Ghost Stories: Transgenerational Trauma and Witnessing in Analyst and Analysand

Abstract

This paper discusses psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a prodigious artist presenting with a unique form of dissociation involving compulsive nearly continuous travel. Symptoms of insomnia, restless work, and flight originated in traumatic experience from his childhood past and his inherited paternal childhood past in Occupied French North Africa. Faimberg’s “telescoping of generations” and Abraham’s “phantom” describe disavowed trauma in earlier generations, often grandparents, transmitted unconsciously to children and grandchildren. Family trauma and attendant-buried secrets evade consciousness and resist analytic attention. By recognizing and witnessing his own traumatic inheritance, the analyst successfully negotiated a significant impasse with an approach different from his relatively classical training. A more relational approach, co-constructed by patient and analyst, enhanced the patient’s experience of being understood. Alternative communication including alterations in the frame, mutual enactment, and analytic witnessing, along with verbal communication, created a more settled frame and deepening of the treatment.