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‘Trauma culture’, as it is sometimes called (Luckhurst, 2008), is a pervasive phenomenon, giving shape to a very powerful contemporary sensation that something haunts each subject, and that - insistently but also in a way hard to grasp - histories of violence are passed down from one generation to another. The notion of intergenerational or, as in the subtitle of this book, ‘trans-generational’ transmission of trauma remains controversial, however: not that anyone doubts that experiences that damage parents can thereby have an effect on their children, but rather that the ‘transmission’ claim has sometimes reeked of mysticism. This is partly due to problems with the psychoanalytic conceptualization of trauma, which defines it largely in terms of experiences that cannot be processed and so ‘return’ like unappeased ghosts, often as flashbacks or unwanted reminiscences that are felt as if they are recurring in the here-and-now rather than being remembered. Picked up by the founders of the modern poetics of trauma such as Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub (1992) and Cathy Caruth (1996), the idea of trauma as inherently inexpressible, as constituted ‘outside’ language and symbolization, can become meshed with a model of ‘transmission’ in which something magical occurs, through silences or hints or through the operation of what Abraham & Torok (1986) have influentially called ‘crypts’. These are places in the mind and in sociality in which secrets are hidden away, inaccessible and yet also constantly calling out for discovery in exactly the way that buried things - ghouls and treasures alike - always do. Freud was also partly culpable in contributing to the