1st Edition
Transgenerational Haunting in Psychoanalysis Toxic Errands
In this book, Maurice Apprey continues his unique work on transgenerational haunting to explore how events in our ancestors' lives may be renegotiated and re-subjectivized in the present from within the therapeutic dyad.
With an informed and impassioned voice that evokes the tragic psychic consequences of the unresolved, silenced tragedies and transgressions that haunt subsequent generations, Apprey illustrates how the analyst can unfold a patient's transference wishes and emancipate them from the unconscious projects, or errands, they have inherited. This can happen through a threefold process of excavating the unconscious sedimentations of ancestral history, appropriating and reactivating the ancestral errands within the transference, and subsequently decoding the patient's transference pressures. Expanding on Apprey's work about the analyst's field of inquiry and ways of listening in clinical practice, this book illuminates the potential for a resolution, rather than a re-enactment, of the traumas that can haunt a family system across generations.
Attending to the manifestation of transgenerational trauma through varied clinical material, and informed by the thinking of Sigmund Freud, among others, this book will be essential reading for all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.
Foreword by Vamık Volkan Editor's Introduction: In Consultation, My First Meeting with Maurice Apprey 1. Delayed Preface, Or, How to Read my Work 2. The Urgent and the Voluntary in Errands: W. H. Auden and my Very First Intuitive Grasp of Psychoanalysis 3. Repairing History: Reworking Transgenerational Trauma 4. "Scripting" Inhabitations of Unwelcome Guests, Hosts and Ghosts: Unpacking Elements That Constitute Transgenerational Haunting 5. Representing, Theorizing and Reconfiguring the Concept of Transgenerational Haunting in Order to Facilitate Healing 6. Difference and the Awakening of Wounds in Intercultural Psychoanalysis 7. Reinventing the Self in the Face of Received Transgenerational Hatred in the African American Community 8. A Pluperfact Errand: A Turbulent Return to the Beginnings in the Transgenerational Transmission of Destructive Aggression 9. Three Leitmotifs for Sequencing and Transforming the Process of Transgenerational Transmission of Destructive Aggression 10. Transgenerational Transmission in Psychoanalysis: Dislocating Errands 11. "Containing the Uncontainable": The Return of the Phantom and Its Reconfiguration in Ethnonational Conflict Resolution 12. "To Maurice, with Best Wishes from One Strategist and Peacemaker to Another. John": An Evocative Reminiscence of Tension Between a Quiet Psychoanalytic Inner Voice and the Fire Outside 13. Emancipation from Institutionalization: A Case Study on Transgenerational Hauntings by Edward T. Novak 14 THROWN: A Personal Narrative of Psychoanalysis and Toxic Errands by William F. Cornell Afterword: Temporality and Apprey's Hauntology for Psychoanalysis by Michael Uebel
Biography
Maurice Apprey, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry Emeritus at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, trained in child and adolescent psychoanalysis at the Anna Freud Centre, London, and in adult psychoanalysis at the Institute of the Contemporary Freudian Society. He is a training and supervising psychoanalyst of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
William F. Cornell, M.A., TSTA (P), maintains an independent private practice of psychotherapy and consultation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author and editor of numerous books in transactional analysis and psychoanalysis. A co-editor of the Transactional Analysis Journal for 15 years, he is now the editor of the Routledge book series, "Innovations in Transactional Analysis." He is a recipient of the Eric Berne Memorial Award and the European Association for Transactional Analysis Gold Medal in recognition of his writing.
'In this book, Maurice Apprey, a psychoanalyst for children, adolescents, and adults, describes how individuals have identifications with damaged parts of internalized images of parents and illustrates how individuals as well as ethnic, national, religious, and ideological groups are unwittingly possessed by historical events involving their ancestors. I consider Maurice Apprey as one of the most integrative thinkers for creating more knowledge about the concepts of trauma, the psychology of historical events and transgenerational haunting. This important book illustrates and teaches us more about the necessity and importance of psychoanalytic study of psychical transfer in transgenerational haunting.'
Vamık Volkan, professor emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Virginia; president emeritus of International Dialogue Initiative and past president of the Virginia Psychoanalytic Society, Turkish-American Neuropsychiatric Society, International Society of Political Psychology and American College of Psychoanalysts
'In this book, Apprey, a pioneer in the study of psychic phenomena expressing transgenerational transmissions of aggressivity, brilliantly shows the implications of such transmissibility for psychoanalytic theory and therapy. Taking Freud's instinct theory and reworking it into an object relations theory that can account for the temporality of psychic messaging, Apprey offers various strategies for conceptualizing how humans enact and make sense of history. Yet, of Apprey's dramatis personae, Freud is not the central character. Nor are the philosophers Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Marion, Claude Romano, et alia - all of whom Apprey mobilizes with total perspicacity. The main figure turns out to be Auden, whose celebrated 1937 poem, "On this Island" prompted Apprey to think through the seeming contradictions embedded in the poetic phrase: ships diverge on urgent voluntary errands. Under what conditions are errands voluntary? And, if errands are truly urgent, then what room is left for choice, the spontaneous? Auden's "errands" would orient Apprey, like the diverging ships in the poem, sending him on a multiplex psychoanalytic errand of his own.'
Michael Uebel, a scholar who has taught literature, literary history and cultural theory at the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, and University of Kentucky, and clinical social work at the University of Texas, Austin
