increase during
the 90s in criminal behaviour, in social disorder, in suicides, in alcoholism and
in the death rate among men.
I worked in Russia from 1996 to 2001 and when I look back now on
the analyses conducted during this period, the strongest impression revolves
around just how unaware I was, especially at the beginning, of the profundity
of the collective trauma and how much I defended myself against ‘knowing’
this reality.
Naturally I knew about the effects of Stalinism and about the Gulags
from my reading of the novels of authors such Bulgakov (1968) and
Solzhenitsyn (1991), just as I was aware of the intense social instability and
the collapse of collective morality that was present in the Yeltsin period,
but I was still incapable of knowing the trauma imaginatively. As Laub and
Auerhahn (1993, p. 287) write, ‘we all hover at different distances between
knowing and not-knowing about trauma, caught between the compulsion
to complete the process of knowing and the inability or fear of doing
so’.
Looking now from a distance of almost 10 years, at the early transference
dreams, described in a paper of 2006, I am struck by how much the difficulties
in distinguishing between reality and fantasy, the intrusion of the past and the
almost complete absence of a psychic space for symbolization, typical of those
who have lived through intense collective trauma made itself felt in the dream
narratives and in transference enactments and how little attention I paid to
these realities.
The initial dreams tended to have a nightmarish and fragmentary quality and
they were full of presentations of the effects of traumatic events, transmitted or
experienced, with images of containers blown apart by bombs, of containers
that overflowed or were dangerously unstable, of containers that stifled and
constrained. At the same time, the lack of belief in the possibility of being
able to communicate their experience to an ‘other’ capable of understanding
and ‘knowing’ the affective reality of their experiences was reflected in dreams
which represented the analyst as a distant and threatening figure with whom
trust and communication were impossible. At the beginning I failed completely
to recognize how the traumatic images of these dreams represented not so much
the subjective reality of my analysands but rather the transmitted collective
trauma, just as I was unable to acknowledge that their experience of the
analyst as a cold and uncanny figure was linked to my refusal to allow the
collective trauma to impact me affectively. This led inevitably to the tendency
620 Angela Connolly

to interpret the dreams only in terms of the here-and-now of the transference

and countertransference dynamics and indeed as I have written, the result, ‘was
a somewhat obsessive insistence on rules and boundaries and a defensive use
of interpretations which were designed more to expel projective identifications
and protect my boundaries, rather than to foster real insight’ (2006, p. 183). All
this led to a real risk of re-traumatization and indeed fantasies of abandoning
the analysis occurred frequently.
It was only when I was gradually able to relinquish my own defences and
to acknowledge the reality of the trauma both past and present that something
began to change. One important factor in helping me in this passage was that
I was gradually realizing how much I, too, was making use of negation and
manic defences to ward off the reality of the very real threats that we all were
experiencing: bombs in buses and in apartment blocks; fears for the safety of
myself and my family linked to my husband’s work as a journalist; the pervasive
threat of social collapse and violent disorder or repressive revolution.
The reality of any ‘structure-shattering psychotic universe’ such as that
of the collective madness of the Stalin years transmits to the children and
grandchildren of the survivors ‘unmetabolized bits of terrifying nothing’ to use
Warren Colman’s telling phrase (2010, p. 288).
One of the principle sources of suffering for these individuals is their
incapacity to recognize that this psychotic core of nothingness that threatens
their very psychic existence does not come from themselves but from past
external reality. They feel (and all too often these feelings are accentuated by
the parents’ silence) that there is something wrong with them and that they need
the analyst to help them understand the real source of this experience.
This point is illustrated by the dream of another patient from a very different
background who had a brief analysis with me some time ago:

I am standing in an empty space of bare ground which is surrounded by barbed wire

fences and wooden structures like watchtowers but there is no one there. Suddenly I
feel that there is something there, a kind of malevolent and mindless presence that is
trying to take over my mind and destroy my thoughts and my capacity to think, to
make me as mindless as itself. I feel that I can do nothing to resist it and I wake up
screaming.

This man came to me after a long previous analysis that he felt had helped him
considerably because, despite the fact that the analysis had resolved many of
his presenting problems, he still continued to suffer occasionally from terrifying
repetitive nightmares in which he was being buried alive or being chased by
psychotic killers. In the beginning, like the previous therapist I too interpreted
these nightmares in terms of the transference and the personal complexes but
something about the emotional intensity and the impersonal quality of this
particular dream struck me; I remembered that the patient had previously told
me that his father had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese for four years but
that this was something that the father never spoke of and indeed discounted
Healing the wounds of our fathers 621

