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The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution because, largely, about all a human being is anyways is just a hoping machine.
I grew up forty years ago in a section of Los Angeles, the Fairfax Area, that was overwhelmingly Jewish—mostly working class, with a smattering of professionals. At the time, that part of LA was filled with adults who, fifteen years before, had survived the Shoah and resettled in California. Their children were my classmates, high school friends, and roommates in college. The holocaust was historically close enough so that in my tenth-grade afternoon Hebrew school, our young teacher, himself a child of survivors, passed around soap made from Jewish fat and a lampshade made from Jewish skin.
Events like that were part of what came to be second nature for me: a recognition of who these children of survivors were, through a marker so prominent that even now, when a clinically depressed adult recently came into my office seeking analysis for difficulties he was experiencing with intimacy and love, I found myself waiting for him to say (which he eventually did), “By the way, my parent was a survivor of Auschwitz.” The mark on his psyche seemed as concrete as if he had stuck out his arm and showed me a number.
I have worked with patients whose communist families lived through the period of American state terror known as McCarthyism; with Vietnam war vets and the children of veterans; with survivors of state terror and torture in Bosnia, Iran, Africa, and South America; and with children of survivors of the Shoah. In each of these instances, one recognizes the legacies of psychic and physical trauma. There are striking similarities in the generational transmission of those terrors through psychological structures, which preserve a relationship to the traumatized parent, affecting the individual's memory and development. The patients with transmitted trauma find themselves