Presentation Announcement by Jill Salberg (USA)

The Shadow of Our Ghosts: Generations of Ruptures

In: Parental Separation, Alienation and Splitting: Healing Beyond Reunification. European Association of Parental Practitioners (EAPAP), 3^rd European Conference with international participation. Keynote address. Teleconference, September 16-18, 2020.

We are living in a time of collective trauma with a worldwide pandemic, while also a reckoning with denials of the impact of war, colonization, slavery, bigotry and hatred and the growing multi-pronged impact of the destruction of our environment. When there are denials of events and/or motivations, I believe we see an erasure of history and a formation of wounds in the collective, as we also have seen in the families where trauma has occurred interpersonally.

When a child’s parent or grandparent has had a trauma, we can assume that their mind has been affected. In whatever way the trauma has imprinted them, some part of them will not be fully accessible for this child. I believe this inaccessibility at times is sensed by the child and is how trauma, both in its presence and its experience of emptiness, can easily become transmitted across generations. This talk addresses the complex matrix of real life events, denials of reality and internal fragmentation that takes place when these complicated internal states and feelings are then transmitted trans-generationally. This certainly enters our work with patients; current trauma, such as what we are living through, often stirs earlier ones, in the patient’s history, in the therapist’s history or in the collective cultural/historical past. Using case material I discuss how this has been entering the clinical work with patients, disorganizing at times patients and myself and also intensifying the work.

GIF