Growing Up in the Old Left: An Intergenerational Tale of Silence and Terror

Abstract

This essay explores the intergenerational transmission of trauma that arises from political repression. Using mine and my family’s experiences of the witch hunts during the McCarthy era, I explore the psychic effects of the political terror and silencing that accompanied my growing up as a Red Diaper Baby and the profound internal shifts that occur when the social surround becomes a place of danger. I look at my family’s experience in the left during the 1950s and I consider the fear that couldn’t be registered, our unexpressed grief and loss, and the multiple contradictions against which our silence defended. Viewing my personal history through a psychoanalytic lens (e.g., Freud, Gerson, Butler, Puget), and considering a clinical example, I explore the ways the social surround of state-imposed terror during the 1950s was elaborated internally from my earliest years, shaping and shaped by my interpersonal experience and intrapsychic fantasy. I also consider the pre-McCarthy era family history that gave nuance to our experience in the 1950s and the emergence in my clinical work of my history of having been terrorized and silenced by the state. Finally, I briefly reflect on the interweaving of political repression and gendered silence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This essay is dedicated to my father, Alexander Sandow, and to my aunt, Judith Lieb, who shared many family secrets with me. I am deeply indebted to many friends, mentors, and colleagues who encouraged me to pursue this project and steered me along the way, and I am especially grateful to Jody Davies, Muriel Dimen, and Adrienne Harris. Special thanks goes to my insightful, supportive, and rigorously critical writing group—William Ansorge, Lama Khouri, William Lubart, and Mary Sonntag.

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Notes on contributors

Lisa Lyons

Lisa Lyons, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst and psychologist. She is on the faculty of the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP) Program in Integrative Psychotherapy, and the Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of New Jersey (CPPNJ). She is in private practice in New York City and Teaneck, New Jersey.