The transgenerational impact of collective trauma - A psychotherapeutic view

Abstract

The theme of collective traumata and their impacts not only for the directly affected people, but also for their children and even for next generations, comes more and more in the center of psychotherapeutic thinking and work. Especially in the psychotherapeutic treatment of the children and grand-children of the holocaust-generation, who suffered and suffer very often of psychic disturbances and difficulties, practitioners and researchers found special phenomena like denial, affect isolation, strange feelings of emptiness and death, which became understandable only after connecting them with the traumatic experience of the former generation. Today, after learning from these first experiences with the psychic consequences of extreme traumatisation, we are able to recognize the psychic impact of severe collective traumatisation also in other people, who live under different social and historical conditions.