Transgenerational Violence and Immunological Deficits, a Psychosomatic Hypothesis

This essay relies on the somatising identification mechanism, conceived to account for the delayed effects of projective identifications on the body, in this case by immunodeficiency. Three clinical cases with a similar dynamic will lead the author to deduce the mechanisms at work in the double operation of transduction from the psychic to the somatic, and transmission from one generation to the next. In each case, borderline mothers have suffered from their father's lack of interest and seem to be using their daughter to take revenge narcissistically. Defenceless, the latter grow in a state of resignation and it is their own daughters who become sometimes bubble babies, sometimes neutropenic or who develops juvenile arthritis. The initial obstacle to oedipal structuring appears as the trigger of these transgenerational pathologies whose somatic outcome would be the return of a denied symbolic castration. Destructive aggression is the common thread that most likely involves epigenetic modifications. To comprehend this type of alteration happening at the passage from psychic to somatic, a splitting of the primordial self is postulated at the undifferentiated level of the protomental. It is from this originary intersection, contained in a pre-object transitionality, that psychic and somatic paths are initiated. Bion and de M'Uzan serve as main references, as well as Anzieu and Green.