Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma

Clara Mucci is a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist practicing in Milan and Pescara, Italy. She is Full Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Chieti, where she taught English Literature and Shakespearean Drama. She received a PhD from Emory University, Atlanta, and was a fellow in 2005-2006 at the Institute of Personality Disorder, New York, directed by Otto Kernberg. The author of several monographies on Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory, she has taught in London (Westminster College), Atlanta, and New York (Hunter College).

'Using the resources of neuroscientific and psychological research, Professor Mucci weaves a dense web of connection between the vicissitudes of early life experience, childhood abuse, adult tragedies and persecutions, and the psychic consequences of trauma on personal lives, psychiatric disorders, and cultural processes. A tour de force of interdisciplinary synthesis, theorization, and deep analysis.'- Lewis Kirshner, Clinical Professor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Training and Supervising Analyst Boston Psychoanalytic Institute 'This book is a major synthesizing contribution to the burgeoning field within contemporary psychoanalysis of new approaches to the understanding and treatment of trauma. Clara Mucci shows how our involvement with victims of trauma requires a revised view of the ethical stance of the analyst, and how individual psychoanalytic treatment can interact beneficially to help mitigate the effects of trauma as a wider phenomenon that crosses generations and sends reverberations through whole societies. Mucci writes, as she always does, with insight, compassion, and deep humanity.'- Robert A. Paul, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University, and a Psychoanalyst in private practice'In this remarkable feat of interdisciplinary scholarship Clara Mucci masterfully integrates past and present psychoanalytic studies on trauma, recent attachment and interpersonal neurobiological data on disorganized attachment, various survivor literatures, and deep clinical experience in order to forge direct links between individual early "relational trauma" and collective "massive social trauma." Her creative and groundbreaking work on revenge and on forgiveness has radical clinical and ethical implications for not only psychotherapists treating trauma but also for the overarching culture, many of which are now experiencing traumatic stress. This is a pioneering contribution, a bold step forward in our understanding of the darker side of the human condition.' - Allan N. Schore, Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California at Los Angeles; David Geffen School of Medicine; author of The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy'Clara Mucci provides us with a book of impressive scope - a comprehensive, erudite conceptualization of human-caused trauma through a detailed examination of interrelated findings from attachment theory, neurobiology, genetics, and different (and sometimes conflicting) psychoanalytic perspectives. Her exploration is scholarly and thoughtful throughout, while also poignantly capturing the subjective experience of trauma in its many dimensions. Mucci considers the central role of interpersonal connectedness, in its different forms, in fostering resilience, and offers a rich psychoanalytic meditation on the places of mourning, creativity, and forgiveness in the process of overcoming trauma-including what victims need from those around them, and from their therapists. Even the most experienced clinicians will come away with a more thorough, integrated understanding of trauma and an enriched clinical approach to their work with traumatized patients.' - Jay Frankel, Adjunct Clinical Associate Professor, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York University; Associate Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues'This book offers a precious instrument of study and research, a rare opportunity to investigate the encounter-crash between not-Me objects and the processes of subjectvivation..opening new roads for future investigation, holding together both the subject and the object, without the threat of reciprocal annihilation.'- Anna Ferruta, Full member of the AFT Societa Psicoanalitica Italiana, and of The International Psychoanalytical Association

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSABOUT THE AUTHORPREFACE by Otto F. KernbergCHAPTER ONE From early relational trauma, to abuse, to massive social traumaCHAPTER TWO Psychoanalysis of trauma: contemporary psychoanalysis and/as testimonyCHAPTER THREE Generations of trauma: reflections on the transmission of trauma from the first to the second and third generationCHAPTER FOUR Going beyond trauma: mourning, connectedness, creativity, and the practice of forgivenessREFERENCESINDEX