Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

14 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
Europe in my twenties. Here I found group analysis and was able to
join up the many threads that had been broken.
A more or less constant psychic distance from the past was
maintained until my parents’ imminent death. As they faded away a
delicate balance in the family system was disrupted. Relationships
with my siblings deteriorated abruptly and dramatically. Any trust
that had been there disappeared. I was told, “You have a personality
like Hitler!” Feeling dizzy, headachy, unable to sleep or dream, yet
struggling to keep thinking, I kept reminding myself that this must be
the traumatic past bursting through but I could not make any more
sense of it than that.
Remnants from the First World War
My parents were both born in the aftermath of the First World War. It
left an indelible mark on both of them. Their parents, my
grandparents, lived in three countries at war with each other: England,
Germany and Austria. They were also of different religion; Catholics,
Jews, Protestants; and class; aristocrats, professionals.
My mother’s start in the world was overshadowed by loss.
Her father’s adored eldest brother, a ‘heroic’ captain in the Queen’s
regiment, was killed at the Battle of the Somme in August 1916. His
body was never found but I always remember the presence of his
disappearance. My mother, born barely 18 months later, was my
grandparents’ first child. Unconsciously wanting to fill the hole of
loss they had hoped for a boy. Of course my mother did not feel
welcomed into the world and always resented the attention bestowed
on boys. As a child, I could never understand why she was not
motherly like other mothers and interested in things feminine.
My father too had an uneasy start in the world. He was born
in Berlin into the contradictory atmosphere of the Weimar Republic,
a nation struggling to manage the humiliation meted out by the Treaty
of Versailles. My grandmother was Jewish and my grandfather
Catholic turned Protestant. They divorced when my father was two
and he became the only child of a single mother. My grandfather died
when my father was barely ten so he never knew his father’s family
until an adult despite paradoxically carrying their unusual name, von
Sommaruga.
Remnants of the Second World War
My mother, a sheltered Hampstead girl and my father, a ‘homeless’
refugee, found each other in my great uncle’s Jungian Study Group.
Their budding relationship was rudely interrupted after the fall of