REVIEW N° 03 | YEAR 2008 / 1
ARTICLE
The transgenerational violence as a part of the family latent violence. Bodily reminiscences and somatic pathology
Roberto Losso *, Ana Packciarz Losso **
“Which differenciates man from animal is that man is an heir and not a mere descendent” (Ortega y Gasset)
“Unsuspicious lethal forces can pass on from generation to generation and transmit to the children the conviction that they are destined to accept their non existence as separate individuals, before their parents’ eyes” (Mac Dougall, 1989).
Violence comes from the latin vis, which means strength. It was the name of a goddess of the Mythology, sister of the Victory, and was represented by a female figure armed with an armour and in an willing to murder a child with a mace.
Violence, then, is related with strength and with destructiveness. It is also related with the fight for power, with the impulse to dominate and eliminate the other.
Piera Aulagnier (1975) has stated that every human relationship implies a certain level of violence, introducing the notion of primary violence, the violence necessary for the constitution of the Ego. She defines it as “what is imposed from the exterior in the psychic field, causing a first violation of the space and an activity that obeys to laws which are strange to the Ego”. This primary violence implies the complicated process of the first identifications. Instead, the secondary violence “follows the path previously opened by the primary one, representing an excess, generally harmful and never necessary for the functioning of the Ego”. The individuals and the families suffer from different forms of violence, and create myths, destined to “historize” the suffered violences. We can remember that Freud stated that “No generation is capable of hiding the ones that follow it, the significant psychic facts”
That is to say that families are “bound to transmit” what they were not able to elaborate, which alludes to their shortages, structural defects and narcissistic exigencies, an imperative which obeys to a defensive need to maintain their own psychic life.
The delegation (Stierlin) implies that the preceding generations, in agreement with the family myth, will demand unconsciously that the child must accomplish a determined mission inside the family orbit (as a legacy) independently from its own desire.
Along the history, societies created violent rites with a sense similar to that of delegation. This is the way René Girard (1972) refers to the character of pharmakos in ancient Greece, retelling that the cautious city of Athens kept a certain number of miserable people for sacrifices of this type. When a calamity threatened the city, such as epidemics, shortages, foreign invasion, internal disagreements, there was always a pharmacos to the collectivity disposal”.
This pharmacos was the escape victim, a stain which contaminates everything whose death “cleans” the community of all the evil, bringing a sense of tranquility. The pharmakos was carried all over the city attracting to him and accumulating inside him all which was impure, after that he was killed in a ritual ceremony in which all the people belonging to the lower classes participated. He had to attract to him all the malignant violence in order to transform it, through his death, in beneficial violence, which brings about peace and tranquility. (The word pharmacon in ancient Greek meant simultaneously the poison and the antidote, every substance capable of exerting a positive or negative action depending on the circumstances and the administered doses.
In ancient Rome, legates were the public officials sent by the Senate to the recently violently conquered peoples to reconstruct their government.
In families, then, these delegations, these legacies, “delegations of legacies”, exercise a form of transgenerational family violence, which means that they impose on the individuals identification models related with family mythology needs and not those of the singular person. Frequently someone or some people take the role of pharmacos, as it happened in the case we will comment.
By doing so, one of the consequences of this violence can be the development of what we have called trivial identifications (Losso, 2001), a particular type of identification in which the subjects are identified as a sort of caricature of idealized or denigrated characters of the family mythology. Trivial comes from trivium, the intersection of three routes in the ancient Rome, and in a figurative sense, it meant a known or very travelled route. We talk about “trivial” since these identifications have “schematic” aspects, repeated, known and even caricature-like aspects of characters coming from shared family fantasies or from the family myth.
In a certain way, it might be said that these are “false identifications”.
This implies that subjects are put under pressure to meet impossible demands that are, in fact, demands from mythical characters, and remain tied to invisible loyalties (Boszormenyi-Nagy & Spark, 1973).
These legates are transmitted through the transpsychic way (Kaes, 1993, Losso, 2006), that is to say, they are beyond the words, that go through the subjects’ psyche. The transitional space which permits the transformation of the received contents in own elements is missing at this level. The transmission is not performed between the subjects, but through them. These are contents “in a rough state”, with no possibility of being worked through, and that may be felt by the recipient as something that “withdraws vitality” or as a presence of something “strange”, an element that alienates and disturbs. The intersubjective space remains severely limited. What was transmitted is not transformed. It is therefore a repetitive transmission of narcissistic mandates and traumatic experiences that couldn’t be worked through by previous generations, a repetition in which more than one subject is involved and implies a transgenerational violence.
