You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The author aims to highlight the importance of applying a psychoanalytic approach in community settings within a post-colonial context where violence is understood as the enactment of unprocessed transgenerational cultural trauma—trauma that is inseparable from entrenched racial, social, and cultural boundaries. The focus is on selected snapshots of work as a consultant to Creating A Safe Supportive Environment (CASSE), a not-for-profit organisation grounded in psychoanalytic principles. Through this work, it became evident that countertransference plays a crucial role in understanding how collective traumas take shape within individual experiences, while also enabling meaningful therapeutic engagement and the reciprocal exchange of insight.
Psychoanalytic trauma theories emphasise that unresolved psychic pain can be transmitted across generations, creating emotional fragmentation, identity crises, and repeated enactments of violence as defensive attempts to manage inherited emotional burdens. In the Central Australian context, the long-term impact of colonisation has contributed to the racial devaluation of Aboriginal culture, resulting in the absence of male leaders and fathers in many communities—a profound cultural void that generates a traumatic crisis for young people navigating questions of belonging and identity. Within this landscape, CASSE's work has consistently privileged the recognition and affirmation of Aboriginal culture as essential to therapeutic process, cultural renewal, and the possibility of healing.