La transmission psychique inconsciente

Child Sexual Abuse, Baby Gender, and Intergenerational Psychic Transmission: An Exploratory, Projective Psychoanalytic Approach

“…In terms of Abraham and Törok's (1975), Tisseron's (1995), and Ciccone's (1999) psychoanalytic model, the crypt is linked here to the impossibility for Anna of telling her daughter that she herself was sexually abused by her stepfather when she was a child. Anna unconsciously transmits two ghosts to Maria, that is, two sequellae that translate unelaborated trauma: separation anxiety synonymous with the inevitable loss of security, and the dangerousness of males.…”

“…Here, she imitates the facial expressions of her mother when she talks about men. This is a manifestation of the transmission mode underlined by Ciccone (1999): Transmission takes place in the infraverbal mode, at the unconscious level. The unconscious is conveyed in the infra-verbal by way of how things are said more than by way of what is said; it is transmitted in a nonverbal manner by behaviors, attitudes, and gestures, all communicative signals to which children are highly sensitive, especially young ones.…”

“…More specifically, we focus on the general characteristics transmitted by a CSA mother to her children, as a function of the child's gender, based on a French psychoanalytic model (Ciccone, 1999;Tisseron, 1995) that has rarely served to elucidate the earlier studies reviewed here, even though it allows one to set forth some highly specific hypotheses. To test this model, we used a clinical and projective methodology, a combination which, to our knowledge, has never been employed to address interactive mother-child dynamics.…”

“…The literature discussed earlier emphasized that the most common maternal attitude is overprotection, and secondarily, attitudes saturated with negativity toward the male gender, with an intensity that seemed to be proportional to the degree of nonelaboration of the trauma. The two major sequellae just mentioned can be understood in the light of the French theoretical model that we are using here as our reference (Ciccone, 1999;Tisseron, 1995). The initial childhood abuse will have generated a total loss of security linked to the nonpresence or nonprotective intervention of the maternal figure during the abuse.…”

“…The unelaborated traumatic event that was "unspeakable" for the one who experienced it therefore becomes "unnameable," Abraham and Törok (1975) defined the work of the ghost in the unconscious as the work of someone else's undisclosable secret (incest, crime, etc.). For Ciccone (1999), transmission is built upon that which was not "metabolized" psychically, that which was neither inscribed nor represented. For this author, traumatic transmission, then, is due to failure to symbolize, and the traumatic effect is produced by the absence or crudeness of speech about the traumatic event.…”