Transgenerational trauma and repetition in the body: The groove of the wound

Abstract

The material event of trauma presents a dissonance of belief, which the bodymind may not easily absorb. In some individuals, this forces a temporal splitting between present and past, in which (without appropriate treatment) the trauma event continues to replay in an interminable present, notably in many Holocaust survivors. This severing can be likened to a separation between body and mind dissociation. It is necessary to recognise the time differences, their meanings and somatisation. Therapy must therefore intervene to collate and elide time, permitting integration of the bodymind.

Keywords:

• trauma
• transgenerational transmission
• Holocaust
• body
• moment

Introduction

The body in trauma returns to the event repeatedly. Corporeality is thus the original site of trauma in its recurrence. References to the body or bodymind throughout this article not only prioritise the body as the original site of trauma, but also support the significance of acknowledging and working directly with the body itself to alleviate the effects of trauma. A body of or in trauma is first a living body (from which a metaphorical body can be theorised), and trauma is foremost a wound in the body. Time is also ineradicably body laden: known and experienced through the body, even unconsciously. Trauma destroys the body's sense of time.

Rothschild (2000) presents trauma as a triune event, consisting of the time immediately or soon before the trauma event, the event itself and the time immediately or closely following the trauma event (pp. 154–158). Most conventional literature admits only to the period of during trauma, while neuro-scientific studies address only the aftermath, or present state of being. Neither of these comprises the duration of trauma. Although I am not, in this paper, concerned with the pre-trauma, the time prior to the beginning of the event, I feel that in treatment, the trauma event must at the least take in the trauma and the time of its continuance, or both the times of its origin and its aftermath, conjunction or sequence. This is more closely comparable syntactically or linguistically to the difference between the present and the present perfect than the present and the past. The trauma event collapses time in the body (Gray, 2001).

Rothschild suggests that the aftermath be treated first, as it is most recent and the issues of the body are attached to this period. The aftermath presents the problem of disintegration, and its timeliness (or timelessness) is what requires intervention. She provides several descriptive scenes in which people who have been traumatised (for instance, soldiers returning from war or women in automobile accidents) are variously met by their spouses and communities. Those received with anger, shock, rejection or denial more likely re-trigger trauma responses than those met with warmth and support. The geography of trauma, despite the redolence of landscape in the memory (Schama, 1995), is thus primarily the body, which in its first or early moments after might be recuperated. The soldier who must wait (as did so many combat veterans of Vietnam) 20 or 30 years for community support has deeply etched defences, a response system that was carefully entrained (by the military, apart from the before spent in-country). The Holocaust survivor who must wait (as did so many survivors) 30 or 50 years to officially record the story (for the Shoah Foundation, which listened without dispensing medication or therapy) holds within a geography of trauma entrained by the absent future and desolate past. It is, like memories of the gulag, built from bread.

One evening I heard an audience laughing at the recital of one of Solzhenitsyn's (1985) gulag narratives. The actor was recounting how slave labourers were punished for hoarding bread, with which they might escape. The remedy was to allot each labourer a piece of bread in which he was to set his mark – taking a solitary bite – so that the bread might be returned to him later from a wooden box. The result was that all day the worker longed for and obsessed about his piece of bread, which indeed looked like every other piece of bread in the box, only perhaps smaller.

I sat in a dark theatre, listening. The people seated behind me were laughing at the story. I realised that such a story might be amusing to people who have never been hungry or were not raised to understand what hunger means. But these people could not imagine how the mere thought of a piece of bread might torture a starving body. It occurred to me that I have always understood this hunger (though it was never, to my knowledge, discussed in my childhood) – an effect of transgenerational transmission – and that my knowing is not the more desirable state. Perhaps, I thought, I should be able to see the humour in the narrative and the moment. Upon thinking this, I could. But that revelation did not diminish the pain of the story.

Trauma in time

There is the event and the reaction to the event, the moment and the moment after. It is the shock of something happening and the relived shattering of something, the same thing, happening again and again. Shorn of context yet flooded with content, replayed in the mind and body, the moment reaffirms its reality long after the moment has passed. Trauma is an unwelcome guest lurking in the house, always present, a shadow in an open doorway, darkness at the corner of vision. There is a body that cannot be buried, because it is very much alive, but with an unendurable break, a tear in the fabric of time. These are the effects of trauma, introducing another dimension into life, continually, possibly forever.1

