Description
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Title: Owen Hewitson: Unconscious Generational Transmission – A Story Beyond Trauma
Questions of generational transmission – how experiences in our family history condition our present – are not just part of our personal story but part of the story of psychoanalysis itself. What is the story of Oedipus if not a story of unconscious generational transmission? The core concerns of psychoanalysis – repetition, how our parents influence us, and how we deal with dilemmas of sex, life, and death – are all concerns about transmission between generations. Yet theories of trauma tend to eclipse theories of transmission, so much so that what is transmitted is often considered to be simply a trauma or the by-product of a trauma. But is trauma the condition for transmission? And what do we even mean by ‘trauma’? This talk will argue that transmission, rather than trauma, is primary. A new model of unconscious generational transmission will be proposed, drawing on Lacanian ideas, and looking at what psychoanalysis can learn from how the same questions about transmission, repetition, and contingency have been answered in other fields. Through clinical examples we will see how an individual’s efforts to establish a ‘Family Line’ – a construction which renders sensical the subject’s place in a generational lineage – are determinative of generational transmission as an unconscious process.
Bio: Dr Owen Hewitson is a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is a member of the College of Psychoanalysts, the Guild of Psychotherapists, and runs LacanOnline.com. Alongside his clinical work he serves on the Board of the College of Psychoanalysts UK, the Academy of Psychoanalysis, and the Editorial Board for the journal Analytic Agora. His research interest focuses on unconscious generational transmission.
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Provided by The SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (www.the-site.org.uk).
