Article ID Journal Published Year Pages File Type
7323145 Emotion, Space and Society 2016 9 Pages PDF
Abstract
The interpretation of individual lives and the history of the silences within the life of a family are placed here in the context of the imaginative mapping of Europe in the late nineteenth century, the period leading up to the First World War and its sequelae. I explore this terrain using two strands of psychoanalytic thinking: Abraham and Torok's work on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and Steiner's theory of the psychic retreat. I apply these to think about my grandfather's experience of life in the trenches and his subsequent long-term occupation of physical and emotional space within our family. I also examine my own psychic retreat into reading, and my literary and imaginative preoccupation with the late nineteenth century world of my grandfather's childhood. In particular, I explore Georges Rodenbach's symbolist novel Bruges-la-Morte, its ambivalent treatment of women, and its metaphors of water, inundation and withdrawal. This novel is a projection onto place of the ruinous consequences of the repudiation of loss, a meditation on Eros and Thanatos. I have found it haunted and haunting, and illuminating about the role of women in containing and carrying the projections of traumatic losses inflicted across generations of human history.
Related Topics
Social Sciences and Humanities Psychology Social Psychology
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