The work of French psychoanalysts Françoise Davoine and Jean-MaxGaudillière centres on the understanding of the ways in which large historical traumas associated with war are brought to life by descendants, often generations later, who carry an experience that they cannot understand and that erupts as psychosis. They have devised a unique clinical method in which, together with the patient, they research what they term as the missing 'social link', a link broken within an earlier generation by a personal or family experience of an extreme situation. Their work, which draws upon a historical reframing and broadening of Lacan, is deeply resonant with implications for pychosocial enquiry within the social sciences. In this article, we show how we developed a method for engaging with interviews with women who were serial migrants. In paying attention to their story, we show how we attended to the complex manifestations in the material of the embodied experiences associated with a history of slavery, colonization, poverty and migration. Our aim was to develop a mode of working, which did not pathologize but still recognized the transmission of suffering and distress in complex ways and its twists and turns across generations. In doing this, we sought to provide a way of working that radically rejected any split between a psychic/personal and social/historical realm.

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The paths to adulthood for the last three generations of young Norwegian women have been accompanied by significant geographical and social changes. How has this process of modernization been experienced from 'below': from the perspective of everyday life and through the eyes of the young women themselves? This article presents results from a three-generational study consisting of interviews with a sample of 18-year-old Norwegian girls, their mothers and grandmothers. The significance of upbringing, parental identification and management of gender for young women's processes of modernization is analysed. These issues affect choices made in education and romantic relationships -choices crucial to social mobility. The study looks at how the processes of social mobility and cultural modernization have been associated with the psychological project of becoming adults for these young women.KEY WORDS adolescence x education x generation x love x social change x young girls What is entailed in the process of growing up? There is little doubt that the answer to this question varies according to culture, social class and generation. Still, the following elements often apply: moving out from the parental home, becoming economically independent of the parents and involvement in sexual relations. How have these rites of passage been performed by young Norwegian women over the last three generations? In what order do they occur and what do they imply? What means have been available socially, culturally and psychologically for becoming an adult?We discuss this topic by presenting the results from a study across three generations. A group of eight 18-year-old Norwegian girls and their mothers and grandmothers were interviewed, with the aim of analysing changing patterns in adolescence, with particular attention to genderThe European Journal of Women's Studies

Most social and cultural researchers emphasize the way people use cultural concepts to organize their social world and to constitute themselves and others in meaningful ways. In this article, this is taken one step further through taking into account the way that such cultural constructions are animated and loaded with personal meaning and emotions that stem from specific psycho-biographies. Making use of object-relational theory in general, and Chodorow’s theory of ‘power of feeling’ in particular, the authors analyse the self-talk of two young women, positioning themselves in a ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ discourse respectively, relating these discursive positions to the generational context in which they seem to have evolved. The aim is to contribute to a more concrete and historically situated understanding of subjectivities as ongoing processes interweaving both cultural demands and personal constructions, which always involve emotional meaning.

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