You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Like a ghost ship floating through the lived space between therapist and patient, transgenerational trauma aches to be recognized and held. It is a shape-shifting, collective gasp of ancestral suffering—shrouded in our social, physical, and relational DNA. In my own sessions, I can sense the specters of ancestors on board, their elusive presence reverberating from one generation of the family to the next. If vigilant, the therapist might discover a faded manifest—clues to the affective and somatic messages carved in the hull, to suffering that lives in the patient’s viscera.
I came to Transgenerational Trauma: A Contemporary Introduction by Jill Salberg and Sue Grand seeking a text willing to enter difficult clinical terrain. Salberg and Grand answered my hope with a cogent examination of the texture of secrecy and the weight of disavowal and suppression surrounding transgenerational trauma, grounded in contemporary relational psychoanalysis and first-person narratives from historical and contemporary voices. They offer a deliberate, reflective, and compassionate synthesis of historical, relational, developmental, ethical, and sociocultural perspectives.
Salberg argues that trauma is transmitted less as a story than as affective states and fragmented states of mind, carried through attachment: “attachment is the vehicle through which trauma is transgenerationally transmitted” (p. 23). Grand emphasizes that witnessing is both a clinical and ethical stance, foregrounding the transmission and reenactment of perpetrator fragments—internalized identifications of aggression, cruelty, and domination—as well as the ethical necessity of addressing social and collective violence alongside individual injury.
Salberg and Grand’s well-argued collection of chapters inspired trust early and often. Their conceptual clarity prepares the reader for the specificity of their account of transmission. The book is anchored in a key idea: trauma moves through families in patterns we can sense