Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 81, September 2018

Newsletter – Autumn 2018 23
Brain plasticity ensures the ability of intervention (Chattarji, 2015;
Kontis, 2017). Long-term potentiation is feasible via electrical neuron
irritation resulting in the enforcement of synaptic transmission (Bliss
and Lomo, 1973).
The transgenerational transmission of trauma and
possible interventions: is prevention possible?
Preclinical experimental models indicate that transgenerational
transmission of behavioral symptoms can be prevented. Negative as
well as positive environmental factors impact on behavior through
generations (Gapp, 2016).
Scapegoating is a phenomenon observed in both social and
therapeutic groups. The ‘passing stranger’ in anthropological
literature was often seized and sacrificed, looked upon as a potential
threat. A question is raised, whether the group, out of its needs, creates
a scapegoat upon whom it can project all its accumulated guilty
feelings - group with members who have inherent difficulties in
expressing their aggression and guilt in the open forum. ‘The
scapegoat may be selected in the first place on the elemental basis of
being different’. The phenomenon is precipitated when the urgent
need for the group to punish meets an urgent need in a particular
member to be punished. (Foulkes, S.H. & Anthony, E.J., 1957).
Through the stigma a distance and indifference for the other are
created, a negative simulation, a ‘we’ versus ‘others’ distinction.
Negative characteristics are attributed (e.g. he is dirty), whereas depersonalization
and de-humanization gradually occur (Tzavaras N.,
2017).
When the suffering is unbearable, the idea of guilt seems to
fill the empty place of the meaning. By the process of projective
identification, guilt may be transmitted through generations and
recycled (Klímová, 2007). Trans-generational, un-housed ghosts in
the eyes of parents may look very ugly, and the child may rather flee
from its own subjectivity. We often experience more than we can bear,
so consequently dissociation occurs in order to prevent annihilation.
Group flow can take different directions, either to vicious spirals or
towards development. Development of our psycho-social identity is
essential for us to take full responsibility for the matrix disrupted
around us (Mojović, 2015).
The re-libidinalization of self-representations may resolve
the sense of helplessness and humiliation, tame aggression, end
mourning, test reality and enhance the adaption to a new environment
(Volkan, 2003). In-cohesion manifests in patterns of interaction,