Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma

Prophecy Coles is a retired psychotherapist. Her publications include The Importance of Sibling Relationships in Psychoanalysis, Sibling Relationships, The Uninvited Guest from the Unremembered Past, The Shadow of the Second Mother and Psychoanalytic and Psychotherapeutic Perspectives on Stepfamilies and Stepparenting.

“The intriguing title demands we listen in to what is never spoken in our own histories. Those vibrations from the unspoken tensions and dynamics in our families’ as well as all the social prejudices and events contribute irrevocably to shape our lives and selves. This is a constant unknown to be questioned to the end of living those lives we have silently shaped. This is a fascinating ‘autobiography’ written, or perhaps conducted, with a psychoanalytic lens on the blinded influences in our lives, from beginning to end. This book is not just for reading a powerful thoughtfulness, but also for continued self-reflection on what we, the readers, have silenced in our own lives. No-one could finish reading this book and continue believing that we already know our own life-story. We can only go on discovering what we have failed to discover in our past self-reflections.”R. D. Hinshelwood, Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society and Emeritus Professor of University of Essex, UK“The Intergeneration Transmission of Trauma is an extraordinary book. Exquisitely written, highly readable, it is vivid, personal, and extremely erudite. The author is deeply engaged in history, social criticism, philosophy, and literary criticism. All of these are woven into her psychoanalytic reflection. This text is rich and nuanced, embracing, empathic and wise. Readers from multiple disciplines will delight in this book.”Sue Grand PhD, Faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Programme in Psychoanalysis, USA and Author of The Reproduction of Evil“The intergenerational transmission of trauma” can sound rather theoretical. In this book Prophecy Coles brings it vividly to life. She describes very directly ancestral histories of trauma, in several families and ethnic communities, which, suppressed or left unspoken, create the ghost-haunted spaces in which neurotic misery is bred. Her examples include not only Freud and the first child psychoanalyst Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, but writers such as W.G. Sebald and Toni Morrison, and very movingly also her own experience in her own family. This book is an important contribution to the enlarging understanding of causal forces in psychological history.David M. Black, Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective, UK

• Introduction 1. History 2. Awake 3. Freud’s Antigone 4. Murder Most Probable 5. Frost Bitten 6. A Colonial Legacy 7. The Angel in the Nursery 8. W. G. Sebald, F. Auerbach and Intergenerational War Trauma 9. An Inner Deadness Within Silence 10. Dark Matters 11. A Story Not to be Passed On 12. The Thing that will not bear Telling 13. Living With