This book describes different instances of trauma that may have occurred several generations ago. It explores the work of several psychoanalysts who have written on the negative effect that unknown or unremembered grandparents can have upon the life of their grandchildren.

This is a book that delves into the relationship between therapists’ sometimes fraught engagement with their own emotional histories and those of their clients, offering a creative template for opening up important conversations. Each of the chapter authors contributing to this volume focuses on seminal life events that inflect the emotional tenor and quality of attunement in the consulting room. A broad range of subjects is covered, which either highlight themes around identity or reflect the kinds of challenges that bring young people to therapy, including bereavement, the experience of otherness, dislocation and migration, disrupted family relationships and life-threatening illness. With compelling clinical vignettes illuminating the resonances between therapists’ stories and those of the clients they present, this book is an engaging and insightful read for all practitioners in the field, especially those working in child and adolescent mental health.

Our sacred texts have the potential to become texts of torture or texts of liberation. History through Trauma explores the symbolic function of religious, political, and national symbols that aid in the construction of historical narratives, and the psychological effects of trauma on their creation and dissolution. The Deuteronomic Covenant, paramount in the construction of a biblical history of Israel, is analyzed with regard to Israel's history of exile. What is proffered is the book of Job as a symbolic history of Israel that stands as a counter-history beside the dominant history constructed in the canon's historical books--a counter-history whose function works to re-enliven the symbol of covenant. History through Trauma brings consciousness to the effects of exile on the dominant historical narratives in the Hebrew canon and to the eradicated affective experiences of trauma that surface in counter-texts such as the book of Job. This work offers a valuable new understanding of the impact of trauma on history-making in general--an understanding that brings light to biblical studies, practical theology, pastoral psychology, and psychoanalysis.

This book questions the junctions of the private and the public when it comes to trauma, loss, and the work of mourning - notions which, it is argued, challenge our very ideas of the individual and the shared. It asks, to paraphrase Adorno, 'What do we mean by "working through the past"?, 'How is a shared work of mourning to be understood?', and 'With what legitimacy do we consider a particular social or cultural practice to be "mourning"?' Rather than aiming to present a diagnosis of the political present, this volume instead takes one step back to pose the question of what mourning might mean and what its social dimension consists in. Contributors reflect on the trauma of the Holocaust, the after-effects of the Vietnam War in the US, the Lebanese war-torn experience, victims of the Pacific War in Taiwan, and the Chilean dictatorship.

The Shadow of the "Second Mother" explores why has there been such little interest, in psychology, social history and biography, in the important contribution that ‘second mothers’, such as wet nurses and nannies, have had upon the emotional life of the children they have nursed. For the last three thousand years and throughout most civilisations they have nurtured the children of the privileged, and kept alive the abandoned and unwanted child, and yet there has been a profound silence surrounding the influence they may have had. The author explores the lives of several well-known people who have been wet nursed, such as Michelangelo, Rousseau, Jack London, Nabokov and Klein. She speculates that they all were affected emotionally by their ‘second mother’, and concludes that a universal feature of such delegated mothering seems to be that the bond between mother and child is broken, and the child may be left with a life-long distrust of close relationships. In The Shadow of the "Second Mother", Coles combines an exploration of attachment theory with neurology, making it possible to give an explanation as to why these important figures have lain unnamed and ignored in our social and psychological consciousness. This intriguing new approach to an ancient practice will be fascinating reading for psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, sociologist and students of social history.

Launching Palgrave's interdisciplinary Professional Keywords series, this reader-friendly reference guide distils the study of attachment into digestible, yet authoritative, chunks. With over 60 alphabetized entries, it is the perfect introduction to the key concepts, debates and thinkers within this increasingly exploration of human behaviour.

This edited collection brings together the perspectives of a broad spectrum of experts who reflect on Freud’s Seduction Theory, psychoanalysis, and the reality of child abuse through the work of Jeffrey Masson. Jeffrey Masson’s The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (1984) is arguably the most controversial book on psychoanalysis in the last century. It provoked a furore from mainstream psychoanalysis, yet was well-received by the emerging international trauma field and became a bestseller. Four decades on, a group of international scholars and professionals revisit Masson’s original work and reflect on the lessons that can be taken from the saga. Was the reaction of Masson’s peers tied to the fact that he had accused Freud of being less than heroic, or was it that he confronted psychoanalysis with a very uncomfortable truth? This book examines how The Assault on Truth came to be written, why it sparked such an extreme reaction, and the issues Masson was grappling with. Complete with an extended Foreword by John Briere, a luminary of the modern trauma field, this book will be essential reading for practitioners, students, and researchers involved in contemporary psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology and especially trauma care, women’s mental health, child safety and the study of memory.

This fascinating book shows how an understanding of the psychodynamics of the extended family, from parental relations to sibling rivalries, can provide insight into many of the key issues faced by organizations today. Covering topics such as change management, creativity, autonomous groups, leadership and democracy, it shows how deep-rooted family dynamics unconsciously frame the way we relate to each other in the workplace, and how they can have a profound influence on the broader trajectory of organizations. This book features: Examples on how to use the extended family as a framework for understanding organizational behaviour. A look beyond parental relationships to discuss sibling relationships as well. Examples to illustrate key topics of practical relevance to consultants and managers. Family Psychodynamics in Organizational Contexts is an important read for students and scholars of organizational psychology, organizational studies and psychodynamics, as well as consultants and coaches working in organizational contexts.

A Group-Analytic Exploration of the Sibling Matrix: How Siblings Shape our Lives offers a fresh approach to siblings, recognising how these relationships are embedded in the framework of the family and how sibling experiences shape our lives, influencing relationships with partners, friends and colleagues, and affecting how we take our place in groups and in society. The book is divided into three parts. Part One focuses on the sibling life cycle, exploring how these relationships shift and change throughout life according to context and circumstances. In Part Two, Parker uses clinical examples to consider how therapists working with individuals and groups might expand their thinking to incorporate the sibling matrix. The final part investigates how the sibling matrix manifests in organisational life and considers how we might develop mutuality and cooperation in our universal sibling matrix. Drawing on the author’s wealth of experience as a clinician, the book incorporates compelling personal stories and clinical examples to bring to life the realities and nuances, the good and bad, the healthy and supportive, and also the potentially damaging aspects of sibling relationships. Accessibly written, this is a rich and rewarding invitation to reflect on our own experience, whether as clinicians, researchers or as members of our own sibling matrix.

In The Other Side of Empathy, Jade E. Davis contests the value of empathy as an affective or critical tool. Whether focusing on technology, colonialism, or racism, she shows how empathy can obscure relationships of dominance, control, submission, and victimization, arguing that these histories taint the whole concept of empathy. Drawing on digital archives of photographs, memoirs, newspapers, interviews, and advertisements regarding nineteenth-century ethnographic museums and human zoos, Davis shows how empathetic responses erase culpabilities from those institutions that commodify difference. She also contends that empathy’s mediation through digital technology cannot lead to more ethical actions, as technology only connects representations of people rather than the people themselves. In empathy’s place, Davis proposes mutual recognition as a way to see and experience others beyond colonial modes of empathy. Davis illustrates that moving beyond empathy allows for a more nuanced understanding of the colonial past and its ongoing impact while providing for a more meaningful affective engagement with the world.