Quem sobre a terra não faz valer a sua parte Divina, não há nem sequer no inferno, repouso. F. Holderlin, Invocação a Parche
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 were two classical Freudian psychoanalysts who noticed that some patients, during analysis, showed symptoms and expressed content that did not come from personal repression.
From there, they developed research across multiple generations and published a book, The Bark and the Core,
in which they put forward the hypothesis that the human psyche contains crypts and ghosts linked to trauma, unspoken words and secrets from ancestors.
According to them, conscious or unconscious transgenerational influences are capable of guiding or disrupting the spontaneous and life-giving process of the unconscious’s affiliation within the family organisation.
Therefore, from birth, the child is influenced, for better or worse, by the shadows of his ancestors’ life experiences.
They distinguish between psychological traumas caused by personal experience and psychological traumas resulting from the intergenerational transmission of traumatic experiences lived by ancestors (the skeletons in the closet).
Unspoken personal traumas, which have not been mentioned out of shame or to avoid hurting others, give rise to a classic denial of the reality of death, exclusions and abolitions of catastrophic realities that are denied even the status of having happened.
Such denials are immobilised in a crypt, a split-off part of the ego.
The unspoken, the secrets, are also the cause of the birth of ghosts: these ghosts return to try to fill the void that has been created in us, with the concealment of a part of the life of the loved one. It would therefore be a metapsychological fact to understand that it is not spirits that inhabit us, but the voids left in us by the secrets of others.
Ghosts do not erase psychic reality, but mask it by expressing it in a distorted, unrecognisable way, while still showing it.
The authors cite as an example the story of a man obsessed with his hobby of geology and butterfly collecting. This amateur naturalist was in analysis when, thanks to information provided by his group, it was discovered that he was carrying a ghost: his passion for stones and butterflies masked a family drama.
His grandmother had denounced his father, who had been sentenced to hard labour breaking stones and then killed in a gas chamber.
The weekend geologist spent all his free time breaking stones and looking for butterflies, which he preserved in arsenic (like that used in gas chambers).
According to Abraham and Török, what is not said conveys gaps in the unconscious of children, unknown knowledge: a fact buried in family history becomes for descendants like an unburied death, where the ghost is created. This unknown ghost re-emerges from the unconscious and exerts its harmful influence, inducing phobias, madness and obsessions. Its effect can spread across generations and determine the fate of a lineage.
It can be seen that all cultures talk about ghosts; since ancient times and in all societies, whether institutionalised or marginal, there has been a belief that the spirits of the dead can return and possess the living.
O fantasma das crenças populares não faz mais que ressaltar a metáfora que trabalha no inconsciente: a sepultura, em pessoa, de um fato vergonhoso.50
The work of the two psychoanalysts has highlighted the importance of transgenerational transmission, secrets and unresolved family traumas: the crypt is the tomb within a descendant chosen as the bearer of the excluded ghost, of an unmentionable family secret.
Nicolas Abraham cites the example of a young chemical researcher who was working on genes and human sperm and was being treated by a psychoanalyst. At the same time as his psychoanalysis, he became passionate about genealogical research and, in particular, the identification of the illegitimate children of the nobility. After a while, he began to have delusions and became convinced that he was the son of his psychoanalyst and a great psychoanalyst.
By carefully observing his delusion, we can find in his words what the young man thought he was unaware of: that is, what should have been covered by a veil of modesty, namely that his father was a bastard son and bore only his mother’s surname. This fact is irrelevant to us, but important to him, because it had produced a hidden wound in the patient’s father and the elaboration of an entire family history, referring to the nobility of his origins and the maintenance of a much-denied grudge against his courtesan mother. The patient’s father’s unconscious is focused on a single thought: if my mother had not hidden from me which noble lover I was the illegitimate son of, I would not be forced to hide my status as an illegitimate son, which humiliates me.51
Abraham says that the patient (the son) seemed hallucinatory and possessed, not by his own unconscious, but by the anguish of another: his father’s unconscious. This is what Abraham and Török call a phantom.
In summary: an event, a bereavement or an unresolved trauma becomes, in the father who cannot or will not talk, an unspeakable event. This father carries 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 unmentionable and this descendant is the bearer of the phantom. In subsequent generations, the fact becomes unthinkable and can cause descendants to have perceptions, feelings or images related to this unknown event.
Criptas e fantasmas transgeracionais inconscientes Nicolas Abraham e Maria Török 49 N. Abraham, M. Török, LÉcorce et le Noyau, pag.427 50 Idem, pag.41 51 Idem, pag.428 Texto do livro digital JUNG, PSICOGENEALOGIA E CONSTELAÇÕES FAMILIARES Autora: Maura Saita Ravizza (Turim, Itália) Tradução e apresentação: Jaqueline Cássia de Oliveira (Brasil) Interação Sistêmica Ltda.