Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma

Doris Brothers, author of The Shattered Self, spoke in Tampa March 10, 2012 on trauma,and briefly alluded to intergenerational transmission of trauma. I would like to elaborate on some of the neurobiological mechanisms that might illuminate how intergenerational transmission of trauma occurs. To that end, I utilize Alan Schore’s Advances in Neuropsychoanalysis, Attachment Theory, and Trauma Research: Implications for Self Psychology.(2002). Psychoanal. Inq., 22:433-484.


As we are aware from infant research and neurobiology, an infant requires the presence of an attuned other for its optimal development and to optimally organize its experience. Winnicott said there is no such thing as a baby, that is, there is a mutual (interdependence) influence (regulation) between infant and mother in which the two function as a unit, including unconscious communications that serve to develop the brain of the infant. [This bulwarks the relational theories which take psychoanalysis from a one-person (intrapsychic) to a two person (intersubjective) psychology.] The 'good enough' caregiver helps the infant maintain its homeostatic equilibrium and facilitates the emerging self. Instead of the Cartesian mind-body duality (or of self from the environment) regulation of physiological functions builds the brain (the mind, the self) in particular ways.

A mother who may herself utilize dissociation as a result of her own childhood trauma, or due to depression, may be unavailable to regulate her infant. The 'good enough' caregiver helps the immature (as yet unformed neuronal connections, and unmyelinated peripheral nerves) infant regulate through her gaze, soothing voice, etc). Ruptures in regulation affect the infant’s homeostasis, and negatively affect attachment. They may even threaten the infant’s survival. Additionally, the infant is unable to acquire experience for self regulation and restoration of its equilibrium. In an attempt to restore homeostasis, the infant must divert energy away from needed growth, development, and learning (sometimes leading to failure to thrive, to lower IQ, and lower socio-emotional learning). Because brain growth is experience-dependent, experience with dysregulation negatively impacts the developing brain, the self, and the sense of self in relation with others, particularly during the brain’s growth spurt in the first three years of life. It can lead to later psychopathology, e.g. affect dysregulation commonly found in certain psychiatric disorders.

The right hemisphere, larger in the first two years, and, more than the left, processes and stores early infant experiences. Resonant attachment experiences involve “synchronized and ordered directed flows of energy” in the primary caregiver’s brain and the infant’s brain. The right hemisphere, more than the left, also has extensive connections with the limbic system. The limbic system is the emotional processing center which helps to guide emotional expression and behavior and organize new, procedural learning. The right brain is central to “integrating and assigning emotional-motivational significance to cognitive impressions” and “the association of emotion with ideas.” The right brain, with its connections to the right prefrontal cortex, allows the sense of self continuous through time. The right hemisphere, with its bodily connections, analyzes signals from the body, and helps regulate appropriate survival mechanisms, through the autonomic nervous system (ANS)which, in turn, help maintain a cohesive sense of self.

An infant responds to traumatic chronic misattunement by hyperarousal or by dissociation. When attuned response is not forthcoming, a distressed infant initially increases its attempts (e.g. by crying) to engage the mother. Should this fail, the infant, hopeless to effect the other, conserves energy, and seems to implode, go limp, itself dissociate, becoming helpless. The ANS lends a physiological explanation for hyperarousal and subsequent hypoarousal. The sympathetic and parasympathetic systems work to maintain homeostasis. The sympathetic ANS prepares the body for fight-flight (increased heart rate, increase blood flow to the skeletal muscles, etc); and the parasympathetic, responding to elevations in stress-induced cortisol, is energy-conserving (going quiet, staring off in space, and becoming limp).

As Winnicott noted, “ If maternal care is not good enough, then the infant does not really come into existence, since there is no continuity in being; instead, the personality becomes built on the basis of reactions to environmental impingement.”
We know that dissociation affects one’s sense of subjectivity. A mother, or grandmother, who has suffered herself with unresolved trauma conveys her terror and dissociation to her infant via infant matching of the mother’s right corticolimbic firing patterns, inadvertently transmitting to the next generation her, or her mother’s, experience of trauma. Mother’s “regulatory strategy of dissociation is inscribed into the infant's right brain implict-procedural memory system.”

