Trans-Generational Trauma After the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Transforming Wounds Into Work Across Three Generations

Based on interviews with three generations of three families, this book clarifies why the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-1976) had a uniquely traumatic impact on those affected, and shows the forms this trauma has taken in the lives of their second and third generations at both inter-subjective and intra-psychic levels.

As a psychoanalytically oriented, qualitative study of the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, this book investigates the role played by the beliefs, practices, and narratives which were ideologically formative during the Cultural Revolution, showing their role in the trans-generational transmission of trauma and how they still prevent a collective means of dealing with this trauma today. Instead of a collective remembering, a collective repression prevents the symbolization of memory on a societal level, and families serve as a space for this unresolved trauma. In this context, psychoanalysis is shown to be an effective way of interrupting and healing the transmission of trauma across the generations. Within a longer historical framework, this book also explores the Cultural Revolution as a defensive compulsory repetition of the traumas that China had previously experienced on a political and cultural level.

Bearing witness to a personal process of transforming a wound into work, this first-person account offers in-depth understanding and guidance for psychotherapists and psychoanalysts engaged in interrupting and healing the trans-generational transmission of trauma.

Yao Lin is a psychotherapist in private practice, a psychoanalyst in training as a candidate of the International Psychoanalysis Association and received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen.