Mine, Yours, Ours? Working Through Transgenerational Trauma with Transgenerational Defense Mechanisms

The construction of the diasporic identity is inextricably linked to the collective memory of home culture: its geography, history, traumatic experiences, and achievements. This paper tackles the effect of trans-generational trauma, diaspora, and collective memories on the second generation of diasporic individuals as represented in selected poems by the Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan. It traces the development of her exilic identity through the analysis of selected poems by her, written over different periods of time. The poems have been chosen from Alyan's volumes: Atrium (2012), Hijra (2016), the Twenty Ninth Year (2019), and an individual poem published in (2020). The paper examines some significant concepts such as: diaspora, trans-generational trauma, displacement, and home-seeking. The paper argues that trans-generational experiences and collective memories can affect the formation of the identity of second-generational immigrants. It contends that what happened in the past will affect the subsequent generations, and they will permanently be haunted by it.

In August Wilson's play Joe Turner's Come and Gone traumatic events in the lives of past generations return to haunt the characters of the play. This article argues that the horrors of the Middle Passage and of slavery have caused an ontological rupture that produces haunting. The unknown and untold stories of a violent past-a silence that marks the rupture-are loaded with traumatic material, which is unwittingly transmitted from one generation to another. In Joe Turner this trans-generational trauma, which is inextricably linked with questions of mourning and melancholia, is manifest in the traumatized character of Herald Loomis, whose personal experiences of violence mirror those of his ancestors, as well as in the on-going struggle between Western influences and African heritage in the play.

Approaching Trans-generational Trauma in Analytical Psychotherapy

Body-focused anxiety refers to a wide range of negative emotional and social experiences centered around discontent with one's own body. This widely recognized phenomenon is mainly experienced by women across different contexts, often resulting from gendered socialization (Becker (1995) Body, self, and society: the view from Fiji. University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 2016). In modern Chinese society, it is important to understand these complex experiences within the quickly changing social landscape and ideas of womanhood. This study goes beyond clinical settings and the scope of mental illness (such as disordered eating or body dysmorphia) to include a variety of embodied experiences, including gender-related stress, negative self-awareness, and struggles in intimate relationships in the daily lives of young Chinese women. To grasp the current generation's body-focused anxiety, this research suggests examining it through the lens of intergenerational trauma, particularly the embodiment of patriarchal injustice reflected in the deeply connected relationship between Chinese mothers and daughters. Over 7 years, this article presents person-centered ethnography to show that some of the most intense body-focused anxiety among young women is an intergenerationally shaped existential crisis rooted in their mothers' upbringing within an explicit son-preference culture. As part of the intergenerational trauma, the body-focused anxiety is driven by (1) the mothers' unresolved girlhood trauma of being "born into the wrong gender"; (2) the desire to fulfill social obligations, which reflects both intergenerational trauma and the gender-specific challenges faced in a changing patriarchy. This analysis emphasizes that body-focused anxiety is not just a reaction to current social pressures, but a reflection of identities shaped across generations. It reveals that "becoming women" in a specific cultural context is transhistorical and closely linked to unresolved traumas from previous generations. Manifesting in different forms, understanding young women's body-focused anxiety from an intergenerational trauma perspective highlights how ongoing social forces are embodied even as cultural norms and social structures change.

THE PLACE OF AVANT-GARDE MANIFESTOS IN EDUCATION PROGRAMMES

Eternalism says that all times are equally real. Objects existing at past times and objects existing at future times are just as real as objects existing at the present. Properties had at past times and properties had at future times are had just as much as properties had at the present. Indeed, there is no metaphysical difference at all between past, present, and future. They differ only as a result of one’s perspective, akin to the way ‘‘right here’’ differs from ‘‘over there’’. And so the eternalist takes ‘the present’ to be an indexical, like ‘here’ or ‘this place’. With all this in mind, let’s say that the eternalist believes in a subjective present.

