2nd Friday of every month from 2:30-4:00 pm
4400 East-West Highway
Bethesda, MD 20814

The group’s focus will be the study of trauma that is “passed down” from one generation to the next. We will be reading both professional and fictionalized accounts to further our understanding of this topic. In addition, we will be discussing our clinical work and personal experiences as they relate to transgenerational trauma. To develop a deeper understanding of transgenerational trauma, our Study Group will read Wounds of History. Additional readings may supplement our exploration of the topic.

Members who attend this study group will be able to:

  1. Identify 3 ways in which an expansion to a transgender action all family might challenge traditional psychoanalytic theory.
  2. Explicate the reparative process of telling and listening to stories of trauma.
  3. Describe how Freud defined “psychic trauma.”
  4. Identify at least four experiences of psychological trauma discussed in analytic literature.
  5. Describe the three unique elements of the psychoanalytically informed intervention, the testimonial process.
  6. Define “testimonial camaraderie”.
  7. Explain how the concept of rupture can serve as an organizing principle in dealing with trauma.
  8. Define Aaron’s term, “Extreme Knowledge”.
  9. Explain what the author means by “the felt sense of trauma resonates through generations.”
  10. Discuss examples of the author’s concept that through sound, music, and rhythm we are given strength and continuity in the face of fragmenting violence.
  11. Define Laub’s phrase “the empty circle” in the context of attachment theory.
  12. Describe the author’s meaning of relational trauma in her personal story of the recurring nightmares shared by her and her grandmother.
  13. Define what Faimberg means by historicization.
  14. Explain Salberg’s term “social containers.”
  15. Discuss and critique two examples that support the author’s thesis about the relationship between war trauma and “(homo)sexual” abuse expressed intergenerationally.
  16. Explain how touch is a means by which intergenerational transmission may take place or be fearfully held off.
  17. Define historical trauma. List examples of traumatic historical events and racial, gender, and religious oppression which can contribute to historical trauma.
  18. Describe the two phases of treatment for intergenerational trauma provided in the case of the anxious five year old Chinese girl described in this chapter and explain and critique the reasoning behind the choices of treatment.
  19. Describe how interpersonal trauma is transmitted from one generation to another according to Faimberg, Kestenberg, and Van der Kolk.
  20. Explain how Judith Alpert came to understand her interest in trauma by tracing the traumatic historical events and racial, gender, and religious oppression endured by her Jewish mother and grandmother.
  21. Describe how “discontinuous lineage” or “spaces of time and between people” nonetheless transmit legacies of trauma.
  22. Describe how efforts to reach across a discontinuous lineage, a silent divide of trauma, as described by authors in Part Three of this book, can result in healing or in a bruising re-enactment.
  23. The author discussed the case of a Puerto Rican client who was traumatized by both the dysfunction within her family and by her experiences within the cultural domains of race, class and gender. Discuss examples of these different types of traumas.
  24. Describe how community based activism created the space for the client described in this chapter to consciously integrate the colonizing subjectivities of her family of origin.
  25. Describe how the author’s mother’s personal history and fight against oppression informed her mother’s career path.
  26. Explain how, in the author’s view, exploitative societies, not innate biological differences, are the source of inequality between men and women.
  27. Define the concept of “Nachtraglichkeit.”
  28. Discuss examples of the impact of the normative social unconscious.
  29. Explain the psychological significance of “haunting blood memories.”
  30. Describe how the “conspiracy of silence” regarding the impact of slavery invades the therapy dyad.
  31. Describe how the psychological consequences of childhood trauma interfere with the child’s capacity to develop self-narratives.
  32. Explain how script and chronicle differ from narrative.
  33. Explain what the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas Survey is, and describe what information it collects.
  34. Identify 3 distinct factors that distinguish the authors’ research approach to traditional studies of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.
  35. Discuss what psychological needs were satisfied by the author’s trip to his grandmother’s birthplace.
  36. Discuss a psychological explanation of Armenians currently living in Turkey denying the Genocide.
  37. Explain how the importance of narrative is illustrated in the author’s account of her mother’s escape from what is now North Korea.
  38. Discuss the relationship between trauma and decision-making.