Kohut Memorial Lecture:
What Do We Inherit? Comments on the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma, Values and Ideals

In her Kohut Memorial Lecture of 1992, Anna Ornstein extended Kohut's thinking about a sense of self-continuity as an essential property of the cohesive self. Anna's lecture that year, which was titled, "Trauma, Memory and Psychic Continuity," addressed the ways in which trauma affects an individual's development of a sense of self-continuity. She paid particular attention to the transmission of trauma from parent to child, from generation to generation.

By the 1970s Anna was already an outspoken and eloquent critic of the prevailing notion that Holocaust survivors transmitted the effects of their traumatic experiences to their children. Her understanding and development of Kohut's work led to her to challenge those who regarded trauma victims as passive, destroyed, empty vessels who poured toxic experiences of self directly into their children. Later, Anna expanded her views on of the ways in which a sense of self is impacted and guided, for good or ill, by the historico-cultural matrix in which people are raised, and in which they currently live.

When Anna Ornstein returned to the podium in October, 2009, she first reviewed her 1992 perspective. She then invited us to follow her as she moved beyond considerations of the continuity of self to the continuity of family, and to the continuity of entire cultures. Next, she took us through Kohut's own thoughts on how personal and cultural memory promotes the reestablishment of self cohesion and meaning in a world of trauma and alienation. She reminded us of Kohut's assertion that maintaining a sense of self continuity depends on the solid establishment of a cohesive self. In other words, those functions that build, bolster and provide for self cohesion are essential to a sense of self continuity.

Anna associated the resiliency of the self with the continuity of one's identity as "this-very-person," and then mused about how individual continuity is mirrored and experienced in family and cultural continuity or "continue-ity. She posed questions about how generations transmit and inherit, both individually and collectively, a sense of continuing. How is it, she asked, that whole peoples can experience horrific traumas for countless years, be threatened with physical and cultural extermination, and still maintain a continuing that is broad, rich and deep? The answer, Anna suggested, involves the ways in which an individual's resilience is built and supported through the transmission of socio-cultural values and ideals. Anna asked us to consider that ". . . cultures and whole societies may also be resilient and that such resilience depends on the successful transmission of values and ideals through many generations." She hypothesized that the resilience of any given society or culture depends upon the continuation of the transmissions of its values and ideals from generation to generation in the same fashion that the individual experiences self continuity through the internalization of these cherished standards and beliefs. Thus, Anna asks us to consider that Marian Tolpin's concept of the forward edge applies not only to individuals but also to the development and maintenance of cultures and societies in which individuals live and grow.

Anna cited the work of Field, Beebe and Lachmann, Main and Solomon, Lyons-Ruth, and Fonagy in clarifying the concept and action of transmission. She closely aligned herself with Gabbard's (1997) criticisms of the oversimplified idea that traumatized individuals are destined to develop a personality disorder or some other form of severe psychopathology, and that the trauma the individual has endured will very likely be revisited in some form on the next generation. She noted that early clinicians treating Holocaust survivors and their children made implausible generalizations as to how survivor-parents were predisposed to transmit their traumatic experiences to survivor-children and forced them to fit with classical concepts such as the Oedipus complex.

Anna then detailed a self psychological perspective on how values and ideals are communicated and retained, from the individual to the socio-cultural. Self psychology, she noted, approaches the incorporation of values and ideals from the outside in, from within the living culture of a family, and then later from the society and culture at large.

In the last part of her talk, Anna provided an enduring example of the generational transmission of values and ideals: the late 19th century diaspora of the shtetl Jews of the Russian Pale. She spoke of the passing of the Torah from grandparents to parents to child in the centuries old rite of passage, the Bar and Bat Mitzvah. She observed that from this point forward, the transmission of traumatic memories and experiences can be balanced by the simultaneously transmitted, unconscious and abstract values and ideals of a society and culture. Observing the power of culture in the preservation and survival of religious and ethnic groups, and the potentially devastating results of societal dislocation from its cultural context, Anna detailed the movement of the Eastern European Jews of the Russian Pale to New York City. From their cultural roots in the shtetls, where the stagnation of society after years of restricted life in the Pale was punctuated by regular pogroms and other depredations, the Jews of the Pale made conscious efforts to resettle their culture into a totally new environment with a wholly different set of societal norms and values. Instead of attempting to totally assimilate into the new setting, the Jews found ways to preserve their traditions and pursue their most cherished ideals while positively embracing the best of the new culture. Anna emphasized that it was largely through their language, Yiddish, that they preserved their culture and values. Classics as well as works of modernity, she noted, were translated and performed in Yiddish.

In summary, departing from the comfortable terrain of her 1992 lecture, Anna's 2009 Kohut Memorial Lecture allowed us to accompany her on a exploration into a rugged and expansive landscape; one marked by the smoke and ashes of trauma, but also containing that which survives the firestorm. Anna pointed to the ashes all around us, but drew our attention to the sparks and embers alive and active still within the cinders (paraphrased from Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, Touchstone, New York, 1996).

Anna's wonderful lecture raises many invigorating questions, especially about psychotherapy with our most shattered patients: the traumatized and profoundly neglected, the chronic personality disordered, the psychotic. As I listened to Anna's Memorial Lecture, I realized that she is urging us not to overlook a powerful tool for the healing of individuals as well for gaining a deeper understanding of self continuity and resiliency as it applies to culture and society. By focusing on the negative transmission of traumatic experience, whether in individual psychotherapy and analysis or in our more global understanding of cultures and societies, we neglect the remarkable function of the intergenerational transmission of values and ideals in the lives of individuals, families, nations and societies in general. Anna is a living example of the transmission of our shared cultural values and ideals in her roles as parent, teacher, analyst, mentor, supervisor, and friend. In her lecture, she embodied the creative and intellectual intensity that Kohut brought to the psychoanalytic world while leavening and spicing it with her own special blend of warmth, rigor and vitality. Anna, herself, is one of our most treasured points of intergenerational psychoanalytic transmission and our culture is so remarkably enriched by having her in our midst.