Who on earth does not claim his divine share, There is not not even in hell, rest. F. Holderlin, Invocation to Parch
Nicolas Abraham (1919-1975) was born in Hungary and lived in France in 1938. Maria Török (1925-1998) was a French psychoanalyst of Hungarian origin. They are two classic Freudian psychoanalysts who noticed that certain patients, under analysis, showed symptoms and expressed contents that did not originate from the personal repressed.
From then on, they developed research on more generations and published a book, The shell and the core, in which they exposed the hypothesis, according to which, there are crypts and ghosts in the human psyche, linked to traumas, to the unspoken, to secrets from the ancestors.
Conscious or unconscious transgenerational influences are capable, according to them, of guiding or disorienting the spontaneous vivifying process of the affiliation of the unconscious within the family organization. Therefore, from birth, the child is influenced, for better or worse, by the shadows of the life experiences of its ancestors.
They distinguish between psychological traumas caused by a personal experience and psychological traumas arising from intergenerational transmissions of the traumatic experiences lived by the ancestors (the skeletons in the closet).
The personal traumas that are not said, which were not mentioned out of shame or not to hurt, give rise to a classic denial of the reality of death, exclusions and abolitions of catastrophic realities to which even the status of having happened is denied. Such negations are immobilized in a crypt, a split part of the Self.
The unsaid, the secrets, are also the cause of the birth of ghosts: These ghosts return to try to fill the gap that was created in us, with the concealment of a part of the loved object's life. It would therefore be a metapsychological fact to understand that it is not the spirits that inhabit us, but the gaps left in us by the secrets of others.49
Ghosts do not cancel psychic reality, but mask it by expressing it in a deviant, unrecognizable way, yet showing it.
As an example, the authors give the story of a man obsessed with the hobby of geology and butterfly collection. This amateur naturalist was under analysis when, through information provided by his group, it was revealed that he had a ghost: his passion for stones and butterflies masked a family drama.
His grandmother had denounced his father who was sentenced to hard labor breaking stones and later he was killed in a gas chamber.
The weekend geologist spent all his free time breaking rocks and looking for butterflies that he preserved in arsenic (like the kind used in gas chambers).
According to Abraham and Török, the unspoken transmits gaps in the unconscious of the children, an unknown knowledge: a fact buried in the family history becomes for the descendants like an unburied death, where the ghost is created. This unknown ghost resurfaces from the unconscious and exerts its harmful influence, inducing phobias, madness and obsessions. Its effect can propagate through generations and determine the fate of a strain.
It can be seen that all cultures speak of ghosts; since antiquity and in all societies, in an institutionalized or marginal way, there is the belief that the spirits of the dead can return and possess the living.
The ghost of popular beliefs only highlights the metaphor that works in the unconscious: the burial, in person, of a shameful fact.50
The work of the two psychoanalysts highlighted the importance of transgenerational transmission, of secrets and undeveloped family traumas: the crypt is the tomb inside a descendant chosen as the bearer of the excluded ghost, of an unconfessable secret of a family member.
Nicolas Abraham cites the example of a young chemical researcher who was working on genes and human sperm and who was being treated by a psychoanalyst. At the same time as psychoanalysis, he became passionate about genealogical research and, in particular, the identification of illegitimate children of the nobility. After a while, he began to have delusions and the conviction that he was the son of his psychoanalyst and a great psychoanalyst.
Observing his delirium in detail, we can find in his words what the young man thought he was ignoring: that is, that which should be covered by a veil of modesty, namely, that his father was a bastard son and that he bore only the mother's name. A fact, in itself, of no interest to us, but important to him, because it had produced a hidden wound in the patient's father and the elaboration of a whole family romance, referring to the nobility of his origins and the maintenance of a grudge, much denied , against the courtesan mother. The patient's father's unconscious is focused on a single thought: if my mother had not omitted me whose noble lover I was the bastard son, I would not have been obliged to hide my status as an illegitimate child, which humiliates me.51
Abraham says that the patient (the son) seemed hallucinated and possessed, not by his own unconscious, but by the anguish of another: the father's unconscious. This is what Abraham and Török call a ghost.
In short: an event, a grief or an unresolved trauma, becomes, in the father who cannot or does not want to speak, an unspeakable event. This father is the bearer of a crypt within himself, in which he has buried his suffering. The son runs the risk of suffering for something he senses but does not know: the fact becomes unnamable and this descendant is the bearer of the ghost. In the following generations, the fact becomes unthinkable and can cause in the descendants perceptions, sensations or images in relation to this unknown event.
Unconscious transgenerational crypts and ghosts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Török 49 N. Abraham, M. Török, LÉcorce et le Noyau, pag.427 50 Same, page 41 51 Same, page 428 digital book text JUNG, PSYCHOGENEALOGY AND FAMILY CONSTELLATIONS Author: Maura Saita Ravizza (Turin, Italy) Translation and presentation: Jaqueline Cássia de Oliveira (Brazil) Interação Sistómica Ltda.
