The Enigma of Memory: Trauma, the Cycle of Unassimilated Experiences, and the Work of Transference

A 20-year treatment of a child of Holocaust survivors is examined considering Laplanche’s concepts of implantation and intromission, Laub’s concept of the empty circle, attachment theory, and reflective parenting, as well as the live third of therapy as witness to dark and unbearable traumas. Laplanche viewed intromissions as a violent form of implantation of the parent’s unconscious that prevents the individual child from translating and repressing in a way that would be expected and normal. In the process of intromission, the ability to metabolize messages is blocked. From Laplanche’s work the article asks: What if the “brute fact” has influenced the unconscious sexual with the dark destruction, annihilation, and the loss of the societal third? What happens when the “implantations” from those earlier significations are accompanied by intromissions, violent messages that may block the process of translation and retranslation? What would the movement and temporality of translation–detranslation look like? If the ability to signify has been lost through this devastating trauma, what is there for the child to translate?