Unresolved Mourning and the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma

This article was first published on the "Caesura" page.

In collective trauma, memory is something far more than the recording of an event in history. Traumatic memory carries within it a living, dynamic force, and just as it can remake and redefine a group, it can equally tear that group apart. The members of a society can grow closer to one another in the wake of a catastrophe, if they recognize their shared suffering — or they can grow estranged from one another, if part of them holds the pain to be real while another part denies it. The fate of a collective trauma does not depend solely on how severe and bitter the event itself was; the form and manner of its narration, its mourning, and its transmission to later generations are equally decisive. For this reason, both the groups who were harmed and their children face the difficult task of narrating the trauma fairly and finding meaning within it.

Like psychological trauma, collective trauma, when it is not acknowledged and understood, tends to give rise to "unresolved grief." Although death lies at the heart of many catastrophes, mourning here does not simply mean bereavement.

Survivors and witnesses of catastrophe, beyond the loss of their loved ones, may for a long time fail to recover their fundamental sense of safety and trust in society, and may lose their connection to other generations, or their image of the future.

In the psychoanalytic sense, mourning is a complex psychic process through which we gradually come to terms with the reality that we have lost a beloved person, a social position, our health, our youth, or some important hope or aspiration.

If the process of mourning does not meet with serious obstruction, we become able to redefine our relation to the lost object and to find for it a new place within our present life.

For collective losses, cultures are generally equipped with certain resources — language, art, rites, and rituals of mourning. But in social catastrophes, especially where violence has been exercised by political or military power, the very process of mourning is itself under threat. Difficulty of access to the bodies of the dead, the impossibility of holding proper ceremonies, or the danger inherent in honoring those who were lost, all make the work of mourning more complicated for survivors.

At the same time, since mourning means confronting intense psychic pain, the members of a society may themselves resort to defensive mechanisms in order to protect themselves from that pain.

Denial (ignoring or minimizing the suffering of a particular group, disbelief, or haggling over the "real significance" of an event), splitting (dividing the world into simple dualities — good/bad, traitor/hero, friend/enemy), manic reaction (a flight forward, triumphalist display, excessive hope, positive slogans disconnected from reality), and enactment (living out and acting upon the trauma rather than thinking about it) are among the most important collective defenses employed against the suffering that arises from collective trauma.

Should a group or a generation among the members of a society resort excessively to such defensive mechanisms, their unresolved grief is bound to repeat itself. What has not been able to become memory and narrative returns instead in action.

Individuals or later generations may find themselves recreating and living out scenes that bear no relation to their own direct experience. They may become captive to intense biases, extreme beliefs, distressing bodily reactions, or psychological difficulties that have nothing to do with their present circumstances. This form of trauma's repetition is what we call "intergenerational trauma."

The intergenerational transmission of trauma tends to occur less through the transmission of a clear story than through denial and silence. Very often the child does not know what the father, mother, or other elders before them witnessed, what they lost, and what they resisted or surrendered to — because any reference at all to what happened is far too painful and too frightening to bear.

Many people would rather not burden others' hearts with painful memories and difficulties which they mostly attribute to their own personal weakness. And yet, through the accumulation of hundreds and thousands of verbal and nonverbal interactions, the members of a family or a group find themselves confronted directly with an anxiety, a prohibition, an anger, and a shame for which they can find no explanation.

The intergenerational transmission of trauma most often occurs through attachment, within the context of the family. In order to preserve their bond with a wounded parent, children involuntarily enter into that parent's psychic world. If the parent remains caught up in unresolved fear, loss, and shame, the child unconsciously comes to feel inclined to carry part of the parent's psychic burden. In cases of very severe trauma, this is sometimes the only way the child has of preserving an emotional bond with the parent at all. Identifying with the suffering of the wounded parent — or, in its more complicated forms, standing in for the parent's lost objects, or even for the objects who tormented them — however much it diverts the course of the child's character and selfhood, remains safer than living in a world where the parent's states of mind are unpredictable.

In societies that have lived through repeated periods of war, repression, massacre, exile, humiliation, and insecurity, speaking of trauma is by no means an easy task, and the resolution of collective grief is a highly complicated, time-consuming affair. Each generation confronts a portion of a past that has either never been fully spoken, or has been distorted, or has never had sufficient opportunity for reconsideration and revision. And yet, until some member of a family, or some group of a society's members, resolves to break the cycle of trauma, its painful consequences cannot be escaped.

This is why collective grief cannot be resolved without testimony being given, and fully heard. Although narration neither undoes the catastrophe nor necessarily the pain that accompanies it, it is very often the first step toward release from the grip of intergenerational trauma, and toward finding meaning within an otherwise endless chain of suffering.

Should a society fail to keep its narratives alive, even the most horrifying of catastrophes will lose their "traumatic meaning" and fade from memory. What remains behind is a deep and nameless pain — one that, for generations to come, like a wandering ghost, will steal the peaceful sleep of that society's children.

Payvand Jalali, Psychoanalytic Therapist