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Nigel Williams has contributed a warm and thoughtfully engaging book; a welcome addition to the expansion of the psychotherapeutic field of enquiry, and to psycho-social understanding of how transgenerational trauma may haunt present generations. Its warmth stems from confidence acquired through having enquired emotionally and affectively into his own ancestral field. His forebears emigrated
from Germany early in the twentieth century. This mixed cultural heritage grounds his observation that people of mixed national heritage, when their otherness is from the enemy state (as Germany was for the UK at the time), are likely to embody conflicted allegiances, or be perceived to. His third chapter, ‘Surveying the Literature on Multi-generational Memory’, acknowledges the many previous contributors to this subject.
So, why do ancestors and their sufferings matter in dyadic psychotherapy, when the issues in the room are so immediate and consuming? Williams' answer is that they may be in the room already, their sufferings often being spoken in the ‘I’ of patients' narratives, but as unnamed hauntings from previous generations unhappily interred in the family unconscious.
Unfortunately, there is often little psychic space in which to realize, for example, that the narratives about grandparents in war, famine, displacement or migration are signifiers from the patient's coded unconscious of hauntings or inhabitation by those forebears. These unhappy interments in the patient's unconscious call for direct recognition and to be laid to rest through processes of acceptance and reconceptualizing loss. Patients would then have more inner space in which to differentiate between what belongs to their grandparents and what is their own.
Williams writes primarily from a psycho-social perspective, with clinical implications for psychotherapy, his research consisting of in-depth interviews. His paraphrases of what interviewees told him provide the latticed groundwork for the book, underp