Gender as a Factor in the Transgenerational Transmission of Trauma

Abstract

Feminist therapy theory has focused attention on gender as an organizing variable of personality development. In recent years, feminist theorists have proposed a new model of personality development based upon the construct of relational self. This self-in-relation model proposes that personality development for girls and woman can be described, not as a process of increasing separation and individuation, but rather as a growing capacity for empathy and connectedness. This process of development of relational self has been posited to lead to an enhanced capacity of empathy in girls and women as well as to more permeable ego-boundaries in women, especially in relationships with women, such as mother-daughter relationships. This may lead to a girl taking on her mother's experiences as her own via the process of projective identification between mother and daughter. What this model suggests is that daughters of trauma survivors may be more vulnerable to the transgenerational transmission of parental or familial trauma. The female children, with their greater emotional openness and the capacity for identification with parental feelings and experiences, may unconsciously become the carrier of traumatic experiences that parents with to disown or suppress. This paper blends these theoretical considerations with actual case examples of an adult woman who is the daughter of a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust and another who is the daughter of a survivor of childhood sexual and physical abuse.