The Intergenerational Transmission of Military Trauma and Winnicott’s Principle of Being: Confusion in the Sense of Aliveness and Deadness

This work elucidates the unconscious destruction of a sense of being as a result of an obliteration (in the first generation due to direct exposure to military trauma) and rejection (in the second generation due to this trauma being intergenerationally transmitted) of the internal connection with the female element - as conceptualised by Winnicott in his book, ‘Playing and Reality’. The rejection of this aspect of the psyche, which is responsible for the experience of aliveness and being, causes the subject significant confusion in the sense of aliveness and deadness. The result is that survivors of both generations become threatened by a sense of aliveness and being - by life itself. Everything that causes a sense of richness, fullness, intensity, a feeling of vitality and existence, is perceived to be a threat, resulting in an unconscious need to reject such states. These dynamics are explored in the case of an adolescent boy who was experiencing anxiety about becoming a paedophile. His fear, as signified by the image of a paedophile, rather than being a response to the difficulties of his developing sexuality, could be understood as connected to his father’s dissociated war trauma (the fear that he might have killed children), and also to a dissociative imperative to obliterate psychic affiliation with a quiet state of being.