as irrelevant to his present life. When I tentatively suggested to him that it

sounded as though the images and the terrifying emotions of the dream might
be similar to those of the inmates of the Japanese camps and that perhaps this
dream reflected not so much his own personal reality as that of his father, the
patient remained silent for a long period but then said that that would make
sense as he had always wondered why his father was so reluctant to speak
about the past. This dream marked a turning point and for the first time he was
able to initiate a dialogue with his father about his experiences and the father
was able to tell him how the enforced starvation and the lack of any hope of
salvation had gradually worn him down to the point that towards the end of
his internment, he had sunk into a state of complete apathy and indifference
even to his own survival. The father was also able to confide that during the
patient’s infancy he had indeed suffered for a short time from a post-traumatic
stress disorder with flashbacks and emotional outbursts. From that point on the
repetitive nightmares ceased.
Looking back at this dream I could say that this image of the mindless
and invasive presence is a powerful metaphor both of the ‘empty circle’, that
magnetic core of mindlessness and non-representation, and the destructive pull
such a representation exerts on the psyche, a constant threat to psychic integrity.
Repetitive nightmares, like the chronicles of survivors, are incapable of going
beyond the ‘real event’ which can only be endlessly repeated exactly because the
dreamer is trapped in a past that is not his own, unable to tell if the terrifying
images of the dreams are the representation of his or her own inner reality or the
past reality of the parents and it is only when the therapist is capable of recogniz-
ing the transmitted nature of such images that something can begin to change.
In the case of my Russian analysands, the working through of my own
defences and my capacity to accept the reality of the trauma, both my own
and theirs, allowed me to begin to empathize with my analysands and to
communicate something of my own affective experience to them. This gradually
brought about a change in the transference and countertransference dynamics
and the creation of an intersubjective space in which a new experience of
dialogue between our very different subjectivities became possible. The creation
of this kind of space for inner dialogue and the recreation of the belief in an
‘other’ capable of ‘knowing’ and understanding their reality was reflected in
dreams in which they spoke fluent English or in which I spoke Russian.
Through this inner dialogical space it became gradually possible for them to
represent imaginatively and symbolize in their dreams both the reality of the
collective trauma from the past and the insidious, silent yet devastating effects
the collective denial of this reality continued to exert on their psyches (and
mine). This passage is reflected in two dreams of one of my analysands:

I’m with my wife in some place near Moscow at a conference and the topic is Stalin,
his psychological heritage maybe. We are in a hall and my wife says she has a problem
with the sole of her foot. She shows me and there is a red lump on it. I look closer and
622 Angela Connolly

see it’s a nose of a face and I see it’s Stalin’s face. I see it’s moving as though it’s alive.
When my wife walks the face disappears inside the foot. I ask if it bothers her and she
replies that she feels it but that it’s not particularly uncomfortable. We are told that
Stalin will say something and I understand he will speak from my wife’s foot. I have
a feeling of invasion or possession.

A few days later the same analysand dreamt:

I feel something in my shoe and when I look I see there’s a nail in the sole of the heel.
I take it out and see it’s so big that it must have been in my foot but I felt nothing and
I’m surprised.

These two dream narratives illustrate how the recreation of an inner dialogical
space and of the empathic bond with the other opens the way to the possibility
of a narrative and symbolic reconstruction of the historical reality of the
transmitted collective trauma. The image of Stalin’s face within the sole of the
wife’s foot, a face that is still alive and capable of ‘speaking’ is a poignant and
powerful metaphor that communicates how past traumatic experiences, so long
as they are unrecognized and unacknowledged, remain as foreign bodies in the
psyche, foreign bodies that are interposed between inner reality (the foot) and
outer reality (the ground on which we walk), capable of invading and infiltrating
both and of destroying the link between them. In the same way the image of
the hole left in the dreamer’s foot by the nail represents the transformation of
the ‘empty circle’, that terrifying image of the nothingness and meaninglessness
created by intense trauma whether experienced or transmitted, a hole that
sucks away both affective vitality and the capacity to think imaginatively and
to create meaning. In this way the void left by the death of language and of
time can begin to be transformed. Of course the hole remains but it is now
circumscribed and thinkable albeit within certain limits, limits posed by the
impossibility of ever fully ‘knowing’ the reality of intense trauma. As Laub
writes,

in the case of massive psychic trauma, knowledge can be reconstructed only

to a certain extent and though one senses and feels that one remains cut off
from certain knowledge, one cannot go beyond these limits . . . the empty circle
remains but can no longer wield such acute and inexplicable power over one’s life
choices.
(1998, p. 527)

Conclusion
As Freud so famously said in ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’, ‘the
analytical relationship is based on a love of truth; that is on a recognition
of reality’ (1937, pp. 209–53). If this is no easy task in any therapy, it is
particularly difficult in the therapy of the children of the survivors of intense
trauma where the search for the truth implies facing up to the devastating and
mind-shattering knowledge of the evil of which ordinary men and women are
Healing the wounds of our fathers 623

capable. Such knowledge inevitably evokes in all of us, a ‘deep and seemingly
insuperable despair’ as Grubrich-Simitis writes. In her words, it is the task of the
analytical partners, ‘to wrest out of despair, a confirmation of the truly human
dimension, which in the twentieth century, in the most brutal form ever, has
been cast in doubt’ (1984, p. 318).

