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Introduction
One of the most pressing problems of our day, here and abroad, is the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next. as a sociologist and psychoanalyst, I have long resisted the notion that the passing on of traumatic injury, occurring in one generation, to the next is a matter of inevitability. elsewhere I have explored the social scientific research on strategies that can disrupt this intergenerational process (Prager & rustin, 1993; Prager, 2011). In this essay I continue this exploration, but now from the viewpoint of experiences and insights gleaned from my psychoanalytic consulting room, informed by my psychoanalytic education and training, and guided by my research that reveals the potency of the socio-cultural world to shape even the inner world of individuals (Prager, 1998). This attention to traumatic transmission across generations will allow me simultaneously to reflect on what it means to bridge the discipline of psychology and sociology in a common intellectual and social project. I hope it also illustrates what it offers to practice psychoanalysis as an interdisciplinary theory and method.
Presenting the Past
Since my psychoanalytic training, I have been interested in the problem of trauma and how best to treat it. Psychic trauma is the result of an event or set of ongoing experiences that are so overwhelming for individuals that they prove impossible to process internally and contain psychologically. Specific protocols exist for the treatment of individuals when these traumatic events have just occurred: school shootings, sexual violence, the experience of imminent physical danger, etc. yet, when the trauma has occurred well in the past, the necessary treatment changes. Traumas sometimes go underground for a time but, like PTSD, may resurface, triggering memories that prove to be more powerful than the individual who tries to contain them. Night terrors, intrusive memories, and flashbacks are all symptoms that can occur or recur long after the traumatic moment itself.
Two psychoanalytic axioms characterize an analytic approach to the treatment of trauma. first, trauma is a deeply personal experience, always a combination of an external event or set of experiences with an internal process of registering it, remembering it, associating to other dimensions of one's life triggered by it and, in this way, giving significance and meaning to it....