TRANSGENERATIONAL HAUNTING
by Fonya Lord Helm, PhD, ABPP
Long ago I read about a man who suffered from paralysis in his arm. He was completely unaware that his father had had his arm amputated as punishment for thievery. When the patient was able to discover his father’s tragic history, he was able to understand his previously unconscious relationship with his father, and his paralysis evaporated. He no longer needed to stay connected to his father in that way.
“Transgenerational haunting,” is a phrase first used by Abraham and Torok, two French psychoanalysts, for the transmission of trauma from one generation to another. It occurs as part of the history of all people and cultures. The parents’s experiences affect the inner lives of their children and grandchildren, and cultural trauma is reworked in complex ways by succeeding generations of that culture.
The most traumatic experiences are the hardest to integrate since they create a state of shock and a need not to know, in spite of actually having memories in the body and mind. The experience of feeling can get dissociated and foreclosed. Later, the known trauma emerges in a different form since it is only disavowed, not destroyed.
Sometimes, the indication that something bad has happened appears in a way that is truly mystifying and seems to make no sense. A mother held her newborn baby out from her body with her arms very stiff, instead of cuddling her baby in the usual way. It turned out that her own mother, the baby’s grandmother, had broken both arms shortly before she, the mother, was born. When the mother was a baby, she was held by the grandmother in the same way, with stiff outstretched arms, because it was the only way she was able to do it.
