Transgenerational and culture in psychiatric clinical practice

Abstract

“I’m Christian, but I feel Jewish; I’m kosher, but just barely!”. The author analyses the relationship between transgenerationalism and culture in psychoanalytic clinical practice. The instinctive life is configured by mneme impressions that can become representations and linguistic networks. These webs get structured according to multiple syntaxes and levels of the unconscious before finally reaching consciousness. These ensembles of impressions, representations and linguistic elements arise from the incorporation of mneme elements during historico-affective relationships and are transmitted from generation to generation. These complex processes participate in the construction of various individual and collective subjectivities. However gaps in memory can occur in the unconscious because certain mneme elements and rudimentary representations remain encrypted and unrecognizable by other imagetic and semantic systems of the subject. The individual wants to realize his potentials, but suffers from the influence of chains of psychic transmission which are determined also by the external context. During this process of transmission the individual incorporates unconscious memories of realized and unrealized desires of their parents and environment such as mindsets, myths, utopias, fantasies, and morals. Vignettes from two clinical cases are presented to characterize the different features of transgenerational transmission.