Traumatic Attachments: Intergenerational Trauma, Dissociation, and the Analytic Relationship

Abstract

While a great deal of research finds that trauma is passed from one generation to the next, there is little agreement about just how this occurs. This article introduces the concept of “traumatic attachments,” as a means of exploring one possible means of transmission. Loosely based on attachment theory and compatible with a relational systems approach, the concept builds on the author's previous perspective on trauma as the destruction of certainties that pattern psychological life. Traumatic attachments are seen as forming within systems that, at some point in their histories, have been plunged into chaos by trauma. Once established, they tend to coalesce into patterns of relating so inflexible and resistant to change that they profoundly affect parent–child interactions over generations. The rigidity of these attachment patterns is attributed to their heavy reliance on dissociation. A clinical example is presented in which intergenerational traumas in the families of both the patient and the analyst figured importantly in shaping the analytic relationship.