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This year our Annual Jim Runsdorf Memorial Lecture was held on April 23, 2009 at The Gateway School. The lecture, "When Trauma Is Transmitted Across Generations," was very well attended. Two authors reflected on how they were affected by their parents’ experience of trauma, and a psychologist and trauma specialist responded.

Our speakers were: Carol Ascher, the American-born daughter of parents who fled Nazi anti-Semitism from Germany and Austria. Carol spoke about her book: Afterimages: A Family Memoir; and, Marnie Mueller, who was born during World War II in the Tule Lake Japanese-American Segregation Camp. Marnie recalled memories from her childhood, as described in her novel, Climate of the Country. Dr. Robert Broad, a psychologist, reflected on Carol and Marnie's remarks. Dr. Robert Broad is a training analyst at the Training Institute for Mental Health and practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in New York City and Westport, CT. He is certified in EMDR, a treatment for trauma. Dr. Broad is an expert in the treatment of trauma and spoke about the multigenerational transmission of trauma.

All those who attended the lecture gained an understanding of how one generation's trauma can be passed onto the next generation. We were happy to welcome therapists as well as non-therapists to our meeting!

Excerpts from Carol Ascher

Carol Ascher explained that much of her fiction and nonfiction has explored both the trauma of the refugee experience and aspects of the psychoanalytic movement. Her Viennese father, Paul Bergmann, had entered the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute to become a psychoanalytic pedagogue, a little known movement of the interwar years. Having fled Austria soon after the Anschluss, he was in England, acting as a counselor for children arriving on the Kindertransport when he met her mother, Ellen Ascher, a refugee from Berlin. After four years of wandering, the family settled in Topeka, Kansas, where her father and other Jewish refugees from Central Europe found work as analysts and therapists at the Menninger Foundation.

Carol offered several anecdotes to illustrate the transmission of trauma in her family home. She described her parents’ connection to German thinking in their private longing and high culture that were evident in her home. What seemed to matter in her parents’ home were desperate efforts at survival and their heroic attempts to make the world a safer and more just place. Carol had difficulty recognizing her own needs and in taking satisfaction in small pleasures and successes.

Carol read segments from Afterimages and from another of her books, The Flood (which fictionalizes her childhood in Topeka), to show moments when she and her protagonist, ten-year-old Eva, resisted their parents’ past from swamping their childhood. For example, in The Flood, while Eva’s mother brings clothing and sheets to families who have lost their homes to flooding, Eva senses her mother’s over-identification and tries helplessly to distinguish between the flooding river in Kansas and the situation with the Nazis. Similarly, Carol read a scene from Afterimages that depicts a painful moment when she and her sister present to their parents airline tickets to Europe, purchased especially so that their parents can return to visit their native cities. Their father, still too traumatized, tells them to return the tickets.

Excerpts from Marnie Muller

Marnie Mueller used the story of writing her novel, The Climate of the Country, as a device to illustrate the transmission of trauma and psychological repercussions of being born in the Tule Lake Japanese American Segregation Camp during World War II. She became the first Caucasian born in the camp because her father, a declared conscientious objector, and her mother, a teacher, had elected to work there, as they said, “to make an intolerable situation tolerable” for the incarcerated Japanese Americans.

Marnie described being met by an incredulous silence, as a child, after leaving the camp, when she told people where she had been born. This silence continued through high school and the university where she found that there was never a mention of the camps in any history book or course that she took.

The silence and disbelief of individuals and of her country about a crucial fact of her early life caused Marnie deep shame and humiliation, and she developed a need to create a more palatable “all American” persona to present to the world.

The writing of her novel, which loosely told the story of her parents’ experience working in the Tule Lake Camp, was Marnie’s effort to discover her long denied self and history. It was an arduous and painful journey, but one that uncovered, through extensive research in the National Archives and at the University of California, Berkeley, the fact that her father was seen as a hero to many in the camp, and as one correspondent wrote, “the one Caucasian in the camp that we can trust.”

Marnie learned that there were fissures in her parent’s marriage that were exacerbated by the volatility and violence in Tule Lake. It was this latter revelation — the illustration of the convergence of political/historical tragedy and individual/familial fragilities—that helped her to see the complex impact of traumatic history on the human psyche, and how her own parents’ choices and actions, no matter how valiant, were passed on to her with unintended consequences.

Comments from Dr. Robert Broad

After hearing the interesting presentations by Carol Ascher and Marnie Mueller, Dr. Broad spoke about how early trauma gets frozen in the right hemisphere of the brain. He said people need to learn skills to bear even a single traumatic event, let alone multiple repetitions of trauma. Also, he explained, when someone who has suffered trauma encounters a later experience that has an analogous element, it will throw the person back to experiencing the feelings associated with the original trauma.

Dr. Broad discussed how their developmental histories got processed within their family units. In both families, there was a conspiracy of silence. Dr. Broad explained how silence blocks the processing of the painful memories, and this makes it very difficult for a child to make sense of what happened.

Dr. Broad spoke about trauma and how therapy can help people who have suffered from transmitted trauma as well as direct trauma. If a person is in a state of disorganization and cannot regulate their emotions, they need a holding environment which can be provided by a supportive and connected relationship with a therapist. In cases of severe trauma, some patients first need “affect management” or “anger management,” before psychoanalysis or insight therapy can help. Once their emotions are being worked with, then the deeper, analytic work can begin. Dr. Broad said he does EMDR with people who have suffered different types of traumas to help them with self-regulation and other affect management.

Marnie Mueller, Dr. Robert Broad, Carol Ascher

Photo by Diane Tepper, Fine Art Photographer