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The idea of shame or guilt being transmitted from one generation to the next is closely linked to trauma and culture. In this article, I first consider the psychoanalytic perspective on transgenerational transmission of trauma (TTT) and then explore three emotional states of mind-shame, pride and dignity-which play such a large part in managing this problem. There are various perspectives on TTT in the literature-prominent being those of Volkan (2002), Faimberg (2005), and Kogan (1995)-whose definitions of it overlap considerably. The central point in these formulations is that the traumatic experiences of one generation can be transmitted unconsciously to the second, and often third generation, in some fashion, such that these children and grandchildren find themselves living out-in their private or professional lives-certain aspects of the original traumata in a way that they cannot recognize or understand because the origins are hidden. The authors seem to agree that if the original experiences were made conscious, later unconscious repetition would be less severe or may even disappear entirely. One might speculate, although we have little evidence for this, that if the first generation of survivors was able to communicate its experiences and its suffering in a coherent and meaningful way to its children, that TTT would not occur. However, as authors like Primo Levi (1986) or Kertesz (1992) have discussed, this may be an almost impossible achievement, since it means imposing clarity and meaningfulness on actions that are so barbaric as to transcend the borders of normal experience.
There are two main questions here: (1) how survivors might unconsciously transmit such traumatogenic experiences to their descendants and (2) how they are recovered, construed, or reconstructed in the course of therapy of those in the second and third generations. Gampel (1986) and Kogan (1995) consider that parents unconsciously exploit their children through a massive process of projective identification to contain the mourning and aggression that they would otherwise have had to feel themselves and which might have made them self-destructive. This notion is consistent with Grubrich-Simitis's (1984) idea of concretisation, a failure of symbolization; Because the parents in the first generation can find no metaphors, no symbolic, language-based way of expressing or communicating what happened to them, their experiences become a kind of concrete "thing" inside the...