Psychotherapeutic Work with Intergenerational Trauma

The “stoppage of time” due to intergenerational trauma PART I: Theoretical presentation

Together with her partner Dr Jean-Max Gaudillière, Dr Françoise Davoine’s life work has been focused on understanding intergenerational history as a key to the apparent “craziness” of her patients’ psychotic delusions. In this presentation, she suggests that the hiding of abuse and crimes when the truth has been impossible to accept (for example, an experience of a war atrocity), requires the defense of delusion within the family. We see how the secreting of trauma by a parent or grandparent can leave an unconscious impression of those events in the mind of a child or grandchild which later re-emerges in the imagery of a psychotic episode. She proposes that good psychoanalyzts are those who can hear clinical stories as “quixotic”, explanatory diversions that may be communicating the trauma of a past generation; that it is only via openness between the two partners in the therapy relationship that the buried, historical truth can emerge in both minds and allow healing to occur. This presentation is illustrated with references to Laurence Stern’s novel, Tristram Shandy, which the speaker offers as a classic illustration of intergenerational trauma.