Healing the wounds of our fathers: intergenerational trauma, memory, symbolization and narrative

This paper explores the issue of cultural trauma, which is an area of concern in psychology generally and has emerged as one within the International Association for Analytical Psychology's Router training programme. A summary of responses to the issues of cultural trauma and complexes (alongside cultural differences) within analytical psychology are presented, followed by an overview of findings from the IAAP's evaluation of the Router training programme. These findings are then aligned with contemporary sociological research. The significant issues involved in healing cultural trauma seem to be 'working through', as well as the place of imagination, dreamwork, symbolism and metaphor. Research in Poland has specifically highlighted the importance of good governance, economic vitality, personal and social capital (as in education and social participation), a meaning system, certain external contingencies, channels of mobility and ritualism.

Section: European Router Experiencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Healing cultural trauma and its application to the Router programme

Merchant¹

2020

“…Transgenerational transmission of trauma is now widely documented (Connolly 2011; Kogan 2012; Loewenberg 2012; Muller‐Paisner 2012; Schwab 2010; Volkan 1998, 2006b, 2012). The impact of these conditions in Poland on the individual's ability to make sense of the experience of the past generations can be easily imagined, both on conscious and unconscious levels.…”

Section: Collective Memory In Post‐traumatic Culture – Polish Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Monuments of memory: defensive mechanisms of the collective psyche and their manifestation in the memorialization process

Kalinowska¹

2012

The paper searches for insight in the area of collective memory as a part of collective consciousness, a phenomenon understood as a stabilizing factor for a society's self-image and identity. Collective memories are seen as originating from shared communications transmitting and creating the meaning of the past in the form of narrative, symbols and signs. As such, they contain the individual, embodied and lived side of our relations to the past. As well as the identity-building and meaning-making functions of collective memories, their defensive function is discussed with a focus on commemorative practices taking place in a transitional space between psychic and social life. Fears of a lack of collective identity and coherence have contributed to the way Polish commemorative practices have been shaped. This is considered in relation to the Smolensk catastrophe in 2010, viewed in the context of the Jungian concept of the collective psyche and the psychoanalytical understanding of defensive group mechanisms against trauma, especially those relating to loss and mourning. It leads to a consideration of how historical experiences and the experience of history can be accessed, as well as their meaning for individual and group development.

“…2 'Dissociation' is such a broadly used term that I should clarify that here I follow Winnicott's usage (implying the 'unintegration' he attributed to himself and Jung). It should be distinguished from the more extreme traumatically engendered condition (Connolly 2011) in which any capacity to represent self experience is ruptured: a state of paralysis in which even the blank impress is lost within a void, unmitigated by any 'colours spreading out'. 3 Appropriately enough one definition of 'exemplar' offered in the OED is: 'an archetype whether real or ideal, 1618'.…”

Section: 'Interprefaction'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Jung's shadow:negation and narcissism of the Self

Meredith‐Owen

2011

The cave walls of prehistoric man record two contrasting hand impressions: the one positive - a direct imprint; the other negative - a blank defined by a halo of colour. Jung's disturbed, displaced contact with his mother led to a struggle in establishing an integrated sense of 'I'; instead to create a sense of Self he brilliantly contrived to illuminate the darkness around that blank impress. The resulting lifework, enhanced by Jung's multifarious capacities as artist and philosopher as well as physician, is deeply impressive; yet Winnicott (1964) in his review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) nevertheless alludes to Jung's 'own need to search for a self with which to know' (p. 450). Passages from the autobiography are considered that appear to corroborate Winnicott's contention that Jung had a 'blank', potentially psychotic, core. Yet it is also argued that the psychoanalytic mainstream has undervalued the subtlety and creativity of Jung's own intuitive response to his shadow and that a sympathetic appreciation of this can still valuably inform our contemporary approaches to narcissistic disorders, especially dissociation.