Anxiety and depression negatively impact many. Studies suggest depression is associated with future time horizons, or how "far" into the future people tend to think, and anxiety is associated with temporal discounting, or how much people devalue future rewards. Separate studies from linguistics and economics have shown that how people refer to future time predicts temporal discounting. Yet no one-that we know of-has investigated whether future time reference habits are a marker of anxiety and/or depression. We introduce the FTR classifier, a novel classification system researchers can use to analyse linguistic temporal reference. In Study 1, we used the FTR classifier to analyse data from the social-media website Reddit. Users who had previously posted popular contributions to forums about anxiety and depression referenced the future and past more often than controls, had more proximal future and past time horizons, and significantly differed in their linguistic future time reference patterns: They used fewer future tense constructions (e.g. will), fewer high-certainty constructions (certainly), more low-certainty constructions (could), more bouletic modal constructions (hope), and more deontic modal constructions (must). This motivated Study 2, a survey-based mediation analysis. Self-reported anxious participants represented future events as more temporally distal and therefore temporally discounted to a greater degree. The same was not true of depression. We conclude that methods which combine big-data with experimental paradigms can help identify novel markers of mental illness, which can aid in the development of new therapies and diagnostic criteria.

Purpose This paper aims to examine the influence of future and past negative time perspectives on job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The effect of national culture (Mexico versus the USA) as a moderator of the above baseline relationships is also analyzed. Design/methodology/approach The research model is tested using survey data drawn from a sample of 287 Mexican and 274 US MBA students (N = 561). Regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses. Findings Future time perspective has a positive relationship with job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Past negative time perspective has a negative association with both job attitudes. The effect of future time perspective on job satisfaction was significantly stronger in Mexico than in the USA. No other significant differences between the countries were found in terms of the time perspective and job attitudes association. Practical implications The results have implications for managing dispositions that affect work-related attitudes and behaviors with consequences for organizational effectiveness. Originality/value The findings suggest that time perspective affects job attitudes. Further, they also suggest that the interplay between future time perspective and culture influences job satisfaction.

ABSTRACTThe events of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, during which more than 1.5 million Armenians were massacred by the Ottoman Turkish Empire, has left a deep, painful scar on this small but prominent culture. Those who lived through the Armenian Genocide survived death marches, rapes, drownings, physical mutilation, and other such heinous crimes. As they have passed, it is being recognized that subsequent generations continue to fight for justice, manifesting their ancestral pain, sadness, and mourning for the loss of their family members. As sociocultural trauma has a multigenerational impact within families and communities and affects the feeling of membership and belonging within that community, understanding how previous traumas shape future generations of that group is important for clinicians. This article reviews the scarce research on intergenerational trauma in the Armenian community within the United States after the Armenian Genocide, using the constructivist self-development theory to provide clinical implications and suggestions.

Аbstract. The possibility of using the semantic differential of time for revealing the prevailing, including the little-understood, tendencies in the actual mental state and the relation of the individual to reality is known, since it is known that the unity of the individual in the destiny of man is realized by the semantic unity of the past, present and future time in their subjective differentiated meaning. The differences in the perception of the past, present and future time by patients in the dynamics of their disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus have been revealed depending on the receipt of antiretroviral therapy. The study of time factors allowed to differentiate the features of the mental state of these women in the dynamics of the disease. It is established that the ideas about the future of the time in healthy and sick persons in the period of relative remission of their disease are similar. It is characterized by them in a single semantic structure. However, the existing differences in comparing the perception of future factors by patients and practically healthy women suggest that patients have a higher motivational component for the future. The mechanisms of the formation of those components of self-awareness (knowledge and understanding of oneself) in women affected with disease caused by the human immunodeficiency virus, which are related to the concepts and properties of psychological time, are specified and concretized. The results obtained can be used to predict psycho-social adaptation of patients in the dynamics of the disease. This is a prerequisite for conducting preventive psychological measures to reduce the risk of negative clinical dynamics of the disease, primarily because the patient is not just a complex combination of various pathological and pathophysiological processes, but first of all a person is a person in need of a return to full biological and social activity.

This paper explores the experience of time from the perspective of a concept of intentionality derived from Thomas Aquinas. As action directed at some future goal is determined by memorial categories, intentionality contains within it reference to past and future time. Meaning is achieved through action into the world and in turn the self is altered by that action. As the world is essentially an unlabeled place, we organize experience by means of memorial categories. Memorial categories serve as relatively stable templates, modified by the recontextualization that follows from novel experiences. Thus, the sense of the permanence of the past, that gives time its direction, is a construction of our brain. The now moment of experience is not emotionally neutral; our relation between past and future time is mediated by means of feeling rhythmic synchrony, keeping in time with the other provides the earliest medium for emotional bonding.