These contents transmitted with no modification from a generation to another, remain as a schism, embodied, encysted but cannot be introjected. They are the fossil remains of Framo (1965) or the ghosts (phantoms) that dwell in crypts of Abraham and Torok (1978)
As Nicholas Abraham has stated: “A word buried in the father is a dead man without a burial in the child”
Eiguer (2007) considers three possibilities of transgenerational violence through three key-words: the “non-said”, which refers to the crypt, the splitting and the ghost; the “badly-said”, the damned, the victim of a male-diction, which evokes the possible malediction of an ancestor, and the “badly said”, the “lost word”, which cannot find a status of speech but acts behind the scenes; and the “excessively said”, the ancestor excessively present who prevents the repression playing its role and disturbs the subject.
Yolanda Gampel (1991) talks in these cases of radioactive identifications, meaning that radioactivity is something not felt, it invades us but we don’t realize that there is radioactivity in the air (except if we measure it). This radioactivity penetrates us and it will harm us many years later, and we don’t know why.
In these cases there is a transgenerational violence that we can call “active”, in which identifying models by delegation are imposed. But a different form of violence exists, a “passive” transgenerational violence, which results not from the imposition of models, but from their absence, a deficit of the transmission which one of us has denominated trophic (Losso, 2001), that which originates in the family group, as an intergenerational transmission. Through this way narcissistic investments like the narcissistic contract, ideals, values, identifications, defensive modalities, trophic myths, separation experiences (Winnicott`s dis-illusion), family stories, ways of seeing the reality together with intersubjective links that generate a psychic space among the subjects, plastic” identification models, and the identifications are transmitted. This is a structuring transmission, that implies the plurigenerational support from the family group.
it is a “nutrient”, nourishing, transmission that stimulates the development, allowing a psychic work of each subject, that then reencounters and recreates the parts of his/her own history that have been transmitted without his/her awareness.
This transmission implies that a transgenerational working-through process could take place, which makes possible the successive transformations of mandates and legacies from one generation to another. A transitional space between the subjects is then developed, creating a –mythical- family history, from which every member is able to take the elements to create his/her own myth.
In contemporary society a “passive” form of violence is exerted through a deficit of the trophic transmission. This is a tendency to an absence or a rejection of anchorages to cultural and family standards coming from previous generations. Trophic legacies are minimized, tradition is devaluated and models are looked down on.
Culture of the instantaneous of the immediate, or the image, makes the characters that become noticeable through mass media prevail as imitation models (Gaddini, 1969) –not identification ones.
This deficit of the trophic transmission occurs in the framework of particular social messages. For example, the myth of the individual’s “independence” as a virtual absolute value together with what one of us has named the “3 E culture” (efficiency, efficacy, economy- Losso, 1997) and the individuals’ valuation based on material progress as a change that can be “objectively measured” contributes to devaluate origins. This also favors the self-engendering fantasies that are antagonistic towards solidarity values and the sense of group belonging, which will disrupt the processes of that necessary trophic transmission. .
Following the same order, Kaes refers to the existence of a culture of the unlimited and of the extreme limits: “a culture of the danger, but of the prowess too: the heroicization of death”, and a culture of the urgency: predominance of the present, of the “here and now”, of the zapping. This is a culture in which links are contingent and only the present links are considered. The only certainty is that the future is unforeseeable.
Kaës adds a culture of the melancholy too,referring to the existence in the contemporary societies of an interminable unelaborated mourning of the 20th century catastrophes, in which, as a defense in front of the melancholic disenchantment “the catastrophism, the maniac promises and the dreams of domination and control appear”.
There is a sort of “rupture” of the narcissistic contract, a transmission crisis. The lack of internalization of links in which we can trust, will lead to failures in the constitution of the preconscious and the unconscious.
In our country, we have the sad experience of the cases of children born in captivity, whose parents had been murdered; these infants were registered as the children of their parents’ murderers and on other occasions by other members of the “task groups”, groups which dedicated themselves to systematic torture and murder of real or imaginary opponents. Here, the violence of constructions based on hiding and lying, which substitutes the trophic transmission of the real generation links, destructs them brutally.
All this leads to a rupture of the symbolic order of the generations, with its consequence, a serious deficit of the subjectivation processes, which will be manifested at some moments as a pathology in one or more of Lagache and Pichon Rivière’s three areas: the mind, the body and the action behaviour.
