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Transgenerational Trauma (Salberg & Grand, 2024) is part of a new series from Routledge, “Introductions to Contemporary Psychoanalysis,” which provides introductions to key psychoanalytic theories, concepts, techniques, and leading figures. The books are pithy by design (40,000 words), and this slim volume from eminent psychoanalytic trauma writers, Jill Salberg and Sue Grand, provides an overview of the myriad issues that one encounters conceptualizing and treating transgenerational trauma. Theirs is a deconstructivist, social-ethical mission to underscore biases within the psychoanalytic trauma literature that privilege White, western frames of thought. Their text sculpts and resculpts the transgenerational trauma literature so as to reduce its limitations and increase its applicability across people and places. To achieve social justice, they argue, psychoanalysis must include the histories of others and engage in “dialogues across difference” (p. 2).
Themes of voices heard and voices reclaimed echo throughout their text. Running among theoretical review chapters are contributions of intimate, personal stories by Michael O'Loughlin, Frederick Douglas, Kirkland Vaughans, Rossanna Echegoyen, and Maurice Apprey. For example, Vaughans speaks of “the imperatives of survival” that have caused Black Americans to collude in “our own invisibility by shrouding painful and degrading aspects of our past and placing our faith in the future” (p. 23). O'Loughlin's piece speaks to a lifelong challenge to reclaim voice, not only for himself, his parents, and forebearers but for “all who experience, marginality, displacement, and erasure in our unequal world” (p. 4).
The book's first chapter, written by Salberg, provides an overview of the schism between Freud and Ferenczi over the tension of reality and fantasy in the genesis of hysteria and explains how the debate delayed appreciation of the direct impact of traumatic experiences. She establishes the early conceptualization of spl