This remarkable book shows in one illustration how an analysis containing an awareness of poverty and a traumatic history demonstrates how the transgenerational manifests itself in the unconscious of a single patient. If we listen to our patients' material, we can often see extensive evidence of war, exile, and politics. These trans-generational communications appear inchoately in symptoms, somatic presentations and sometimes in dreams. For instance, I used to work on a unit for psychotic patients and often the disturbing hallucinations and behaviours that they presented with could be made sense of if the transgenerational inheritance at the core of their being could be pieced together. From symbolic equation to symbolic thinking.

This book is an unusual study of one entire case of a patient, supervised by Vamik Volkan. It beautifully demonstrates the importance of recognizing the forces exerted on and within an individual's unconscious. It also possibly illustrates how sensitive our patients are to the unconscious of their analyst.