[Ed. note: this is one of a series of profiles by TAP Editorial Board Members of intriguing psychoanalysts we think you would want to know about.]
Maurice Apprey is a tenured, full professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. A prolific writer and book review essayist for a number of journals, he has caught the attention of our membership for his thinking and writing on ethnicity and culture and theories of technique. A remarkable teacher, in one year he's able to teach students from the first year of college all the way to fifth year fellows of child psychiatry.
He teaches a course called “Psychoanalysis, Repetition and the Human Sciences” to college freshmen, “The Practice of Medicine”, where he focuses on teaching interviewing skills, to first year medical students, an “Introduction to Psychoanalytic Theory” course to fourth year medical students, “Psychodynamic Theories behind Psychotherapy” to third year psychiatry residents, and a human development course to fifth year fellows in psychiatry. Now he has added the teaching of a human development course at the New York Freudian Society (Washington DC) to his already full load. As if that were not enough, he carries a regular load of psychoanalytic patients and still functions as Associate Dean in the medical school. He also undertakes projects on community change for local groups, as well as international groups, for example, in the Baltics. From the standpoint of human interest, therefore, his career carries a curious mixture of altruism, commitment to social change, integrity in the teaching of metapsychology, and interdisciplinary projects in the human sciences. He hales from Ghana, West Africa, trained in London, and is an American citizen.
HIB: Thanks for meeting with me. Your work has been attracting attention. You have been espousing a phenomenon called “trans-generational haunting.” What are you referring to?
MA: Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, two French psychoanalysts, first used the term in their work on the phantom as a metapsychological construct. I am interested in how toxic psychological projects of prior generations are subtly injected, deferred and/or transmitted into subsequent generations in multifarious ways.
HIB: How did you come to think of trauma in this particular way?
MA: The inspiration for this line of inquiry presented itself to me as an adolescent of fifteen when I was studying the poetry of W. H. Auden and was struck by the line in his poem, “On this Island”, where he writes: “Ships diverge on urgent voluntary errands.” I have come to see through clinical work and also in the communal memory of traumatized groups how humans carry errands to reduce themselves to ashes or derivatives thereof at the behest of their ancestral transgressors. One of the most powerful depictions of this comes from Robert Stoller's account of his work with the mother of a transsexual boy where the mother reported a recurrent dream: “I had died but my mother was so busy sending me to the store on errands that she did not know I was already dead.” These errands become mentalized and are subsequently carried out in a different form so that the motor remains the same but the license plate changes. Clinically I have observed echoes of the phenomenon of trans-generational haunting in anorexia nervosa, gender identity disorder, some criminal psychopathic conditions, and in the larger societal arena, [among] groups that have undergone massive trauma such as African Americans, Holocaust victims and so on. I encourage those who read my work to do so along with the writings of Ilany Kogan of Israel, Haydee Faimberg of France and Vamik Volkan.
HIB: What basic assumptions underlie your description of this phenomenon?
MA: Three passages from Heinz Hartmann serve as a pivot for my thinking about this phenomenon. The first speaks to how humans are subject to the influence of tradition and how they take over from others a great many of their methods for solving problems. In so doing, they live in past generations as well as in their own contemporary one.
The second speaks to the notion of change of function where defensive operations that were once anchored in instincts may subsequently be carried out in the service of the ego with new apparatuses taking over prior and primitive functions.
The third is Hartmann's view that the results of phenomenological psychology are a necessary foundation upon which explanatory psychology may build results that could also be used in psychoanalytic research.
In my clinical or psychoanalytic research work, therefore, description precedes interpretation. Often where there is tension between the two, I am reluctant to resolve [it]. Why? Because a good description and good interpretation both seek a prior latency in taking us to primordial places.
HIB: You mentioned that there are several other influential sources to your thinking.
MA: Many. I should mention Georges Politzer, a Hungarian who emigrated to France in the 20's. He was a Hegelian Socialist in those days when it was a good thing to be a Socialist. He taught philosophy to workers in France. But the Nazis gave him an ultimatum: he should either discontinue educating the public or be executed. He chose to die, but not before he wrote one of the finest critiques of psychoanalysis. He privileged the latent content and dismissed manifest content as nothing but “a conventional story” and correlatively, the analytic surface as a non-sequitur. He regretted that so much of the structural theory pointed to formalism and abstraction and in so doing, lost the story of the analysand at the level of the first person. Two lessons follow my interest in his critique: firstly, keep the tension between the topographical and the structural theories, and secondly, we are sometimes so busy interpreting that we lose sight of that which is staring us in the face. This is where, generally, good description precedes interpretation.
Harriet Basseches is a member of the TAP Editorial Board.
HIB: I see your thoughts move easily from philosophy to psychology, and from individuals to groups.
MA: That is true. In my view one must have a resumé of skills that allows one to go from representations of knowledge to the transfer of knowledge. But in whatever I do, rigor [involves] fidelity to the phenomenon under observation. In the past, infant observation and work with at-risk mothers gave me the opportunity to sharpen my observational skills. So whatever I do, I must start at the level of naïve description. Accordingly, I can faithfully listen to a child while we play on the floor; listen to an adolescent chide me for not knowing the name of a rock star; sit behind the couch as I listen to an adult patient; and mediate ethnonational conflicts in Eastern Europe. Whatever I do, I can hear the sedimentations of historical grievances, observe how they are reactivated, as well as [listen for] what the individual or traumatized group expect[s] of me by paying particular attention to how they supplement that which has now been reactivated.
“I am interested in how toxic psychological projects of prior generations are subtly injected, deferred and/or transmitted into subsequent generations in multifarious ways.”
HIB: The person who is notably absent in your list of influences, but I do not believe you ignore, is Freud. Perhaps it is too obvious to mention, but certainly the echo of Freud's ideas permeate and resonate with these other sources.
MA: Yes indeed. Allow me to put together a bald and representative way that I think. Freud showed us that a drive has a source, operates under pressure, has an aim and an object. What trans-generational haunting has shown me is that this notion of Freud's can be radicalized into a developmental history of instinctual goals by marrying concepts from drive theory and object relations theory. The result is that we can no longer say that the source of an instinct is the subject's body alone; rather, the source of an instinct can also be from an anterior other or even multiple agents. We can no longer say that an instinct operates exclusively with urgency; rather, an instinct can both be urgent and deferred through a deceptively dormant intercession between generations. We can no longer say that an instinct's aim, active and passive, is to seek satisfaction of libidinal or aggressive ends; rather, those instinctual aims can be collapsed into one another and compromised, as when a subject accepts an infanticidal project from an other only to contest it and/or transform it. We can no longer perceive an object that performs or participates in a subject's libidinal or aggressive aim as the object of desire or of hostile dependence and so on; rather we must think of objects as though they were simultaneously potentially independent, potentially intermediary, as well as potentially a member in a series of linkages, for example, across generations.
So Freud remains the anchor. It is difficult to train at the Anna Freud Centre and lose that basic foundation.
HIB: I am truly grateful for this opportunity to talk with you about your work on trans-generational haunting. There is so much more we could share with our readers who I am sure will look forward to future publications of yours. Thank you!