A body's sense of time is disordered and disorganised by trauma. Shatan (1989) notes the ‘split time zone’ of combat veterans who in the moment of trauma – that is the present from which the trauma shall draw in the future, that moment to which it shall always return – already generate two disparate experiences of time. Terr (1983) cites a number of alterations in sense of time following psychic trauma, consistent with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. There are (to paraphrase) misperceptions of time duration; gross confusion of sequencing (particularly with children); time skew (events of trauma located in mind prior to trauma, hence leading to a sense of prediction); retrospective pre-sifting or omen formation and sense prediction (related to dreams, leading patients to believe that they now have psychic abilities). I would add that the sense of prediction common to the skewing of time is similar to or synonymous with retrospective foretelling: the difference lies in a predictive sense of warning. Writing on what constitutes an effective programme for rehabilitating people with trauma (specifically, post-traumatic stress disorder), Mason includes ‘Anger management, stress reduction, education on what PTSD is, rational thinking, thought substitution, alternative behaviours, assertiveness training, the whys, wherefores, and elimination of substance abuse, and goal setting’ (Mason, 1990, p. 323).

From this, too, one might detect an effort to focus on the future as a means of fast-forwarding from the past. Trauma does not exist in the present, but drags the body into the past. If it were in the present then the moment of trauma relived could be halted, as a boiling pot is withdrawn from the stove. But because it is mired in the past, the traumatised body cannot be rescued. And it cannot escape from its past precisely because we have not yet determined how to handle time. As Lacan writes: ‘[T]he real is that which always comes back to the same place – to the place where the subject in so far as he thinks … does not meet it’ (Lacan, 1981, p. 49). He makes the important point that a personal sense of time is only ever idiosyncratic; the human body's sense of time does not participate in a shared reality. Despite the synchronisation of watches or other timepieces, a sense of time remains just that – sensory, phenomenon, idiosyncrasy, an idea rather than an object. (Thus, I know I was once enjoying an evening of theatre, but I have another, contesting memory of feeling isolated and alienated that night in the same seats. Between these two memories lies a chasm, filled with the image of bread. This moment was not a trauma event – and yet there is a moment after which changed everything, re-cast the theatre as a wooden box and the audience as onlookers, bystanders. In this way, one moment overtook and replaced another as the signifying moment.)

The geography of trauma is synchronous or at least confluent with the chronography of trauma. In addressing the time state of trauma, I use the idea of a chronography of trauma as a picture of the impossible in its recursion: time as something written, graphed or imagistic, rather than only studied. I am not speaking of a chronology of trauma, which I feel is incompatible with how trauma is actually experienced (i.e. as an ongoing recurrence, the present perfect); rather, I indicate a mapping, even for the purposes of this writing, of a trauma event.

Here, the image of a record player (gramophone) may prove helpful. In the past, when record players were prolific as domestic objects, the phrase ‘getting stuck in a groove’ became synonymous with the notion of repetition, a pejorative usage. (The groove refers to the actual circular cuts in the vinyl or shellac surface.2) This phrase was subsequently replaced with phrases about audio cassettes, such as ‘playing an old tape’, ‘rewinding the tape’ or ‘putting on a new tape’, with the tape used to reference an individual's internal dialogue. In using the image of a phonograph record, or gramophone, I replace the ordinary linguistic and conversational referent of the groove with the trauma event.

A gramophone needle stuck in a record's groove produces effects in some ways consonant with trauma. First, the site of injury to the record (its stuckness) does not damage any other groove, yet impedes the meaning-making of the record as a whole (its ability to produce cogent music). Second, jarring of the record produces an additional, greater scratch in the surface. Both the machine and the document placed upon it operate as if the music currently emerging is being made audible for the first time. Neither the record nor the record player is conscious that the music playing is in fact re-playing, and replaying indefinitely or until the record player is jarred. Had the record player been built to recognise its own production of repetition, then it might elect to jump past the track and physically move the music forward in time, thus permitting the rest of the document to be heard.3 But the instrument is more simply constructed, and its ability to make music audible from a piece of scored plastic is useful and important. This is its purpose to derive meaning – make music – from a series of imprinted lines.

The body in peril has similar limitations – and protections – as the record: in a primitive state the body is being protected from a failure to recognise danger where and when it exists. The reiteration of trauma prevents the bodymind from being whole. And the replaying of the event provides a kind of containment, whereas precipitous pressure serves to re-traumatise.

We consider the record as the skin of the document and the imprints as wounds. The mind in trauma recall returns to its simplest and most purposeful state – in which thought occurring in the present reflects the action or fact of the present. It thus replays the event repetitively, without (necessarily) bringing consciousness to the notion of its own repetition. Were it to possess recognition then it might also permit a movement forward, or past, the presently repeating moment.

