The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma: Melancholia, Mothering and Motherhood
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : November 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 186
- Category :
Trauma and Violence - Category 2 :
Forthcoming - Catalogue No : 98637
- ISBN 13 : 9781032894546
- ISBN 10 : 1032894547
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Prophecy Coles describes the psychic impact of intergenerational trauma, with reference to clinical cases, literature and social issues.
The book considers how trauma is transmitted across generations and explains the evidence base from research in relational theory and attachment theory. Coles discusses the trauma wrought by the Holocaust, colonialization and the transatlantic slave trade, and how these deep wounds continue. Contemporary racism and misogyny are also discussed, and the book concludes with a discussion about human and civil rights in light of decolonialsation.
The Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, and for all readers interested in the impact of trauma across generations.
Reviews and Endorsements
'The intriguing title demands we listen in to what is never spoken in our own histories. Those vibrations from the unspoken tensions and dynamics in our families’ as well as all the social prejudices and events contribute irrevocably to shape our lives and selves. This is a constant unknown to be questioned to the end of living those lives we have silently shaped. This is a fascinating ‘autobiography’ written, or perhaps conducted, with a psychoanalytic lens on the blinded influences in our lives, from beginning to end. This book is not just for reading a powerful thoughtfulness, but also for continued self-reflection on what we, the readers, have silenced in our own lives. No-one could finish reading this book and continue believing that we already know our own life-story. We can only go on discovering what we have failed to discover in our past self-reflections.'
R. D. Hinshelwood, Fellow of the British Psychoanalytic Society, author of Unconscious Politics: Alienation, Social Science and Psychoanalysis and Emeritus Professor of the University of Essex, UK
'The Intergeneration Transmission of Trauma is an extraordinary book. Exquisitely written, highly readable, it is vivid, personal, and extremely erudite. The author is deeply engaged in history, social criticism, philosophy, and literary criticism. All of these are woven into her psychoanalytic reflection. This text is rich and nuanced, embracing, empathic and wise. Readers from multiple disciplines will delight in this book.'
Sue Grand, PhD, Faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Programme in Psychoanalysis and author of The Reproduction of Evil
'The Intergeneration Transmission of Trauma can sound rather theoretical. In this book Prophecy Coles brings it vividly to life. She describes very directly ancestral histories of trauma, in several families and ethnic communities, which, suppressed or left unspoken, create the ghost-haunted spaces in which neurotic misery is bred. Her examples include not only Freud and the first child psychoanalyst Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, but writers such as W.G. Sebald and Toni Morrison, and very movingly also her own experience in her own family. This book is an important contribution to the enlarging understanding of causal forces in psychological history.'
David M. Black, Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics: The Necessity of Perspective
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. History
2. Awake
3. Freud’s Antigone
4. Murder Most Probable
5. Frost Bitten
6. A Colonial Legacy
7. The Angel in the Nursery
8. W. G. Sebald, F. Auerbach and Intergenerational War Trauma
9. An Inner Deadness Within Silence
10. Dark Matters
11. A Story Not to be Passed On
12. The Thing that will not bear Telling
13. Living With
About the Author(s)
Prophecy Coles trained as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Lincoln Clinic and is a member of the London Centre for Psychotherapy. She has worked as a psychotherapist for 30 years and has published widely on sibling relationships, family and transgenerational conflict.
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