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The uninvited guest from the unremembered past: an exploration of the unconscious transmission of trauma across the generations, by Prophecy Coles, London, Karnac, 2011, 112 pp., £14.99, ISBN: 978 1 85575 700 4
In her most recent book, Prophecy Coles moves from the intra-generational world of sibling relationships to that of the trans-generational. She starts with some thoughts about the losses in Freud's life – beginning with the mourned loss of his daughter, Sophie, in 1919, and the death of her son, his grandson, two years later. These are deaths clearly remembered and written about by Freud. By contrast, she goes on to note some sibling deaths in Freud's family – not only that of his brother, but also that of his mother's younger brother – both named Julius. These deaths occurred within weeks of one another, when Freud himself was well under the age of two years. Coles muses about the echoes in Freud's thinking of these deaths, and their likely impact on his mother and, through her, on Freud himself, presumably a scarcely verbal toddler at the time of the losses.
Her interest in this book is to trace some of such echoes, as seen in literary characters and in her patients, back to their sources, often many generations before. She argues that the force of these aspects of the past, and their ability to unsettle, lies precisely in their being unremembered, unmarked. Uncovering them and making them available for thinking about can at least mitigate their force. That this would be important for individuals and their families is clear, and she acknowledges that her title links her work to Fraiberg's ‘Ghosts in the nursery' (1975). Fraiberg's ghosts are referred to as ‘the uninvited guests at the christening’: maybe a reminder of the story of Sleeping Beauty, underlining the power of such uninvited guests to disrupt and wreak havoc. The central chapters, focusing on particular individual ghosts, are framed by ones noting the wider ripples – family feuds, the holocaust a