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They transmitted only the wound to their children, to whom the memory had been refused.
This unique and important collection is traversed by stories that present a particular psychoanalytic challenge: to respond analytically to the complex struggles of people whose histories seem to enact the secret lives passed on from the distant familial past. A woman whose life re-enacts, not her own abandonment by her father, but her father's abandonment by his mother. A man who revives, unknowingly, the humiliation and obliteration of the life of his grandfather. The lives these patients live cannot immediately (or solely) be analyzed in terms of traditional psychodynamic theories and techniques because they tell unconscious stories that do not precisely belong to the people who live them: stories that return and possess those they inhabit from the secreted stories of lives they have never, strictly, known. The French psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham described this phenomenon as the “phantom,” a “formation of the unconscious” that “passes … from the parents' unconscious to the child's” (1987, p. 289). “What haunts,” he suggested, “are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others” (p. 287). These secrets, as the writers in M. Gerard Fromm's collection eloquently show, are not so much the secrets of repressed Oedipal configurations as the secret histories that have, in Françoise Davoine's words, been “cut out” from the official story (p. 154). At the heart of Lost in Transmission is the psychoanalytic, historical and political insight that both personal and collective histories may be determined through the intergenerational transmission of a traumatic past that, in its compulsive return, both insists upon, and resists, conscious witness.
In this sense, Lost in Transmission marks an important step in the theoretical (and clinical) history of psychoanalysis, by bringing back into psychoanalytic discourse and practice a crucial, yet ofte