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Title: Third Reich in the Unconscious
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| Third Reich in the Unconscious by Routledge Can the Concept of Trans-generational Transmission be further generalized? | This book is another intellectual feast produced by the great Valmek VolKan. He and his colleagues propose in this book that psychic trauma can be transmitted collectively to succeeding generations through a process coined "trans-generational transmission."
Part I of the book sets up the conceptual machinery for defining and exploring the meaning of "trans-generational transmission;" part II, examines a carefully chosen variety of case studies dealing with victims of the Nazi and Armenian Holocausts. Interestingly, these include at least one German who lived as a "perpetrator" during that period. Part three deals with the therapeutic consequences of "trans-generational transmission." As usual, Volkan's work is on the cutting edge intellectually and is as stimulating as it is provocative.
In part I the authors explain how traumatized victims often oblige their descendants (and do this almost always unconsciously) to carry the weight of, and help resolve the unfinished business of their past traumas, thus among other things, helping them reverse (or at least attenuate) hopelessness and accumulated residual psychic pain. Images of past traumas are carried forward and relived in the mind of succeeding generations of individuals and groups that are culturally related, as unconscious fantasies. That is to say, the progeny or descendants of past traumas learn to live in two worlds: their own (present-oriented) world, and vicariously in that inhabited by their victimized ethnic survivor/ancestors and simultaneously in "an imagined but un-experienced" past oriented-world. Like the real victims of such experiences, these "vicarious victims" too are caught up in the same time warp of past traumatic experiences as the "real victims" are. However, with the important twist that the "vicarious victims" have never experienced the traumas they imagine.
Such is the case with Jews whose parents and relatives were victims of the European Holocaust; American blacks whose ancestors were victims of slavery; the sons and daughters of the Armenian genocide, and the descendants of the genocide against Native Americans, to name just a few select examples. These "unremembered" and "un-experienced" events become "real" in the imagination, and an unforgettable part of the conscious (but "wholly imagined") experiences and life-histories of the descendants. The imagined experiences become in effect "chosen traumas" and a part of a shared "chosen history" to use two other phrases coined by Volkan in his earlier books.
The personalities of these "vicarious victims," adapt to a set of "imagined events" as if they were real and had actually happened to them. They "playact" as if the imagined events are a part of a "shared victimization experience." Their simulated and imagined world becomes a part of the repertoire and a part of a continuum of culturally shared experiences: a kind of "transference neurosis," as it were, that can be as real in its consequences as any other shared experiences can be. Indeed, as these authors so carefully point out in Part III, they eventually become an integral part of the daily repertoire of the "vicarious victim's" own behavioral responses.
The larger and much deeper question this research raises is this: To what extent does this phenomenon of trans-generational transmission represent just the more complex, and more obvious end of a continuum: from strong to weak trauma, and from strong to weak ethnic identification? Indeed, is it possible that trans-generational transmission is just a larger "backdoor" way to defining cultural and ethnic identification itself? Or put differently, to what extent is all ethnic history and identification just a more complex form of identity based on imagined traumas? That is to say, to what extent is ethnic identity a more general but greatly attenuated form of trans-generational transmission?
I raise these questions only because after a careful reading of Part III, which is dense to say the least, the reader is left with the notion that at some level all ethnic grievances may in some sense be viewed as part of a continuum of shared or "chosen traumas" (that is from massive to minimal traumas). And since it is true that ethnic identification (and arguably even ethnicity) is, as often as not, defined by collective grievances, collective insecurity, shared threats to security, shared collective fears and "chosen histories of past traumas," - that is by the gaps in the mental space of group identity -- it is not unreasonable to suggest that the effects of traumas on succeeding generations can easily fit along a continuum, or even a series of continua.
Even if this last suggestion seems premature, or unsuited for the clinical setting, it certainly does no harm to raise the larger issue of whether or not the concept of trans-generational transmission has much wider application and whether or not despite these misgivings it can be seen in a more general, global light as a more systemic psychological phenomenon. Certainly the author's arguments in Chapter III, where traumas take on symbolic and proto-symbolic representations can be read and interpreted in this way.
But this is not the only meaning that can be mined from this conceptually rich mother lode. There are endless possible permutations to how the concept of trans-generational transmission might be expanded and put to further clinical as well as theoretical use, as the term "massive trauma" is further delineated and parsed. It is not unreasonable to suggest that it could, for instance, be expanded to include "perpetrator groups" as well as "victim groups" by the following logical analysis:
Since it is true that wherever there is a "victim group" there is usually also a corresponding "perpetrator group," whose identity is equally "fragmented, equally full of gaps in their mental spaces, and defined by and tied to "shared acts of cruelty," such groups, at least at the unconscious level, experience the same kind of "reverse or indirect trauma," as do "victim groups" do directly. This is another way of saying that "perpetrator groups" are defined as much by their shared "unconscious guilt" from committing acts of cruelty as victim groups are by the cruelty perceived to have been inflicted upon them by actual cruelty.
Is it not true that in the end these are but different sides of the same psychological coin? Building rationalizations and a defensive wall of solidarity becomes as important a form of group identification for perpetrator groups as "reliving victim-hood" does for victimized groups -- and often are the only tangible bases of group solidarity and identification for either group.
As but a couple of interesting examples we could take the results of the American Civil War as a case in point.
It would be difficult to argue that Southern whites did not experienced a kind of collective "massive trauma" by any definition of the term, and whether it be a situational definition or a more general one. However, the same could be said of two other groups' experiences from that war: "The Northern victors, " and the blacks who were "freed" from slavery. In each of these latter cases, the indirect trauma of upheaval and war were no less traumatic than it was directly to southerners, whether or not it was consciously perceived as such by either of these latter two groups. The gaps in their respective collective identities and mental space were nevertheless filled by fears and insecurities of that war. Their respective subgroup identities were defined by and bound by the experiences shared during that period. And so too were the vicariously imagined experiences of their descendants.
The point, of course is that while there are many large definitional problems involved with the concept of "massive trauma," and with the psychological meaning of "ethnic identity," theoretically these are nevertheless a very rich and very useful set of terms, and when they are coupled with Volkan's term transgenerational transmission, the depths of what they can do together has yet to be completely plumbed.
One cannot say enough about the work of Valmik Volkan. Fifty stars! Amen. | | Third Reich in the Unconscious by Routledge It is possible that prior generations transmitted images to their off spring? | | Dr. Volkan, this time with some colleagues, presented an enlightened thesis about Transgenerational Transmissions of Traumas and its Consequences. Although aim at the legacy of the third rich in the mind, it can be applied to established a new outlook about transgenerational transmissions of traumas in others scenarios. | | Third Reich in the Unconscious by Routledge Product Description | The Third Reich in the Unconscious concerns itself with the third element of the psychological impact of massive human trauma: transgenerational transmission of psychological tasks. In order to study this topic and identify its pertinence to Third Reich-related case studies, the authors both revisit the effects of the Holocaust on second-generation survivors and outline the mechanics of transgenerational transmission in general.
Describing in detail how transgenerational transmission occurs, this book focuses on the psychological processes of the younger generations, outside of their indentification with directly traumatized ancestors, and explains how historical images contaminate the expression of developmental conflicts at all levels.
Also included are complete treatment processes for Jewish and German second-generation individuals, and, for the very first time, a full analysis of a traveler (gypsy). Accessible to the general reader The Third Reich in the Unconscious will be of interest to anyone concerned with the Holocaust or past traumatic historical events. |
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