Because Adrienne Harris so eloquently discussed intergenerational transmission of trauma on March 18, 2017 at the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society [see 3-21-2017 post], I thought I might share a bit of what Bruce Bradfield’s wrote on the subject:
“[P]sychic trauma...attempts to make meaning out of a phenomenon that resists knowing. … [D]issociation [i]s a primarily relational process, which keeps traumatic experience
unformulated and ambiguously signified in both the mother and her child. … [It is] a defense against intolerably painful affective states,which manifests in the mother’s intrapsychic experience, and in the relationship between mother and child…[T]rauma [is]...an experience that overwhelms the individual with inassimilable affects.
“[E]lements of parental traumatic experience are passed on to their children …and… subsequent generations. …[D]issociation is a consequence of a disruption of the parent’s caregiving capacity. [The parent’s] disrupted capacity to be emotionally attuned to the child ...[and] may impact on the child’s expectations[.]... [W]hat may be dissociated are not only the emotions associated with the parent’s trauma, but also the child’s need for relationship with the parent. …[T]rauma [is] communicated through patterns of relationship. … [C]hildhood interpersonal trauma has implications for the development of a particular disruption in lived experience [going on being], affecting attachment relationships directly. [There is] a relation between attachment style and posttraumatic responses.
“[A]ttunement within the relationship between mother and child facilitates the development of a capacity to integrate and contain painful emotions. … [D]issociation [is] an experience of disruption of the... capacity to integrate painful affective experiences. [D]issociation [is] manifest in future interpersonal relationships. …[and] reflects the incommunicability of traumatic histories, with trauma being held in familial and individual narratives as something unformulated and nameless.”
Bradfield, B. (2011). The Dissociation of Lived Experience: A Relational Psychoanalytic Analysis of the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma. Int. J. Psychoanal. Self Psychol., 6:531-550. […]
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