Freud’s construct of ‘psychic apparatus’ and ‘psychic reality’ (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1983) became the foundation of the science ‘psychoanalysis’. These constructs remained the centerpiece of the various schools of psychoanalysis and dynamic psychotherapy for most of the twentieth century. Contemporary psychoanalysis confronts the unprecedented challenges to these constructs posed by the neurosciences heralding the current paradigm change, powerfully driven by advances in the understanding of the neurobiology of trauma.
The current paradigm has transformed neuroscience’s earlier focus on the synapse – the ‘chemical imbalance theory of mental symptoms and illness’ – to advance the centrality of dysregulated neural networks as the preferred model. Schore’s extensive body of work offers a coherent formulation of the neurobiological mechanisms of relational trauma (2012) expanding his earlier (2001) observation that for relational trauma ‘[T]here is no one objective threshold at which all infants initiate a stress response; rather, this is subjectively determined and created within a unique organismic-environmental history’ (p. 206). Furthermore Schore (2001) posed critical questions to which we now have emerging answers:
What if the brain is evolving in an environment of not interpersonal security, but danger? Is this a context for the intergenerational transmission of psychopathology, and the origins of maladaptive infant health? Will early trauma have lasting consequences for future mental health, in that the trajectory of the developmental process will be altered?
(p. 207)
Questions like these resonate at the heart of Part I, seeking further clarification to the likely mechanism accounting for transmitted intergenerational trauma (see Salberg). Some psychoanalysts have rejected the challenges posed by neuroscience (Blass & Carmeli, 2007) while others eagerly embraced the opportunities offered (Baradon, 2010). Part I also confronts neuroscience’s paradigm change, specifically applied in the specialized field of massive trauma, offering innovative new concepts, clinically useful ideas and original research using video excerpts from Holocaust testimonies. Lastly, there are implications as to how later generations can further their own resilience (see Hopenwasser) helping repair the generational and historical trauma wounds.
As entry to these chapters, I believe it is crucial first to address the central ongoing concern within psychoanalysis that I first mentioned. The nature and status of the construct of ‘psychic trauma’, which resides within Freud’s ‘psychic reality’, alongside the complex human experiences that constitute the ‘reality’ of any trauma is as relevant and debated today as it was in Freud’s time. To clarify the complex issues at the heart of trauma transmission further, I will contrast two unique brief case studies. While both vignettes concern psychoanalysts impacted by the Holocaust trauma and both involve issues of trauma between a parent and child(ren), yet, as they are separated by more than half a century, they underline how professional attitude changes to trauma are influenced by their personal circumstances, in these two cases, prominent leaders within psychoanalysis.
I hope this approach might serve to highlight how psychoanalysis, the profession, has adapted, or failed to adapt, to the advances in trauma research over the last half century; to underscore the hegemony of trauma; and to provide the context for the sense of urgency we face to clarify the distinction between ‘psychic’ and ‘real’ trauma and its transmission. I am concerned that to ignore this challenge risks the credibility of psychoanalysis as a science of the mind still relevant in the twenty-first century.
At present, it seems that the proliferation of terms to describe the experience of trauma include, but are not limited to, ‘relational trauma’, ‘attachment trauma’, ‘vicarious trauma’, ‘emotional trauma’, ‘developmental trauma’, ‘complex trauma’ and the persistence of ‘psychic equivalence’ of trauma. The difficulty for clinicians and researchers is the added burden that these terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Thus the ambiguity attached to the term ‘trauma’ and its usage, past and present, impacts on both the credibility and status of the profession and the personal identity of the professionals. As therapists, we daily face the clinical challenge to choose between focusing on either ‘psychic’ or ‘real’ trauma with our patients. How we choose to respond to the moment-to-moment encounter clinically is problematic.
How we distinguish between our use of these two terms for trauma, on the one hand ‘real’ childhood ‘developmental’ and/or infantile ‘relational’ trauma, while on the other, to contrast both these real traumas with ‘psychic trauma’ and/or ‘psychic equivalence’ will, to a great degree, shape our understanding and response to the question of how trauma is passed on. Especially important within the question of transmission is the ‘vicarious’ trauma transmission that occurs daily during our therapy sessions – trauma transmission to-and-from patient and therapist.
Rather than trying to find immediate answers to these pressing concerns, Salberg, in her chapter, offers another possibility. Drawing upon the work of Robert Prince (2009) she argues that psychoanalysis itself is ‘a survivor of the Holocaust’. She further elaborates utilizing the work of Aron and Starr, Davoine and Gaudillière, and Kuriloff,
it often takes the passage of some time before processing [of trauma] can take place. Time was certainly needed for metabolizing the trauma of the Holocaust in order to be able to study it, and perhaps this further delayed a more generalized transgenerational transmission study of other historical traumas.
(p. 82)
The concept that psychoanalysis itself is ‘a survivor of the Holocaust’ suggests that the responsibility for the delay in sorting out the definition and mechanisms of trauma transmission rests within the profession, with the psychoanalysts themselves. Just as other Holocaust survivors brought their particular survival instincts and attitudes – including the survival defense of dissociation – to bear their own trauma, so would have survivors who were psychoanalysts.
To explore this issue, we gain some critical insights from Hartman’s (2014) recent reconstruction of Anna Freud’s complicated mourning process in the context of the Holocaust. We glean how, as the inheritor of her father’s legacy, Freudian psychoanalysis, she deployed the Freudian concept of trauma for her own self-understanding. According to Hartman, Anna Freud’s self-analysis, including dreams, led to her self-definition that today would undoubtedly be defined as her double exposure to trauma (first, direct trauma, while at the same time, the recipient of transferred trauma from her survivor father), yet back then, the very idea that her father’s Holocaust trauma was transmitted to her was not yet conceivable. It took another half a century to advance trauma studies to the point where Schore (2001) introduced the seminal concept of ‘relational trauma’, and mechanism to account for such family trauma transmission.