Maltreatment in childhood, then, is a growth-inhibiting environment for the developing brain and results in “structural defects of cortical-subcortical circuits of the right brain, the locus of the corporeal-emotional self.” “[D]issociation is associated with a deficiency of the right brain” and “early relational trauma is particularly expressed in right hemisphere deficits”. The untoward consequences include disorders in attachments, regulation of affect, and subjectivity and sense of self, with threats to going-on-being.

An Introduction to "Prisoners of Childhood" by Alice Miller (1981)

Prisoners of Childhood, published by Basic Books,(republished under it's German name Drama of the Gifted Child in 1997) is ironically a basic, but essential book that focuses on the the loss of the self (and its origins) and on the traumatic consequences of this loss. Prisoners of Childhood is divided into three short chapters rich in psychoanalytic insights (especially in the first two chapters).

First, a little bit about the two editions of the book. The original edition centered around the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism. In the ensuing years, Miller had a complete falling out with the psychoanalytic community and even turned away from the concept of psychoanalysis itself, which is a bit confounding given what a gifted psychoanalyst she was. Thus in the 2nd edition she stripped the work of any and all psychoanalytic "jargon". I believe something was lost in the process, so I have chosen to review the original.

Like my review (March 17, 2011) of Gaslighting... (Dorpat), I will quote this book extensively for it is rich in deep insights spoken so eloquently they hardly need explanation.

In the foreword Miller focuses on the ways many children are taught to behave at a very early age. With this focus on behavior, the child, who cannot risk losing his parents' love, complies, behaving before he can possibly understand what the behavior means. Miller than goes on to show how this leads to the development of a "false self" in gifted children (by "gifted" Miller is referring to those children that are very good at modifying their behavior to secure the parents' love, i.e. surviving).

On the lack of "respect for others" found in the narcissist, Miller has this to say:

If a mother respects both herself and her child from the first day onward, she will never need to teach him respect for others. (viii)

How lost this is on so many parents! I see it all around me, the commandment "Thou shall Honor thy mother and thy father" is drilled into a child's head on the one hand, but that honor is never practiced in the parent-child relationship. Children learn through observation and experience, what better way to teach a child respect than to respect yourself as well as the child? This commandment ought to be "Honor thyself and thy child". The original is a poisonous commandment that has misguided countless parents and poisoned society.

Miller continues:

... a mother who [was not respected as a child] will crave this respect from her child as a substitute; and she will try to get it by training him to give it to her. The tragic fate of such training and such "respect" is described in this book, (viii)

Miller makes some poignant observations about this early focus on behavior:

[it is inconceivable to love others] ...if one cannot love oneself as one really is. And how could a person do that if, from the very beginning, he has had no chance to experience his true feelings and to learn to know himself? For the majority of sensitive people, the true self remains deeply and thoroughly hidden. (viii-ix)

Miller's point is that the 'gifted' child, the child who most successfully conforms to her parents' wishes of behaving a certain way (and thus being something the child is not) most thoroughly loses any notion of love and respect for who she really is.

Miller poignantly concludes:

Such people are enamored of an idealized, conforming, false self. They will shun their hidden and lost true self, unless depression makes them aware of its loss or psychoses confronts them harshly with that true self... (ix)

On page ix we get the origin of the books title, where Miller speaks of the "true self's 'solitary confinement' within the prison of the false self." (ix) For Miller then, the ultimate goal of therapy is to help the patient experience his true feelings which will allow him to face repressed instinctual conflicts, which he will experience intensely. (x)

I could justifiably end this review with the opening sentence, one which could not be more insightful or informative to the therapist and patient:

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and the unique history of our childhood. (3)

but continuing,

for many people the truth is so essential that they must pay dearly for its loss with grave illness. (4)

I have born deeply personal witness to the veracity of this statement! "The truth hurts, but lies kill" I often say.
Miller goes on to say

Sometimes I ask myself whether it will ever be possible for us to grasp the extent of the loneliness and desertion to which we were exposed as children and hence intrapsychically are exposed as adults." (5)

by Tim LaDuca

(To be continued...)