We witness in recent times the occurrence of wars and destruction in various parts of the world. Couple and family psychoanalysts, members of the AIPCF, are concerned about the destructiveness that is being acted out in these situations, against children, the elderly, women, entire families in disregard of the ethics that should characterise human relations, the right to autonomy of peoples and international laws.

They condemn the invasion of Ukraine and the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people by the government of Israel and its prime minister who, in response to the atrocious and sudden attack by Hamas on 7 October 2023, brought death and devastation to a defenceless people. We are aware that the people of Israel do not identify with their government.

Our work with couples and families has shown us many times how fierce and unprocessed traumas carry over into subsequent generations and we are therefore concerned about such transgenerational legacies.

The great risk of these traumatisms is the fact that they do not end in the here and now, but enter into the transgenerational chain of memory’s transmission, which consists of a crossing, between generations, between psychic spaces, of contents whose elaboration and transformation was not possible. Unfortunately, these memories are maintained in a timeless dimension that is neither modified nor remodelled.

Ferenczi spoke in this regard of “dead clinical fragments”, exiled parts of the mind from the conscious and unconscious. They may appear through other languages, through a kind of inscription in the body that represents one of the most primitive vehicles of communication. But everyday actions can also carry these memories, and especially in family groups it becomes an organisational mode of the traumatic links that are transmitted from parent to child and that we can observe in family myths or in the myths of a people.

Over time, we have experienced traumas such as genocides and migrations, and it seems to us with astonishment that the product of such traumas is dehumanisation.

We are also convinced of the need to manifest our witness. Freud stated that the psychoanalyst is called upon to be the Nebenmensch, the neighbouring human being. The witness of the close human being has a meaning and a strength also with respect to the social pact because it induces one to regain trust in the other, in listening to the other, in the recognition of existence that the other can give you.

For all these reasons the International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis expresses its solidarity with the suffering populations in the hope that medical and food aid can resume in the regions affected by the massacre, and that the release of all hostages can be obtained, restoring human and social rights.

Anna Maria Nicolò
President AIPCF