Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

Newsletter – Autumn 2017 93
manage to get rid of his/her own feeling of low worth, of guilt: that is
that essence of identification with the aggressor – with the aggressor’s
destructive work. That guilt (however unjustified) can then manifest
itself in ordinary situations; the person abused in childhood can see
the world as an arena of iniquity, and if he/she is not able to bring
his/her motivations into consciousness (or even if the person
him/herself does not turn into an aggressor), then he/she can
unconsciously steer towards repetition. Such a person easily assumes
various unreal faults, invite accusatory or critical reactions from others,
sometimes embark on a lifelong search for different foreign wrongs in
order to put them right. Such actions are not easy to distinguish from
simple nobility. The unmistakeable criterion is the persons'
relationship to themselves; the persons who were not traumatised, not
burdened by any fear of guilt know above all how to love, and to love
themselves as much as the other person.
The aggressor leaves a destructive trail on the soul, that is, an
embossed image of the world as a permanent struggle between
violator and victim. This unconscious identification with the work of
the aggressor is then transmitted across the generations. Children feel
the need to tend the family injury and to protect themselves, maybe
obsessively, against the possibilities of the complementary role (the
role of the aggressor). From fear of their own (supposed) aggression,
in preventive defence against their own possible guilt they then often
forbid themselves even the natural assertion needed for the next
generation to become independent. They spend their whole life with
their parents in a relationship of symbiotic irresolution. This has been
ascertained by therapists who care for the second (and later)
generations afflicted by World War II. The children of both victims
and violators experience things similarly; while true antithetical
stories disappear into the unremembered, what remains is energy
connected to the unfinished business, to the non-reconciliation of
destinies.
Europe is now ruled by the experiences of the second
(third) generation after trauma as though by an omen
There are generations living together in Europe nowadays whose
parents and grandparents waged World War II against each other, a
war so terrible that atonement and reconciliation marked the content
of the lives of subsequent generations.
There are also the descendants of those who settled in Europe
from outside, especially after the war; as they came, desirous of a new
destiny, they suppressed their natural aggression (which, as an