When the bodymind is made to, or recovered to the point of, experience this consciousness (e.g. the healing of trauma), then the individual regains some control over the instrument, becomes able or even agile at advancing the moment. The aim of psychotherapy is often not to sedate, delude or rob the body's sense of its own trauma event, but instead to develop the ability to move the body through and past this moment. In so doing, one creates a new moment: the moment after. At this juncture, the moment after is merely the same moment, happening again a moment later. To get to an entirely new moment, to a moment after unlike the moment before, time must be unstuck. Wounds must be preserved in their past (always present) condition, yet kept clear of the penetrating (gramophone) needle that obstinately and obdurately bears down as it has always done. The needle must be lifted. One might ask how this wound maker, the trauma instrument (generally called memory), is to be displaced, on what other line or groove the needle is to be laid. For the next groove is co-terminus with this one and just as likely to be damaged. The body is a continuous place, in which we have as yet no understanding how memory is laid down, only the knowledge that it is embedded in the brain as well as the body (hence what we call muscle memory, although this is inexact). In this place of continuity, there is no rationale for believing that there is any space entirely free from trauma and its repetition, and no logic for assuming that this body's timepiece, its inherent mechanism for experiencing life's rhythms, is not trauma laden. It might be more logical to assume that every groove has already been compromised, because it has been touched.

In place of time

Wajnryb (2001) has spoken evocatively of the silence of the original survivors of the Shoah, a silence that takes the place of a speech that would otherwise be traumatised (by coming from a body of deep trauma). I find Wajnryb's argument arresting not only because she writes so eloquently of a silence so many have experienced, but also because she understands so well the power of the silence in the matrix of inter- and transgenerational trauma.4 For Wajnryb, silence becomes not just the form but also the content of the transmission, a content passed between generations, and a form that replicates itself in the re-telling (or its absence). Silence in this way becomes inseparable from story, from history, becomes a shameful (and otherwise unspeakable) silence shared by families that never found and might not seek any other means of articulating or communicating trauma. In replacing speech, silence assumes the place of history as well as the future, writing its own trauma into the second and third generations post-Holocaust (Krystal & Danieli, 1994), in effect becoming the story that is told in and through silence.

The body of a survivor marks trauma on the descendants in the simple fact of its being. In the context of the Shoah and its descendants, particularly because of the way Jewishness is conceived in terms of a collective unconscious (Baum, 2006), one can extrapolate the injury from individuals to entire communities, present and future. The Jewish body, despite or because of its survival, reflects a time and a society that did not survive the Shoah. Each body therefore comes to signify other bodies and (as I argue elsewhere) each living body simultaneously signifies the dead – most of whom have no other resting place. This double marking is therefore also an empty marking, the mark of what is absent; the surviving body signifies the trace, in Derridean terms pointing at once to a presence and an absence.5 Derrida signified this phenomenon as language under erasure (1978), the word glimpsed through its marking out, still a useful emblem.

Writing of the children of the (original) survivors of the Holocaust, Nadine Fresco speaks of the ‘nostalgia’ of the second generation, a psychopathology that manifests in a haunted language:

Those Jews who have come late upon the scene, burdened with their posthumous life, infatuated by an irreparable nostalgia for a world from which they were excluded on being born, feel a vertigo when confronted by the ‘time before,’ the lost object of a nameless desire, in which suffering takes the place of inheritance. (Fresco, 1984, p. 421)

While I am uncomfortable with the term ‘nostalgia’, which suggests a desire to experience the parent's horror rather than its silent evocation, I appreciate Fresco's vision of the confusion of the body in space. I resonate with this sense of being out of time, either without time or timeless, and of the negotiation in which the second and later generations continually engage in order to make sense of the present (inflected always by such a past). She continues: ‘These latter-day Jews are like people who have had a hand amputated that they never had. It is a phantom pain, in which amnesia takes the place of memory’ (Fresco, 1984, p. 421).6 The body must grapple with a disturbance in time, the absence of a past that can be put away and the loss of a present that does not repeat. Although Fresco refers to the ‘time before’, ‘vertigo’ occurs because of the rupture between the moment and the moment after. Descendants of the Shoah are aware, in other words, that a ‘time before’ existed, though we no longer have access to it except through photographs, songs, artefacts and gravestones.7 But the time in which survivors and their descendants struggle is the repeating moment of loss, so loud and so long we cannot hear the time ‘before’ except as a prelude to the present moment. The gramophone record re-creates an awful music that cannot seem to tear loose of its scream. This is the groove of the wound.