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Cet article analyse l’histoire des approches psychanalytiques du trauma in-

tergénérationnel des points de vue jungien et freudien et évoque la nécessité, lorsqu’il
est question de trauma intergénérationnel, de mieux définir la nature et les différentes
catégories de traumatismes. Une attention particulière est portée aux traumatismes
cumulatifs et extrêmes tels que ceux que vécurent les survivants des camps de la mort
nazis et des goulags russes. La thérapie avec les survivants et leurs enfants requiert une
adaptation particulière de la technique analytique. Ce qui est en jeu n’est pas tant l’ici et
le maintenant de la dynamique transférentielle et contretransférentielle qui, de fait, dans
un premier temps peut s’avérer contreproductive, mais la capacité de l’analyste à accepter
la réalité du trauma, avec toutes ses émotions dévastatrices et anéantissantes, sans perdre
sa capacité à imaginer et à jouer métaphoriquement avec les images, essentielle pour que
le patient puisse créer un espace de représentation.

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Annäherungen an

intergenerationale Traumata, sowohl von der freudianischen wie von der jungianischen
Schule, und spricht die Notwendigkeit an, die gegeben ist, wenn wir von intergen-
erationalen oder übertragenen Traumata sprechen, die Art und die unterschiedlichen
Kategorien der Traumata besser zu definieren; dies unter besonderer Berücksichtigung
extremer und kumulativer Traumata wie sie von Überlebenden der Nazi Todeslager
und dem russischen GULAG erlitten wurden. Therapie mit Überlebenden und
deren Kindern erfordert eine besondere Adaption der analytischen Technik, denn
hier geht es weniger um die Analyse des Hier und Jetzt, von Übertragungs- und
Gegenübertragungsdynamiken – was in der Tat in den frühen Stadien der Behandlung
kontraproduktiv sein kann, - sondern um die Fähigkeit des Analytikers, die Realität des
Traumas mit all ihren verheerenden und erschütternden Emotionen zu akzeptieren ohne
dabei die Fähigkeit zu verlieren, zu imaginieren und metaphorisch mit Bildern zu spielen,
was wichtig ist, wenn der Patient fähig wird, einen inneren Raum für die Repräsentation
aufzubauen.

In questo scritto viene esaminata la storia degli approcci al trauma intergenerazionale

da entrambe le scuole sia junghiane che freudiane e indica la necessità di definire meglio,
quando parliamo di trauma intergenerazionale o trasmesso, sia la natura che le differenti
categorie di trauma con particolare riguardo ai traumi estremi o cumulativi come quelli
subiti dai superstiti dei campi di morte nazisti o dei gulags Russi. La terapia con i
sopravvissuti e con i loro bambini richiede un particolare adattamento della tecnica
analitica poiché ciò che è in gioco qui non è l’analisi del qui e ora delle dinamiche
transferali e controtransferali, ma la capacità dell’analista di accettare la realtà del trauma
624 Angela Connolly

con tutte le sue emozioni devastanti fino a frammentare le capacità mentali, senza perdere
la capacità di immaginare e di giocare metaforicamente con le immagini, fatto essenziale
perché il paziente diventi capace di creare uno spazio per la rappresentazione.

ta stat issleduet istori psihonalitiqeskih podhodov k mepokolen-

qesko travme kak vo Frediscko tak i v ngiansko xkolah, i obrawena
k potrebnosti luqxe opredelit prirodu i razliqnye kategorii travmy,
vski raz voznikawe, kogda my govorim o mepokolenqesko ili peredan-
no travme, i v osobennosti esli my imeem delo s kstremalnymi
i kumultivnymi travmami, takimi, kak travmy, ispytannye vyivx-
imi v nacisckih koncentracionnyh lagerh i v russkom ǴULAǴe. Ter-
api s vyivximi i ih detmi trebuet osobo adaptacii analitiqesko
tehniki, poskolku zdes na kartu postavlen ne stolko analiz zdes-
i-seqas perenosno-kontrperenosno dinamiki, kotory, na samom dele,
moet okazats kontrproduktivnym, skolko sposobnost analitika print
realnost travmy so vsemi ee opustoxawimi i rasxatyvawimi psihiku
mocimi bez utraty sposobnosti k voobraeni i k metaforiqesko igre
obrazov, kotora okazyvaec vanexe i osnovno dl vosstanovleni
sposobnosti klienta sozdat prostranstvo dl reprezentacii.

Este escrito explora la historia de enfoques psicoanalı́ticos al trauma intergeneracional,

desde la perspectiva de ambas escuelas, la freudiana y la Junguiana, y afronta la necesidad
de definir major lo que queremos decir cuando hablamos de trauma intergeneracional o
transmitidos para definir mejor la naturaleza y las diferentes categorı́as de trauma con
referencia particular aquello extremos y traumas acumulativos como los experimentado
por los sobrevivientes de los campos de exterminio nazi y los gulags rusos. La terapia
con sobrevivientes y con sus niños requiere de una adaptación particular de la técnica
analı́tica, ya que aquı́ lo que está en juego no es tanto el análisis del presente de la
dinámica de transferencia y la contratransferencia, ella puede verdaderamente, en las
etapas tempranas, ser contraproducente, pero la capacidad del analista para aceptar
la realidad del trauma con todo su devastadoras emociones y rupturas del equilibrio
mental, sin perder la capacidad de imaginar y jugar metafóricamente con las imágenes,
elemento esencial si el paciente es capaz de poder crear un espacio para la representación.

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