Parents and Their Child—and The Analyst in the Middle: Working with A Transgenerational Mandate

The first part of this paper explains how the transgenerational mandate influences the mental activity of the child. When a child acts the denied suffering of the parental couple, the analyst risks being imprisoned by the transgenerational mandate. Frequently the analyst is unconsciously asked by the parents to cure without curing because the child's psychological birth, still in the making, threatens the defensive equilibrium of the parents. The analyst is thus caught between the parents and the child and must find his/her own way forward in order to free the child from the burden of the mandate. In the second part of the paper, an analysis of a 5-year-old child is presented. The author shows how a transgenerational mandate may hold a traumatic potential because it can impair heavily the child's capacity to think. The author also describes the way in which she works with the parents and how she manages the setting and the style of the interpretation. She insists in particular on the need to sustain the child's perceptions in order to gradually allow the child to take roots in his/her experiences and therefore develop his/her own identity.