C. Fred Alford’s research while affiliated with University of Maryland, College Park and other places

For Améry, resentment is an ethical stance. Refusing to forgive is a way of demanding more from perpetrator and victim than either dreamed possible. For Améry, forgiveness is a virtue only when perpetrator and victim both want the same thing with equal intensity: that the offense never happened, that history could be rerun with a new outcome. It’s impossible, of course, but other moralities have demanded the impossible. What distinguishes Améry is his focus on the reversal of time, in which an empirical impossibility becomes an ethical necessity.

Drawing on my own research, as well as the research of others, the question considered is how trauma may be transmitted down the generations. Some argue that the second-generation of Holocaust survivors is traumatized. I disagree, concluding that many faced emotional problems separating from while remaining connected to their parents. Attachment theory seems the best way of explaining both the problem and how it is best dealt with. The answer to these questions comes from second-generation survivors themselves, not just the author’s theory.

The Macabresque: Human Violation and Hate in Genocide, Mass Atrocity, and Enemy-Making. By Edward Weisband. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 480p. $45.00 cloth. - Volume 16 Issue 2 - C. Fred Alford

A key problem for trauma theory is bringing internal and external sources of distress together, paying sufficient attention to each. While Wilfred Bion is well-known among psychoanalytically-oriented trauma theorists, the relevance of his work to trauma is not always fully appreciated. Bion focuses on the inability to know. Freud made Eros and death the driving forces of the psyche, particularly in his later work; Klein made love, hate, and reparation central; Bion makes knowledge central. In conclusion, I turn to Stephen Mitchell in order to explain how focusing on the inability to know helps us better understand trauma.

The work of D.W. Winnicott suggests how we might get on in the world after suffering terrible injustice and deciding (consciously or unconsciously) not to forgive, or rather not to think about forgiveness. The alternative to forgiveness happens when one comes to reside in transitional space, where the other’s offense is no longer the center of the victim’s world. One problem with forgiveness today is the tendency to use forgiveness to seek power instead of reunion, either with the offender or the holding community. Winnicott reveals that achieving a transitional position does not, and should not, mean that forgiveness must happen, or even should happen. Transitional space is its own reward. Winnicott reveals sources of forgiveness deeper than the rituals of forgiveness, sources that lead to or are the experience of transitional space.

The chapter first examines Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s well-known critique of authority and the family. One aspect of this groundbreaking work is its exclusive focus on men and boys. In the 1970s, Jessica Benjamin wrote two seminal essays critiquing this focus, showing how it resulted in the idealization of the bourgeois father and a punitive superego. This critique is part of the chapter’s study, before it moves on to Marcuse’s dialectical transformation of Freudian psychoanalysis into a ground of utopia. Arguably, there is no more important work in Marcuse’s oeuvre than Eros and Civilization. It represents the utopian spirit in critical theory at its strongest, a spirit, the author argues, that has been lost in the next generation of critical theorists, particularly in the early work of Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests.

This book examines the social contexts in which trauma is created by those who study it, whether considering the way in which trauma afflicts groups, cultures, and nations, or the way in which trauma is transmitted down the generations. As Alford argues, ours has been called an age of trauma. Yet, neither trauma nor post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are scientific concepts. Trauma has been around forever, even if it was not called that. PTSD is the creation of a group of Vietnam veterans and psychiatrists, designed to help explain the veterans’ suffering. This does not detract from the value of PTSD, but sets its historical and social context. The author also confronts the attempt to study trauma scientifically, exploring the use of technologies such as magnetic resonance imagining (MRI). Alford concludes that the scientific study of trauma often reflects a willed ignorance of traumatic experience. In the end, trauma is about suffering.