ABSTRACTHumans have the remarkable ability to mentally travel through past and future times. However, while memory for the times of past events has been much investigated, little is known about how imagined future events are temporally located. Using a think-aloud protocol, we found that the temporal location of past and future events is rarely directly accessed, but instead mostly relies on reconstructive and inferential strategies. References to lifetime periods and factual knowledge (about the self, others, and the world) were most frequently used to determine the temporal location of both past and future events. Event details (e.g., places, persons, or weather conditions) were also used, but mainly for past events. Finally, the results showed that events whose temporal location was directly accessed were judged more important for personal goals. Together, these findings shed new light on the mechanisms involved in locating personal events in past and future times.

Understanding Past tense is closely related to the notions of time, tense, and verb-form. Syntactically, it is claimed that most of the verb forms expressing past and present tenses tend to show a somehow correspondence with past and present times respectively. Yet, in the very nature of language use, this is not always the case. Future time, for instance, can be expressed by more than a form, none of which is specifically used for future tense. This behaviour of the verb phrase is common to both Arabic and English languages Past tense, similarly, might refer to past, present, or future times; furthermore, it might refer to simple, progressive, or non-progressive aspects. The present paper attempts to shed some light-beams on these notions in both languages theoretically and practically. Theoretically, it attempts to explicate areas where past verb-forms can easily be used to indicate, past, present, and future, if possible to call them so, tenses. Practically, the two languages tend to show similarities as well as differences that chracterise them or each of them. It is hypothesised that past verb-forms in English and Arabic tend to show certain similarities in relation to the ways these verbs are formed and used to express past and non-past tenses. Besides, what might be syntactically similar could be completely different from the viewpoint of language use. Conclusions and recommendations of the present paper might be of significant to linguisticans, teachers of Arabic and English, and translators to and fro the two languages.

The purpose of this study was to describe health-promoting behaviours and temporal perspective in low-income adults. Positive health practices represent a broad range of health-promoting behaviours. The ability to adopt positive health practices may be influenced by many factors, one of which is temporal perspective, the perceived relationship between past, present and future times. This exploratory study was conducted in a south central Pennsylvania community with a convenience sample of individuals who were eligible for a subsidized low-income housing programme. Positive health practices were measured using the Personal Lifestyle Questionnaire. Temporal perspective was measured with the Circles Test. The sample consisted of 75 subjects, 61 women (81%) and 14 men (19%). Positive health practices were relatively high (mean = 70 out of a possible score of 96). Forty three per cent of the subjects expressed future temporal dominance and 80% of the subjects in this study expressed non-continuous temporal relatedness. Health-promoting behaviours in this low-income sample were similar to those reported in other samples in middle-class adult samples. The percentage of subjects who expressed future dominance was similar to findings in other samples. The percentage of subjects who expressed non-continuous temporal relatedness was different from findings reported in other samples, suggesting that perception of the relationship of past, present and future times is different in this low-income sample compared with other samples. The temporal relatedness findings suggest that low-income individuals may not believe that adopting positive health practices will influence future health.

Objective: This study aims to examine the psychological impact of intergenerational trauma on family dynamics in post-conflict societies. By exploring personal experiences, psychological effects, and coping mechanisms, the research seeks to understand how trauma is transmitted across generations and how families manage its complex ramifications. Methods: This qualitative study utilized semi-structured interviews with 21 participants from multiple generations within families in post-conflict regions. Participants were selected through purposive sampling to ensure a diverse representation. Thematic analysis was conducted using NVivo software, following the transcription and systematic coding of interview data. Data collection continued until theoretical saturation was achieved, ensuring comprehensive coverage of the research themes. Results: The study identified three main themes: personal experiences of trauma and conflict, psychological impacts on individuals and families, and coping mechanisms and resilience strategies. Participants reported significant psychological effects such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD. Emotional responses included grief, anger, and helplessness, while behavioral changes involved aggression, withdrawal, and substance abuse. Coping strategies ranged from individual practices like mindfulness and exercise to seeking family and community support. The use of traditional healing practices and the availability of community resources were crucial in managing trauma. The findings highlight the enduring nature of intergenerational trauma and its profound impact on family dynamics. Conclusion: Intergenerational trauma profoundly affects family dynamics in post-conflict societies, with significant psychological and emotional consequences. Effective coping mechanisms involve a combination of individual resilience and support from family and community resources. The study underscores the need for comprehensive, culturally sensitive interventions to address the multifaceted challenges posed by intergenerational trauma. Future research should focus on longitudinal studies and quantitative approaches to enhance the understanding and management of intergenerational trauma.