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This is a singularly important contribution. Rarely are we handed a new way of listening to our patients that expands and transforms how we understand our work in the manner that Dr. Maurice Apprey achieves in this edited collection of his work, Transgenerational Haunting in Psychoanalysis: Toxic Errands. Apprey invites us to consider what happens if self-states designated as Not-Me widen to include those inherited familial/cultural traumas that a particular self was not alive for, yet nonetheless were imprinted on them psychically. With the conceptual precision of an academic, and the poetic potency of an artist, Apprey shows his readers the transmutation of historical wounds that have undergone a process of metamorphosis and now appear in the present as dislocated, mystifying symptoms. He aptly renames the legacy of unresolved past wounds “toxic errands” and “haunts,” and he utilizes his psychoanalytic praxis to move these ghostly inheritances into less obstructive injuries for his patients, applying the same model to address inter-ethnic conflict between groups more generally. As Volkan offers in the book’s introduction, the effort to understand the “other” and to move out of polarization and into negotiation of conflict is critical. Indeed, it merits being regarded as essential reading, particularly in our contemporary milieu where
pervasive toxic polarization undermines the very fabric of intersubjective relatedness.
Synthesis is creation. Apprey immerses his readers in the influences shaping his intuitive understanding from aspects of his ancestral home in Ghana, to Freudian texts he studied and transcended, and his clinical work with patients, supervisees, and diverse ethnic groups navigating inter-ethnic conflict. While reading Apprey, I had the experience of being led by a patient, erudite teacher who is guiding me on a journey inward and back in time. I am not alone in interpreting Apprey’s work in this manner, as both William Cornell’s and Edward Novack