Early Relational Trauma, Massive Psychic Trauma and Their Intergenerational Transmission

In this chapter I discuss two different kinds of trauma: the so called ‘early relational trauma,’ referring to abuse and severe neglect in the first years, resulting often in a ‘disorganised’ kind of attachment; and what is called ‘massive psychic trauma,’ such as in wars and genocide for instance, in which the transmission of traumatic elements that have not been processed and overcome from the parents is transferred onto the following generations. The two kinds of trauma are often interconnected, because caregivers who have been victims of abuse themselves or are depressed, alcoholic or suffer from a trauma of the past, that has not been worked through sufficiently, are more likely to maltreat their children, or respond negatively or with emotional distance to their children’s needs and affects. These caregivers might be either identifying with the aggressor and unconsciously repeating some of the abuse they have suffered, or they might be using defences against the same affects and feelings their children experience, so that they cannot empathise with their children’s needs and therefore fail in recognising their children’s emotions, which negatively impacts on a phase that developmental psychology nowadays sees as the first moment of the child’s forming self, with neurobiological correlates, affecting especially the right brain. In therapy, reparative work is attempted through a relational kind of approach in which the empathic dyad that has been destroyed by trauma is recreated.