State Violence and Transmission between Generations
Abstract
This text deals with the specific contributions provided by psychoanalysis to the reflection on the transmission to the new generations – grandchildren – of the trauma which may have been produced by their elders, within their own family –grandparents – in the context of the state violence carried on between 1973 and 1989 in Chile. We will first contextualize some of the most significant milestones of the Chilean dictatorship, then we will conceptualise the notions of trauma, history and trauma transmission from a psychoanalytic perspective, so as to reflect on the cases of Cecilia and Margarita, two youngsters whose families were disintegrated by state violence. Transmission reveals the need of history to reconstruct itself through the details related in testimonial biography, focused on what repeats, interrupts and is recorded through transfer; thus it questions what makes transmission invisible in state terrorism, passed on to a generation of people born after this historical period took end.
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