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A close-up of a vintage radio adorns the cover of this remarkable collection of essays on traumatic transmission. The authors explore how the trauma of one generation is carried by the next. Such emotional handoffs may be particular to a given family suffering a loss, or they can exist as a shared response to societal trauma. The book is divided into three sections, the first exploring the transmission theme in legacies of the Holocaust, followed by the analysis of its enactments in clinical vignettes, and finally in relation to events of collective injury in contemporary America.
In the introduction, Gerard Fromm recalls overhearing his mother hum the Joan Baez song “I Still Miss Someone,” in unconscious reminiscence of her first baby who died in infancy. When Fromm was born a year and a half later, he was given the name of his mother's obstetrician, also that of St. Gerard, the patron saint of pregnancy. Fromm describes his own “mission borne of trauma,” to thrive and help repair his mother's injury. Fortunately, Fromm's mother could sing her loss. But what if one can't sing it?
The opening essays elaborate how trauma typically disrupts the process of symbolizing feeling states and renders the subject “affect-lame” (p. 56). Dori Laub argues that in the wake of massive trauma “death drive derivatives” annihilate the internalized good object, what he gently calls the “inner thou.” Traumatic experience is dissociated from the narrator who has endured it and thus cut-off from social discourse. The dead mother complex extends beyond the realm of maternal deprivation, Laub suggests, and applies to catastrophic injury where the internal good object is destroyed.
Following up on these ideas, Peter Loewenberg recalls the years of hunger of the German civilian population during the WWI when the physical health and stature of a generation was stunted due to prolonged malnutrition . The transgenerational impact of famine was transmitted through the oral tradition of his parents