Putting into Words, Putting to Rest and Putting Aside the Ancestors: How an Analysand who was heir to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 Worked Through Mourning

The author discusses the intergenerational psychic transmission of collective trauma on the basis of her personal experience as a descendant of victims of the Armenian genocide of 1915. She shows how the processes of transmission are encumbered within a diaspora community such as hers by the incorporation of objects in the throes of mourning, the invalidation of prohibitions by murder-become-law, and lack of differentiation between the sexes. A parallel is drawn between the characteristic secrecy of the genocidal project on the part of the perpetrators and the sense of illegitimacy of the victims' descendants, exacerbated in the case of the Armenian catastrophe by the refusal of the state that inherited the genocide to confess to it and consequently its erasure from Western consciousness. The author describes how she was enabled to emerge from confinement in the trauma by her French schooling and her analysis, and subsequently became able to work through mourning and writing, by divulging the secret and in particular the publication of her father's deportation diary. The written text is seen as a shroud in which the dead can finally be interred. Presenting an episode from her schooldays, she demonstrates the importance of her immersion in French culture in allowing her to achieve the necessary linguistic and psychic distance from her heritage.