At a wider glance, our globalized society is, as we will see, a complex context for the good development of the mentioned subjectivation processes. Giorgio Agamben has referred to the state of permanent social violence which is lived nowadays, in which he called a “state of exception”, a permanent civil war, a moment of the law in which, paradoxically, the rights are suppressed precisely “to guarantee their continuity”. This is a “state of exception”, in which the legal order is suspended, and what might be provisory has become a permanent and paradigmatic form of government, an idea that Agamben develops following Walter Benjamin. We are living, Agamben says, a situation of “modern totalitarianism” that founds a sort of “legal civil war” through the state of exception. These states of exception, paradoxically permanent, contribute to the crisis of the links in the current societies. This will put in crisis the subjectivation processes too, substituted by the imitative processes (Gaddini, 1981) and the individualistic illusion (Anzieu) we have already referred to. The present society produces a producer or consumer individual, who for Judith Revel and Toni Negri (2008) is reduced to be a productive unity in a form of monad “without doors and windows…disarticulated and re-articulated depending on the exigencies of efficiency and the maximization of the profits”, to which the phenomenon of the “seriation” of that monads, its overcrowding, its constitution in undifferentiated population, its interchangeable character are added: individuation and seriation as characteristics of the current man.
Touraine develops the concept of meta-social guarantors, the big structures that function as a frame and regulate the social and cultural life, which function is that of guaranteeing a sufficient stability of the social institutions and give them legitimacy.
The social and individual violence is a manifest expression of the crisis of the meta-social guarantors, and leads to a crisis of those that Kaes has called meta-psychic guarantors, which are the frame of the psychic life.
A part of that violence is the “always more” of the capitalism, inducing a passion for the accumulation and the consumption, including who are prevented of realizing it. The lack is accentuated. Permanently new offers are created (objects and activities: trips, gyms, diets, etc.) that recreate and feed this state of lack, the sensation of being in lack, which will be saturated (illusively) by the acquisition and use of these objects and activities, in an emaciating circle for the subject: the anonymous voice of the market which dictates identification models, objects, activities. An imaginary “Other” that generates a model of a desirable and amiable subject by the “Other”, too. A subject who is always young, slender, permanently active, acquiring objects, hyperkinetic … This particular model produces a mode of organization that, as Revel and Negri stated, is characterized by their fragmentation, because the exaltation of the consumption, the velocity, the “living on-line” lead to a narcissistic refuge too. A subjectivity in a state of constant heedlessness (connected with screens, cellular phones, mp3’s, mp4’s, etc.) disconnected from the environment, from the face to face contact with others, with society and with itself, a subjectivity exhausted by the velocity and the saturation of information. This “being in lack” produces a dissatisfactory state associated with void and depression. The velocity, the isolation, the social fragmentation lead to identification crisis, pathologies of the act, loss of desire.
The corporal reminiscences
In many cases, when there is a failure of the “historization” process, the structural failures together with the subjectivation deficit can make that, not being able to become psychic elements, the split and contents which cannot be thought can remain as imprints in one’s body which we call corporal reminiscences. They will consequently lead to psychosomatic diseases, as a manifestation of the suffered -and not elaborated by other generations- traumatic violence.
In previous papers (Losso & Ferrazzano de Solvey, 1985), we started from the Freudian idea that the affects have an equivalence in bodily changes modified by the personal experience: as Green (1973) stated “the affect is itself, a product of an ‘on the contrary’ conversion”. These affects can be transmitted by the transpsychic way remaining then hidden for the consciousness, but they can remain as records in the body, as bodily reminiscences. We proposed to denominate bodily unconscious to the place of those records, as an analogy with the psychic unconscious, the place for the “representations of the thing”. The organic modifications occurred at this moment will be then the founders of the unconscious corporal answers. Actual somatic fixations are then produced as corporal traces which remain established from very precocious experiences transpsychically transmitted. Maybe, we can find in Freud’s “Outline”, an allusion to this fact in his reference to “somatic processes concomitant with the psychic ones […] more complete than the psychic sequences “ (Freud, 1938).
Those fixations can be expressed through structural and/or functional changes. One of the possible changes can be an alteration more or less permanent of the synchronization of the bodily rhythms or also a predisposition to that perturbation, which will be expressed by a particular tendency of the subject to the dis-synchronization of the biological rhythms.
Gaddini (1982) expresses a similar idea talking about the existence of fantasies in the body. In these cases – Gaddini says- there exists a bodily memory but not a mental one. The experience is neither evocated in the memory nor hallucinated, nor projected to the exterior, but acted in the body. From now on, the tragedy will be developed in the body.
