An analysis of unconscious generational transmission in psychoanalytic theory and practice from a Lacanian perspective

This thesis provides a Lacanian psychoanalytic study of the phenomena of unconscious generational transmission. It proposes a model of transmission without trauma, specifically a model of the effects produced as a result of generational transmission which can be described as unconscious, but wherein neither these effects nor their cause can be adequately described as ‘traumatic’. The domain of trauma studies has traditionally dominated that of ‘transmission studies’, so that transmission is often taken to be an epiphenomenon of trauma. This thesis will argue for the opposite: transmission should be considered the primary and central phenomenon. It will argue that transmission phenomena exhibit the repetition of a signifier – the primary organising element of the unconscious –linking different aspects of the subject’s lifeworld and prehistory, around which idiosyncratic significations are formed. It will propose that the presence of certain conditions – all of which function to establish what will be termed the ‘Family Line’, a construction which renders sensical the subject’s place in a generational lineage – are determinative of generational transmission as an unconscious process. These conditions are specified as a) the presence of a debt; b) the necessity for an ‘accounting’ in relation to this debt or similar asymmetry in family relations; c) the doubling or superimposition of a loss; and d) the supplementation of a lack in the Other through a principle of sacrifice on the part of the subject. Clinical examples are used throughout, and the relevance for clinical practice of the proposed new model for unconscious generational transmission is specified.