In place of time, which continues regardless of one's cultural means of marking it (Edkins, 2003), the body in trauma substitutes a living present. (It may be more appropriate to think of this present in its recursion as a dead present or a non-present.) The body appears trapped in a place without time, or with only one time, the time of trauma (Baum, 2000); this time holds the body, constraining and restraining it from the ability to yield, surrender and release. The traumatised body becomes innately guarded; the body defends itself from attack, including an attack that may never again come in a commonly shared reality. But as this attack is already internalised, the attack having already occurred and recurred, the sense of another reality outside the body is irrelevant: the body adapts to attacking itself as a means of generating its own defence. In its presentation to the world this body is simultaneously active and reactive: it is removed or removes itself, confined or confines itself and defensive or defends itself. Guarding has become what Reich (1972, p. 30) purposefully theorised as ‘body armour’, or ‘character armour’. His student Alexander Lowen described it as

the total pattern of chronic muscular tensions in the body. They are defined as armour because they serve to protect an individual against painful and threatening emotional experiences. They shield him from dangerous impulses within his own personality as well as from attacks by others. (Lowen, 1983, p. 13)

To say that there is no need to defend is absurd: a body must protect itself, and only through those original defensive behaviours was it was able to survive. These behaviours, as well as their recursion, helped the body to re-image its chemistry and to re-programme cells that they might respond faster, more ably saving the body from demise. Neurobiologists attest to this visible, palpable alteration in body mechanisms, and what was previously the considered domain of dance/movement and somatic therapists is now commonly understood: trauma experiences are laid down in the body at a cellular level (like tracks or grooves in shellac, or wounds in the psyche), affecting the chemistry of the body and re-patterning cellular response (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker and Suedfeld, 1997; Rauch & Shin, 1997). The basic aim of the therapist, as mentioned before, is to unstick the groove and place the gramophone needle past the point of damage. Or conversely, to fill in the groove with other thoughts, or non-thoughts: this is the perversion of memory engendered in medical excisions (i.e. the lobotomy or removal of another part of the brain for purposeful forgetting) and medications designed to sedate, tranquillise and otherwise flatten affect, more often prescribed as prophylactics.8

The corporeal body is remade by its trauma. It will not lose this experience and must not be required to forget. As with the gramophone, we cannot make another music of the same musical disc, rather we must play another recording. Reich felt that to work directly with the body in its ‘armoured’ or ‘vegetative’ state was to uncover the unconscious. There is no other mysterious site in which the trauma is locked, ready to rebound, as in horror stories about basements and attics: the basement, the attic, the prisoner's cell, is contained already in the body.

Trauma is part of the future of a body. But the time in which trauma recurs, in which the body is trapped by remembrance and re-enactment, can be managed and integrated into body wholeness, so that trauma's recall does not spontaneously and unconsciously fling the body back in time or hold it in a merciless groove. The trauma event can then be brought out consciously and with mindfulness – ideally through a psychotherapeutic process, particularly one that acknowledges the role of the body in carrying trauma. Trauma might then be remembered, retold or even re-played, as if it were now in the past (Culbertson, 1995; Simonds, 1994). In this effort, the body is of paramount importance as the place and time of trauma.

Notes

^1. It is understood that not all those who experience a trauma are haunted by it or develop PTSD; this article discusses those who are. At this writing, transgenerational transmission of trauma has been more or less ‘scientifically’ tracked into the third generation of Holocaust survivors (I am second generation). Experiential practitioners have, however, noted the transmission of traumatic elements, especially dates and names, event markers and reactive effect, over a spread of centuries; see, for instance, Schützenberger's (2000) work with trauma as ‘family inheritance’ in ‘Health and Death: Hidden Links Through the Family Tree’ (Kellermann & Hudgins, 2001).

^2. I am imaging the inflexible shellac 78 rpm record – more brittle and deeply grooved than the (post-war) vinyl.

^3. Similarly, the record could have been constructed to note repetition. But curiously, even the compact disc – which antedates the vinyl by almost a century – is not equipped with such a sensor, an example of old technology revivified by new materials.

^4. See also Lowin (1983), Rich (1983), Rubenstein (1981), Volkan (1991) and Zlotogorski (1981).

^5. Compare ‘doubling’ in the context of character consciousness and ego preservation: see Lipton (1990).

^6. See also Van der Kolk (1996) and Yehuda (2002).

^7. I shift here from the use of ‘we’ as an inclusive human term to specify the second and third generations' descendants of the Shoah.

^8. As Donald Nathanson effectively argues, prescribed medications can themselves recall traumatic symptoms to a body that has already successfully managed the symptoms, in effect re-traumatising the body; see Nathanson (1992).