In Piera Aulagnier’s words, “a text without words … a text which talks about the bodily matrices, marks…as tracks of times which will always remain as an enigmatic background …”
The C family
In the case of the family we will comment on -the C family-, the violence suffered by both families of origin, as social violence in one of them and as auto-destructive violence in the other, not elaborated and kept split, reappears as a severe somatic pathology.
The “C” family was integrated by Norma (35), her husband Eduardo (37), and their two daughters, Cristina (5) and Laura (2). The family was sent to our team by Cristina’s pediatrician, because Cristina showed severe bronchial and lung problems (bronchial asthma with pneumonic complications and subsequent pleural compromise) which were threatening her life. In two circumstances she had to be hospitalized.
Eduardo was the only child and his father had died when Eduardo was five. His grandfather had committed suicide by throwing himself onto the train rails. His mother suffered from a chronic depressive disorder and had once tried to commit suicide. On that occasion, she threw herself under the underground train, but she survived because she fell between the rails. Eduardo disclosed an obsessive personality with a depressive background.
Norma had a brother, who had been kidnapped and “desaparecido” (missing), during the military dictatorship in Argentina, but both she and her family denied the fact that he could have been dead, although more than fifteen years had passed by then.
During the first stages of the psychoanalytic family therapy, we as analysts in co-therapy, felt that the family, particularly Cristina, transmitted a menace of `psychic annihilation, of breakdown and of (real) danger of Cristina’s death. Consequently we were on a permanent alarm, with a menace that something serious could happen. The sessions material revolved around Cristina’s illness, her doctors, her treatments, her evolution and so on.
But as Cristina was getting gradually better, the field climate began to be more “boring”; it became frankly depressive. The depression was in the place of the anxiety generated around Cristina’s disease. The family came punctually to their sessions, but we felt that “nothing happened”, as if they had been coming “to waste their time”.
Countertransferentially, we felt paralysis, futility, boredom and lack of hope. Eduardo said: “all is pointless. It is better not to talk because if we talk, we’ll reach a total conflict with no return”. “Total conflict” meant annihilation, breakdown and eventually death, which is the only point of no return.
The first consultation had been related to a death threat. The pediatrician had transmitted her concern about Cristina’s symptoms, which, she said, “expressed the family’s anger, their discomfort”. “It is as if she were committing suicide”, she added. Cristina said that “she would go under the ground” and communicated dreams in which she and her mother were captured by “monsters” that tortured them, tearing off their hair, and other nightmares in which her mother was run over by a train (let’s point out that she had never been told either how her grandfather had died or about the grandmother’s suicide attempts, or the missing uncle).
We can remember here Gampel’s concept of radioactive identification.
The transgenerational violence became manifest in the analytic field through the “death mission” Cristina was doomed to fulfill, due to the “pending bills” of her previous generations. Cristina’s body was the place of resonance of non elaborated mourning. It summarized all the deaths.
The shared family unconscious working-through fantasy of “C” family was that the real death of the patient-symptom and the concrete presence of a corpse would permit the “working through” of all the mourning that the family had not been able to work through along at least three generations. Someone had to die. Cristina was destined to be the family pharmakos.
We are here facing violence that is expressed through a transgenerational repetition in the links. Both Eduardo and Norma bore in their respective families, traumatic situations with origins in a not elaborated mourning. The couple was built around this mourning, and a mutual feeling of misfortune, creating a depressive bond in which the shared depression somehow protected the breakdown (the threat Eduardo talked about). They configured a bond organized in the confusion between life and death, where death was “suspended” but it should reappear in the coming generation.
“A word buried in the father is a dead man without a burial in the child” (N. Abraham)
After having analyzed these fantasies in the analytic field, the family was able to start facing the deep pain of their not elaborated mourning and the thanatic delegations from the previous generations. They were able to disclose the ghosts, spreading the cryptic secrets in the therapeutical field and giving a sense to the repetition phenomena. All this helped everyone out and set Cristina free from the repetition and her destiny of pharmakos.
We have permitted ourselves to develop different levels of violence with their consequences in families. The “combination” of social violence and transgenerational violence leads to changes in the families and in the individuals which are by no means superficial, which oblige us to clinical re-definitions and to re-think about our treatments.
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* Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, Training Member APA and IPA, Professor of Psychiatry, University of Buenos Aires, Director, Specialization in Psychoanalytic Approach to Families and Couples, Argentine
Psychoanalytic Association and CAECE University. Secretary of International Relations, International Association of Family and Couple Psychoanalysis.
**
Psychologist, psychoanalyst, Training Member APA and IPA, Professor of Family and Couple Clinic, John F. Kennedy University.