The post-Holocaust family : a psychohistorical investigation into the intergenerational transmission of trauma / by Nina Lynn Bogaty

This dissertation investigates the intergenerational transmission of trauma in the post-Holocaust family. It examines how the Holocaust as a traumatic historical event has impacted upon and been metabolized across three generations of a survivor family. The method of investigation is the psychobiographical case study. A series of psychobiographical portraits are presented, organized as a linked chain of psychobiographies bound together by a body of shared psychohistorical themes. Individual portraits were culled from extensive interviews with a Holocaust survivor, her son and her grandson. Their focus is a close examination of one family's unique personal, familial and cultural history. Emphasis is placed upon careful study of the content and patterns of cross-generational communication and upon the impact of Holocaust traumata on the personality development of each generation. Cross-generational traumatic effects are conceptualized not as fixed imprints that are passed unchanged from generation to generation, but instead, as dynamic forces whose shared impact is woven into the fabric of parent-child interaction and absorbed into the thrust of development in each generation.