Hartman’s (2014) review of this unique father–daughter relationship serves to illustrate several key points regarding the fate of Freud’s construct of ‘psychic trauma’ in the post-Holocaust world of psychoanalysis. The unique transmission of psychoanalysis and its constructs from Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna, at that time in her early forties, included the entwined texture of her traumatic attachment embracing the transmission of the very concept of ‘trauma’ itself. As father and daughter together left Vienna on 4 June 1938, the question whether Holocaust trauma transmission might have occurred between them at that time was an impossible question to formulate, as the atrocities of the Holocaust had yet to be fully witnessed. But could that question have been posed after the events of the Holocaust, after 1945?
In his article, Hartman affords a special, albeit brief section of two paragraphs to ‘Trauma’ (pp. 1203–1204). This brevity textually underlines the contrast between Anna Freud’s otherwise original and prodigious output on a wide range of psychoanalytic topics and her apparent avoidance and/or reluctance to address the topic of trauma in her in-depth self-analysis. Hartman notes that Anna Freud’s contribution to a symposium on trauma in 1964 centered on the
definition of trauma that closely followed her father’s notion of the breaching of the stimulus barrier and the inability of the ego to cope with stimuli from within or without. She sought to restrict the term to this experience rather than the broader concepts like cumulative trauma, strain trauma, retrospective trauma and other related broader concepts. She felt that the definition of trauma had been mistakenly broadened to include any circumstance that contributed to psychopathology. In Anna Freud’s view, for something to be considered traumatic the stimulus barrier had to be breached and the ego knocked out of commission however briefly. By this definition the youngest concentration camp survivors did not suffer trauma but rather severe developmental interference. Also by her definition, she could not be considered to have suffered trauma because her stimulus barrier was not breached and her ego functioning remained intact during her ordeal with the Nazis and when she was informed of her aunts’ deaths.
(pp. 1203–1204)
While Hartman’s reconstruction of this father–daughter loyalty with respect to psychoanalytic theorizing on trauma is a single case, an anecdote, it carries a profound message related to the issue we confront – namely the possible reasons and motivations for the delay by psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts to recognize the phenomenon of trauma transfer.
Alternatively, in our current zeitgeist see in Salberg’s chapter how she introduces the metaphor, ‘the texture of traumatic attachment’, thus offering a framework and language to begin to unravel the complex pattern woven by the verbal threads of ‘psychic’ and ‘real’ trauma, and its relationship to ‘traumatic attachment’ as these relate to trauma transmission.
Fast-forward nearly half a century. Child survivor and distinguished professor of psychiatry and training and supervising psychoanalyst Henri Parens (2012) reflected on his struggles to come to terms with the impact of his Holocaust trauma on his wife and sons. Parens introduced his struggles in the context of contemporary neuroscience, using another term for trauma – traumatism. Parens offered an explanation for the apparent irreversibility of his traumatism due to ‘[I]ts inscription in the amygdala and forged pathways to the frontal cortex [which] I believe cannot be totally metabolized (i.e., totally suppressed and overridden by new neural pathways) by in-depth analytic working through’ (pp. 97–98). Parens further adds,
Kandell’s important findings and theorizing on synaptic formation and the possibility of overriding old neural pathways by new ones is limited – while I do believe that we should not abandon trying to do so until long-term analytic efforts seem to hit the brick wall of indelibility.
(p. 98)
I found Parens’ metaphor the ‘brick wall of indelibility’ an echo of earlier metaphors like ‘dead mother’, ‘abyss’, ‘black hole’, ‘empty circle’ used in psychoanalytic narratives suggestive of the apparent limitation of reparation of trauma. More correctly, stated in the context of relational trauma, it amounts to, or at least is suggestive of, the closure of opportunities for further reparative moments that can, and does, take place in focused trauma informed therapy. Metaphors carry an inherent and attendant risk of reification. The ‘brick wall of indelibility’ may represent that fleeting moment of collision between the ‘old’ paradigm of psychic trauma and its transmission with the ‘new’ paradigm ‘relational trauma’ that offers an opening, letting in new possibilities beyond the ‘brick wall’. I wondered whether Parens had ‘real’ or ‘psychic’ trauma in mind, as clearly his theorizing centered on the amygdala and neural synapses, it suggested a model of ‘real’ traumatic imprints.
Hopenwasser (2008) introduced ‘dissociative attunement’ as an exciting new dimension to the phenomenon of dissociation. In her chapter, she elaborates how ‘Each of us brings into the therapeutic process memories that have fallen off the arrow of time … Hidden within this narrative history is an epigenetic transformation of our selves’ (p. 60). Alluding to the reality of the ‘very expression of our genes’ it behooves us to refine our usage of the term ‘trauma’ as the future links may well be forged between that experience we term ‘trauma’ corresponding with its specific epigenetic switches.
Both Laub’s and Bodenstab’s chapters powerfully focus, from very different perspectives, on critical moments in excerpts from joint videos between next-of-kin. These chapters carried special significance for me as my own research of trauma transmission between my mother and I is based on close analysis of a split screen, split between her video testimony and the analysis of my moment-to-moment responses (Halasz 2012). Bodenstab microanalyzes two excerpts of a mother, Rosalie, and her daughter, Jolly, testimony that lasts less than four minutes. Yet painstakingly she captures there ‘an almost iconic historical moment and, at the same time, mark a distinctive narrative turn’ (p. 000). As her part of her research, Bodenstab reconstructs their moments of arrival at Auschwitz, on the ramp, at the selection. There she explores the central role of their relationship, also to highlight that contrast of the apparent clarity of visi...
