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“If families resemble trees, as they say, arborescent structures with entangled roots and individual branches jutting out at awkward angles, family traumas are like thick translucent resin dripping from a cut in the bark. They trickle down generations” (Shafak 2021, 128).
This remarkable book by M. Gerard Fromm is a deeply moving story about how “cuts in the bark” of families and societies make traumatic “resin trickle down generations”. Shafak’s story tells how the violent civil war between the Turks and Greeks in Cyprus had an effect as the “cut in the bark” – the traumatic destruction of the protective shield – and led to the encapsulation of wounds transmitted to the following generations. Fromm refers to Davoine and Gaudillier’s work on how traumas have hidden histories, a traumatic heritage from earlier generations (Davoine and Gaudilliere 2004), where:
one task of transmission turns out to be the generational struggle to resist the dissociation of that heritage, to recognize, in Davoine and Gaudilliere’s phrase, the cut out unconscious (Davoine and Gaudilliere, 2004, p. 61). The goal is to bring the cut out back into the official narrative, whether the narrative is the family’s or the society’s – and to bring its full tragic story into social discourse. (Fromm, 2022, 96)
Unresolved traumatization leaves a heavy burden on the coming generations, but also the possibility of relief for families and groups when the descendants have the possibility to work through unfinished mourning.
Trauma becomes trauma because it is suffered alone. This is a simple, profound definition of why dire experiences become traumatic for many people. The traumatized person needs another, a witness, who then can become a third, who not only can help put words to and decipher the “cut-out” story, but also give some meaning to experiences that for most of us are beyond any understanding, like torture. Fromm’s book is a witness for the many who have suffered atrocities, but it also represen